Tombstone was unique among the frontier towns that have achieved lurid distinction in the history of the American West. It had, according to its legend, its man for breakfast every morning, but it was touched with the refinements of old and ordered communities. It had its desperadoes, but it had also its hardworking citizens who established homes and built prosperity. It was isolated in an Arizona desert, but civilization was just over the horizon.

A mining town in the heart of a cattle country, it had the picturesqueness of a boom silver camp and the colour of a trail-end, cowboy capital. It was a town of lawlessness and law, saloons and schools, gambling halls and churches, lurid melodrama and business routine, red lights and altar candles. It was Hangtown of the gold-rush days of ’Forty-nine. It was San Francisco of the Stranglers. It was Virginia City, Alder Gulch, Poker Flat, and Deadwood. It was the Hays City and Abilene of Wild Bill Hickok, the San Antonio of Ben Thompson and King Fisher, the Dodge City of Bat Masterson. It was all the hectic, mad romance of the old Western border, but in a stage-setting of modern comforts and conveniences.

Bad men, cattle thieves, stage robbers, and gamblers brushed elbows with wealthy mine owners, merchants, and men of the professions. Six-shooters flamed in the shadow of churches. Desperadoes died in the streets in swirls of gunpowder smoke while pastors expounded the gospel to devout congregations. Sunday schools were next door to bagnios. Gospel hymns were sung to an accompaniment of spinning roulette wheels and the clatter of faro chips. College-bred women nibbled wafers at pink teas while the underworld whirled in drunken orgies in roaring dance halls. Courts sat in session while stage drivers threw out their treasure boxes to road agents at the edge of town. Pinafore sung by town amateurs drew patronage from the bacchanalian allurements of the Bird Cage Opera House. Tombstone was Bret Harte brought up to date.

News of Schieffelin’s discovery flew far and fast, and from the four corners of the West came the stampede of fortune hunters. From the ends of railroad steel at Deming on the east and Yuma on the west, they poured into the Arizona valleys. Gila River trails were white with their canvas-topped caravans. Their mule teams, ox teams, and pack trains crawled under burning suns across the Santa Cruz deserts, streamed in endless procession through gaps in the Eastern mountain wall, and came into the promised land of the San Pedro through Dragoon Gap, Texas Canyon, and Mustang Pass. Villages in New Mexico and southern California were almost emptied, northern mining camps were deserted, and industries in many Western cities felt the drain of the exodus. Many died in the rush: froze in the mountain snows, famished in the flaming deserts, fell by the way from hardships and accidents. Apaches, watching from their mountains, swooped down upon the stragglers, leaving dead bodies beside the trails among the blackened ruins of burned wagons. Buzzards and coyotes had fat pickings on the Mogollon plateau, and skeletons bleached along the lonely sands of the Camino del Diablo.

Tombstone, magic city of the desert, was born in April, 1879. Where the Hills of Silver stretch out a lion’s paw into the mesa to the east, the town blossomed flowerlike as a cluster of white tents. No faint presage of the future glimmered in this shabby genesis. But beyond the desert’s rim, the tidal wave of destiny was curling to its crest. Evolution became the swift process of a dream, and the town, in swirling metamorphoses, rushed to full development. A twinkling camp fire on the mountain grew into a splendour of lights; a miner’s canvas shelter changed into streets and homes and marketplaces. A year was compressed into a minute; a century was packed into an hour. Daybreak surged to blazing noon; while the dawn was still red, the clock struck twelve. A city suddenly stormed into being out of a clear sky.

Tombstone soon covered the lion’s paw down to the claws in the mesquite. Allen was the main street, paralleled by Tough Nut and Fremont, also business thoroughfares. Allen was a street of stately width. From the O.K. corral at one end to the Bird Cage Opera House at the other, it was solidly built up with one-story business houses of frame, brick, and adobe, above which two or three two-story structures towered like skyscrapers. The sidewalks were sheltered from the sun by projecting roofs⁠—wooden awnings⁠—supported by posts at the curb. These long arcades swarmed with people⁠—mine labourers, cowboys, capitalists, Mexicans, children out of school, flashy women of the half-world, dainty young ladies out for a promenade or a tour of the shops, whose windows were gay with bonnets, lingerie, and fashionable gowns.

