“Lefty,” a re-enactor with Tombstone’s Six Gun City gunfighting troop, prepares to take the stage as part of the recreation of the story of T.J. Waters, a man who was killed after striking a provocateur who made light of his flashy shirt. Although Tombstone is known for the famous gunfight at the OK Coral, its violent and checkered history is scarred with scores of less-famous shootouts.
***
Tombstone closes up at dusk these days, the crackle of tourists’ tennis shoes crinkling across gravel as they make their respective ways back to cars parked along the side streets of U.S. Highway 80 before it drops south toward the Mexican border. The desert evenings are quiet, uninsulated and the slightest sound tends to take on a palpable presence in the still air. Children giggling, the sound of car doors being shut, the din of tires on the asphalt highway, the quick sandpaper sound of a car starting and then silence once again. Standing in the changing hues of the Arizona dusk, the beast of the hot sun now looks peaceful as he falls asleep under the horizon. It is hard to believe that the bone dry earth under my feet holds the ghosts of scores of gunfighters who tried their luck in the Wild West and lost. At the height of its boom this brazen, raucous, and violent mining camp supported two undertakers at a time when most towns couldn’t support one. Boot Hill, the town’s famous cemetery, is filled to the brim; a second graveyard opened nearby to accommodate the growth.
Each year, short of a half-million people come to this tiny spot on the map, drawn in part by the legend of the gunfighters created and perpetuated by lawman-turned-Hollywood consultant Wyatt Earp and his counterpart, Bat Masterson. These men were, by many accounts, part lawman, part vigilante, sometimes murderers and sometimes keepers of the peace. As it turns out, the winners do write history, Earp and Masterson living on until old age building the myth of the Wild West gunfighters, the greater parable of good versus evil drafted into the subtext of their stories.
I would argue that it’s not the guns or the killing that interests people passing through Tombstone, rather the stories that quench our collective thirst for mythology, for the distilled plot-line that forces man to face his own mortality in the most dire of circumstances. Through these characters, history itself becomes an argument, hyper-fixated on the traits that we deem noble, letting the unsightly rough edges fall into the soft focus of the background. The legend is skimmed from the sludge of its human roots in such a way that the story of men like Doc Holliday makes me wonder if Christ’s Second Coming were as a gunslinger. Holliday had tuberculosis, his cough a constant reminder of his own death sentence, the disease making it near impossible for him to practice his professional skill as a dentist. An educated Georgian, he took to the dryer climate of the west as therapy for his disease, becoming a gambler and, by proxy, a shootist. He is not legendary for shooting men, rather for his calm, sardonic demeanor with which he squared off with death, for the story of how his gambles with guns and cards somehow always left him with the upper hand in spite of his stature as a small, frail, and sick man. We are impressed with his legend because we see in it a man fiercely loyal to his friends who had no illusions of immortality, that he was strangely freed to take life’s biggest gambles by the notion that his death was always imminent, be it bullet or disease.
In spite of his risks, Holliday avoided the bullets, dying many years after his time in Tombstone. His death tells of a man who was lucid at the time of his passing, curious and self-aware that his final breaths would be drawn not standing up in his boots, but barefoot and reclined in a hospital bed. Peeking over the sheets at his bare toes, Holliday spoke his last words: “Well I’ll be damned. This is too funny.”
Or so the legend has it.