Neither of us had ever seen the movie “Tombstone.”
But why not take the chance to see grown men re-enacting a gun battle in which some town drunks were killed on a Saturday?
With this “why not?” mentality, we stepped onto the streets of Tombstone and back in time more than a hundred years.
As the Visitor Center proudly proclaimed, Tombstone was “The Town Too Tough to Die”– several times in its boom-or-bust lifecycle over the years, people had written the town off the page. But Tombstone always managed to reinvent itself– this last iteration being as a tourist town that Hollywood kept famous with film after film about the OK Corral.
The town’s historical determination was clearly still present– with every single town resident present on the historic streets playing a role. With a commitment level that would rival Disney’s Cast Members, the locals dressed like it was 1881, talked like it was 1881, and hosted all the visitors to the town with an Old West fervor.
The movies still use Tombstone as a set today– both of the main streets are lined with gift shops with historic wooden signs, horse-drawn carriages reminiscent of the Wells Fargo wagon, and lots of saloons.
It was transportive– the effect was pretty incredible. It was really charming, and I enjoyed myself much more than I had expected. All of the tourists were having a great time posing for pictures with the residents, and the residents seemed equally chuffed.
But of course, we were there to see a fake gun fight.
If you aren’t familiar with the real-life events that inspired the legend, it’s really not as impressive or heroic as Hollywood (though admittedly, nothing ever is). Wyatt Earp, of course, was the already-famed lawman recalled as a hero– but his brother Virgil was the true center of this tale.
Basically, Tombstone was a lawless sh*show in the 1880s– like so many other frontier towns, a mining boom had brought more people to an area than there was infrastructure– and left mostly to their own devices, people overran the land in ways that were mostly unethical. And given the penchant for appointed lawmen to be shot, nobody really wanted the job.
So Virgil Earp stepped in, and once he did, his brothers reluctantly joined him (on that day, so did random addition Val Kilmer– I mean, Doc Holliday). The telling of the legend takes over here– some raucous, drunk cowboys were supposedly causing trouble around town for years needed to be put into line. Honestly, reading the history sounded to me like ‘dudes being dudes’ and needlessly escalating interpersonal dramas via injured egos– but who’s to say?
Anyway, back to the reenactment– it could have been so very cheesy that it became cringeworthy. Yet it was anything but.
The actors– by definition– were the kind of working actor that nobody knows by name, and likely never will. These guys weren’t hoping to meaningfully “make it” in the industry. If this was baseball, the daily show in Tombstone wouldn’t even be the minor leagues. That meant there was only one reason to be out there– they were totally passionate about the craft. Enough to dress up like historical figures 7 days a week and deliver the same argumentative lines every single day.
They completely sold it. It was awesome.
The fake guns were the real stars of the show– in some ways, upstaging the workaday actors. The loud ‘POP!’ that emerged from their barrels was jarring every time, reminding everyone that this was the kind of show where the audience wouldn’t really care who died– just as long as somebody died.
Everyone cheered when the cowboys fell.
The rest of our day was spent exploring the rest of the attractions, including a working blacksmith who fired me a custom-made fire poker that would fit in the back hatch of my van– which was a fantastic find. A diorama– Moon LOVES a diorama– was within the Tombstone “Historama” — a very dated look at the history of the town and shootout, and was poorly-executed enough to make Moon chuckle out loud (at sections she was not supposed to laugh at).
The most surprising and delighful thing about Tombstone ended up being something we had never planned to see– the World’s Largest Rosebush. What, you didn’t associate the World’s Largest Rosebush with Tombstone, Arizona?
Well, we didn’t either, but there we were.
Tucked away on a side street, the museum of THE Rose Bush was there to unspool the story of a rose bush planted in 1885 that grew, and grew, and grew– and when it kept growing, the owners built a clever system of trellises to hold it upright and allow it to continue spreading. See the picture below to see what 8,000 square-feet of rose bush looks like, especially with Moon standing in the middle of it.
If you’re going to ask, no– they don’t give the rose bush Miracle Gro or any food– it just requires pruning.
In retrospect, though, it makes sense that the most stubborn surviving rose bush in the country– still going after more than a hundred years– is located in the hardscrabble “Town That Refused to Die”.
Posted by Sun