The broad street roared with traffic. Wagon trains loaded with lumber were coming in from the sawmills in the Chiricahuas and Huachucas. Rustlers were arriving from the San Pedro or the San Simon. Sheriff’s posses were clattering out on the trail of stage robbers. Stages were departing, shotgun messengers on the box beside the driver, for Benson, Bisbee, Fort Huachuca, Tucson, Lordsburg, and mining towns across the Mexican border; stages robbed so frequently that the stamp mills cast the silver bullion in two-hundred-pound bars which road agents found difficulty in carrying off on horseback. Heavy wagons loaded with ore and drawn by sixteen mules, two abreast along a trace chain half a block long, were constantly rumbling through town from the mines on the hill to the mills at Charleston and Contention. The skill with which the skinners brought these teams around a corner was a form of art; these drivers, it was said, could flick a fly from a mule’s ear at twenty paces with their long whips. One sees the ruts of these ponderous wains today, cut three and four inches deep in solid limestone in the old trails.

Night was distinguished from day in Tombstone only by darkness and stars. Saloons and gambling houses were never closed. Day and night, the long bars were crowded. Night and day, the gambling tables girdling the saloon walls were surrounded by tense throngs. Gamblers dealt or sat lookout with their sombreros on and their six-shooters buckled around them. Monte tables were stacked with gold and silver money. Faro was played in feverish silence. The little ivory ball in the roulette wheels and the dice in the chuck-a-luck boxes rattled noisily. When a player dropped out at the tables of stud poker and draw poker, another was waiting to take his chair. Play at noon was as heavy as at midnight. A thousand dollars won or lost at a sitting was nothing to cause excitement; a loser today was a winner tomorrow. Professional gamblers lived in clover and were known at a glance by their immaculate clothes, their silk shirts, and their headlight diamonds.

The saloons were not the boozing kens of old frontier tradition. Such places as the Crystal Palace, Oriental, and Alhambra were resplendent with oil paintings, mirrors, brass and mahogany, three bartenders⁠—sometimes five⁠—always on duty. Few rough fellows thumped on the bar and roared out orders for raw whisky; Tombstone displayed connoisseurship in mixed drinks. The spruce, white-aproned chaps behind the bars were adepts in concocting cocktails, mashes, sours, cobblers, flips, and sangarees. The bungler who fumbled a silver fizz or a pousse café or was so crass as to crush the sprig of mint in a julep was shipped back to San Francisco or Chicago, where libationary art was less exquisite.

Adjoining the business district was the populous region of red lights, its street lined with cribs, palatial establishments, saloons of the rougher sort, and dance halls where, to the music of Mexican orchestras, men and women revelled all night in wild saturnalia. In the small hours, the sirens of the resorts drove in cabs and barouches to the Crystal Palace, Oriental, or Alhambra, swarmed in with gusts of tipsy laughter⁠—pompous old mesdames, reckless young beauties in paint and finery, low-cut gowns, and satin slippers⁠—and drank with the men at the bars or bucked the games until morning.

Nightly the Bird Cage Opera House offered “stupendous attractions,” and nightly the famous old honky-tonk was packed to the doors. There was a bar at the front and a horseshoe of curtained upper boxes around the walls. Seated on wooden benches, the audience guzzled whisky and beer and peered through a fog of tobacco smoke at vaudeville performers cutting their capers in the glare of kerosene-lamp footlights. Beautiful painted ladies in scanty costumes sang touching ballads of home and mother on the stage and then hurried to the boxes where, by their voluptuous charms and soft graces, they swelled the receipts of the downstairs bar and received a rake-off on every bottle of beer they induced their admirers to buy. When the performance ended, the benches were moved against the walls to clear the floor, and the crowd reeled in drunken dances until the sun peeped over the Dragoons.

Billy Hutchinson was proprietor of the Bird Cage, succeeded in later years by Joe Bignon. From a yellow, tattered old programme, one gains an idea of the character of entertainment the Bird Cage had to offer.

“First Appearance of Mr. Tommy Rosa, King of Comedians and Laugh Makers,” announces the ancient show bill in impressive capitals. “Mr. Walter Phoenix, America’s Premier Song and Dance Artist. The Campbell Sisters, Seriocomic Stars and Sketch Artists. Professor King in His Wonderful Suspension Wire Act. Mr. James Holly and Miss Lola Cory, America’s Own Specialty Stars. In Addition to Our Own Great Company. Our Petite Star Miss Annie Duncan, the Tombstone Nightingale. Mr. Harry K. Morton, Comedian and End Man, in His Great Specialty, the Dublin Dancing Man. Our Seriocomic Queen, Miss Lottie Hutchinson, in Her Selections of the Latest Gems. Mr. Neal Price, Author and Vocalist, in His Original Budget of Songs of the Day.” A comforting footnote adds, “No Advance in Prices. General Admission Twenty-five Cents. Boxes According to Location.”

The mouldering old playbill, which seems ready to crumble at a touch, gives one a twinge of sadness, and one wonders mournfully what may have become of all these kings and queens and nightingales of other days who sang and kicked up their heels so merrily in the old Bird Cage. Where now are America’s Own Specialty Stars? Who can recall a single bar of the Songs of the Day that the gifted Author and Vocalist sang with such fine effect? Into what particular corner of utter oblivion have faded the Premier Song and Dance Artist and the wonderful Professor of the slack wire?

In a short walk along Allen Street on a pleasant afternoon, one would likely see most of Tombstone’s celebrities. Wyatt Earp, the lion of Tombstone, six-shooters on, keen eyes restlessly on watch. Town Marshal Virgil Earp, dour, silent. Morgan Earp and Doc Holliday laughing together in front of a saloon over some dry witticism of the humorous doctor, as agreeable a fellow as ever looked over the barrel of a gun. Sheriff John Behan bustling importantly. Deputy Sheriff Billy Breakenridge, neatly groomed and smiling. The Clanton and McLowery boys, sworn enemies of the Earps, just back probably from a cattle-stealing raid with Curly Bill. But as these breezy fellows swing past the Earps, they salute pleasantly instead of shooting, and the Earps respond with “Hello, boys.” Which seems surprising. Sombre John Ringo, outlaw with a haunted past, who drinks hard, unlike other bad men, who take their liquor sparingly to keep their trigger fingers steady. Billy Grounds, Zwing Hunt, and Billy Claibourne dropping into the Oriental at “second drink time” for a social glass with Buckskin Frank Leslie, the genial bartender, looking innocuous in a white apron. Frank Stilwell who, it is said, has robbed the stages so often the drivers know him by his voice. Jeff Milton, government immigration officer, tall, dashing, a native of Florida with the manners of a cavalier. Dick Gird, Ed Schieffelin’s old partner. John Slaughter, cattle baron, who is some day to clean up Tombstone, a small man with notably piercing black eyes. E. P. Gage, wealthy mine owner, and former Governor Anson Safford, banker, walking arm in arm. Henry C. Hooker, picturesque proprietor of Sierra Bonita ranch in the Sulphur Springs Valley, at which Augustus Thomas in later years wrote his famous play, Arizona. Or Walter L. Vail of the Empire ranch with his brother, Ed Vail. Or perhaps old Pete Kitchen, known as the Daniel Boone of Arizona, in from the Portrero for a visit.

Tombstone had plenty of money to spend and spent it in these boom times. The saloons equalled the silver mines as sources of quick wealth, and stores of all kinds prospered greatly. Visitors expressed astonishment at the quality and variety of the merchandise sold over the counters. The prosperity of the town was reflected in the habiliments of its citizens. Tombstone was dressy. Men of the wealthier class might have looked at home in a metropolitan club. The women kept abreast of the styles, and the fashion edicts of the Rue de la Paix, as set forth in the town papers, were echoed in the Arizona deserts. Though Allen Street was not Fifth Avenue or State Street, many of the costumes to be seen on this frontier boulevard were not lacking in smartness. Dances were held at the Cosmopolitan, Grand, and Occidental hotels, and it was the vogue for hostesses to entertain at dinner at the Can Can or Maison Dorée, where food and service were more or less distinguished.

Tombstone read the news of the great world with its morning coffee. The President’s message to Congress, an ultimatum by the German Kaiser, or Wall Street’s market quotations were discussed in the same breath with a stage holdup at Robbers’ Roost or Curly Bill’s last attack on a smuggler train. Four newspapers, the Nugget, Epitaph, Expositor, and Evening Gossip, not only kept the town well informed, but the political pot furiously boiling. The Nugget, Tombstone’s first newspaper, was established in the fall of 1879 by A. E. Fay and Thomas Tully, who brought from Tucson the primitive hand press on which had been printed the Tubac Arizonian, first newspaper ever published in Arizona. The Tombstone Epitaph, unique as the only paper of its name in the world, came out May 1, 1880, its owners John C. Clum, afterward postmaster and mayor, Charles D. Reppy, and Thomas R. Sorin. Antiquarians still argue over the origin of the name. Some say John Hays Hammond, famous mining engineer, suggested it in an after-dinner speech at the Can Can. Others attribute it to Ed Schieffelin, who with such happy inspiration had christened the early mines and the town. Mr. Clum, it is said, coming in with Schieffelin on the stage from Tucson, asked the passengers to suggest a name for the paper he was about to start.

“The Epitaph,” said Schieffelin quickly. “That’s the name for a paper that will celebrate in enduring print the deeds and fame of Tombstone.”

“But,” replied Mr. Clum dubiously, “epitaphs are usually mere chiselled lies.”

“Well,” declared Schieffelin philosophically, “they tell the truth about as often as newspapers.”

Pat Hamilton, Sam Purdy, Harry Brook, John O. Dunbar, Harry Wood, Dick Rule, William O’Neill, and O’Brien Moore were the editorial thunderers of the Tombstone press, later achieving some celebrity in politics and journalism in other parts of the country. The Nugget, the political organ of Sheriff Behan, and the Epitaph, the champion of the Earps, were constantly at war, and journalism in the pioneer camp was not devoid of acrimony and personal bitterness. Pat Hamilton and Sam Purdy, having arranged a duel to the death, marched with seconds, doctors, and supernumeraries to the field of honour and then marched back again without fighting, to be chaffed unmercifully thereafter by the citizens.

S. C. Bagg of the Prospector, one of Tombstone’s later papers, criticized a decision rendered by Judge W. H. Barnes of the District Court and was fined $500 for contempt. Bagg, a man of means, refused to pay the fine and was committed to jail, editing his paper for several weeks from his cell and revelling in his martyrdom. When his friends at last paid his fine, Bagg was indignant and refused to accept his freedom. The sheriff had to throw him out and lock the jail door to prevent his return. Several years later, Judge Barnes, having retired from the bench, was sent to jail in Tucson for contempt by Judge R. E. Sloan. As he passed through the prison doors, he was on the point of collapse and was only sustained, as Historian McClintock points out, “by the sympathy and stimulants of his partisans.” His spirits were greatly revived when a messenger brought a telegram. “Friends from afar,” remarked the former jurist to the little band of sympathizers gathered about him, “have heard of this damnable outrage.” He tore open the telegram triumphantly. The message read: “Are you there, Moriarty?” It was signed by S. C. Bagg.

Old files of the Tombstone papers are filled with small-beer chronicles which retain some flavour of the life and spirit of the town:

The Rev. Endicott Peabody, educated at Cheltenham and Cambridge University in England, and now rector of the Tombstone Episcopal Church, is anxious to have the churchyard fenced and takes up a collection for the purpose. His congregation gives meagrely. Gamblers playing poker in the Crystal Palace learn of the good pastor’s disappointment and, with their compliments, send the Rev. Peabody the kitty from the night’s play, the kitty comprising chips taken out for all hands above two pair. The Rev. Peabody returns a note of polite thanks and the church fence is built.

Miss Nellie Cashman, running the Russ House at Fifth and Tough Nut streets, having for years followed stampedes and kept boarding house in mining towns from Montana to New Mexico, is known to every miner and gambler in the Western country. Her hotel is always crowded; if a fellow has no money, Miss Nellie gives him board and lodging until he makes a stake. She is one of the angels of the camp, held in an affection akin to veneration. Stranger or tenderfoot who gets uppish with Miss Nellie takes a long chance. A drummer, served with beans in Miss Nellie’s restaurant, loudly and harshly demands food more pleasing to his cultivated appetite. A tall miner unlimbers his six-shooter and steps over to the drummer’s table. “Stranger,” he says grimly, “eat them beans.” Which, with sudden gusto, the drummer does, to the last bean.

Dutch Annie, a figure in red-light society, is deeply mourned at her death by all Tombstone. Dutch Annie has been distinguished by great kindness of heart and many generous charities. A thousand buggies and carriages filled not only with women and men of the underworld but with business men and town officials follow her body to the grave in Boot Hill Cemetery. This is the town’s only burying ground and is to remain so for many years. On the unfenced, desolate, windswept slope north of town, men who died with their boots on and the town’s best citizens find a common resting place. Possibly some Tombstone matron of wealth and position will some day sleep side by side with Dutch Annie.

Bradshaw and McIntyre are not only business partners but old pals. Bradshaw goes shopping and buys a gorgeous shirt with black, green, and red stripes. When he saunters through Allen Street in this portentous garment, he achieves instant prestige; it is an event of great public moment. There is a current song of great silliness and popularity in these days called “Where Did You Get That Hat?” This song, slightly altered, seems to fit the occasion, and as he strolls along the boulevard Bradshaw is saluted on all sides by facetious citizens who shout with boisterous guffaws, “Where did you get that shirt?” Bradshaw is vexed by such ribaldry, but his show of displeasure only incites his tormentors to new derision. He flies into furious anger at last and declares flatly, “I will kill the next man who makes fun of my shirt.” The next man is McIntyre. The shirt strikes McIntyre as excruciatingly ridiculous. He laughs so immoderately that for a time he cannot speak. He bends double in unholy glee, he twists, he squirms, all the while pointing a finger at Bradshaw but unable to articulate a syllable. Finally, between gurgling outbursts, he manages to ejaculate the fateful words, “Where did you get that shirt?” Whereupon Bradshaw, beside himself with rage, draws a six-shooter and kills him, the bullet entering McIntyre’s mouth, which is wide open with merriment. Tombstone takes this murder lightly, holding McIntyre fortunate in that death comes to him as a sort of joke and that he goes out into the other world holding his sides with laughter.

Julius Caesar rises to fame as the greatest of Tombstone restaurateurs and the Maison Dorée over which he presides has dimmed the original prestige of the Can Can. Portly, rubicund, with triple chin, he rubs his hands unctuously, welcomes his patrons with smiles and bows, suggests epicurean dishes, and tours the crowded tables, inquiring solicitously as to the cookery. His steaks and chops are especially celebrated among Tombstone gastronomes, and a quail on toast at the Maison Dorée is an event. Julius Caesar grows comfortably rich but falls finally, not beneath dagger stabs at the foot of Pompey’s statue in the Capitol, but beneath the fascinations of faro. He is last heard of running a cheap lunch counter at Benson.

A coroner’s physician “performs assessment work” on the remains of an unfortunate gentleman who has been badly shot up and finds the body “rich in lead but too badly punctured to hold whisky.”

Johnny Blair of Double Dobe ranch comes to Tombstone to see the sights with a bunch of cowboy comrades and is taken down with the smallpox. His friends quarantine him under care of a Mexican woman, immune from the plague, in a cabin out on the mesa, themselves occupying another cabin a half mile away to lend whatever long-distance assistance they may. After five days, the Mexican nurse approaches within earshot and announces that Señor Juanito is very dead. To bury the victim of the dreaded disease without endangering the lives of the other cowboys becomes the immediate problem. Having scooped out a grave, they play seven-up to determine who will officiate as mortician. The loser at the game saddles his pony and, riding to the open door of the cabin where the dead man lies on a blanket on the floor, throws the loop of a riata about the feet. Spurring his pony to a gallop, the corpse dragging and bouncing at the end of the rope, he races toward the grave, into which the dead man flounces headlong. The other cowboys, rushing up with spades and making the dirt fly as they fill the grave, establish doubtless a world’s record for lightning speed in funerals.

A sheriff’s posse has a fight at the Stockton ranch with two outlaws. A member of the posse is killed. Also one outlaw. The other outlaw is wounded and brought to Tombstone, where he is placed in the hospital, the authorities declaring him too badly hurt to be locked in jail. In a week or two, the outlaw strolls out of the hospital and is seen no more. The townspeople view the official laxity with indignation. A little afterward a crowded audience greets the amateur performance of Pinafore in Schieffelin Hall. When Ralph Rackstraw in his tuneful farewell to the captain’s daughter, sings “I go to a dungeon cell,” Dick Deadeye interrupts. “Say, Cap,” says Dick Deadeye, “have you got a dungeon cell on board this ship?” “No,” replies the captain, “but we have a hospital.” This suggestive quip, you understand, brings down the house.

Martin Costello, a shrewd fellow, runs the St. Louis Beer Hall. He is the first saloon-keeper to sell St. Louis beer in Tombstone, and as he handles a famous brand, his bar does a land-office business. Costello in a little while accumulates much money, but is always looking for opportunity to make more. He grubstakes a prospector who makes a lucky strike in the Mule Mountains, locating the copper mine afterward known as the Irish Mag. Costello sells his interest in this mine a few years afterward to the Calumet & Arizona Company for close to a million dollars. So Martin Costello bids goodbye to his Tombstone saloon and establishes himself in a handsome residence in Los Angeles and lives there in princely style for many years. One day he is found dead in a lodging house, a pistol beside him and a bullet hole in his head. Though some suspect murder, his death, it seems pretty clearly established, is suicide, but why he should have been in a lodging house, or why he should have killed himself, remain mysteries. Costello had invested in much Tombstone realty which his widow owns today.

Miss Ethel Robinson, now Mrs. Macia, hostess of the Arcade Inn, joins the choir of the Episcopal Church upon her return from graduation at the University of Arizona at Tucson. A handsome young tenor also sings in the choir, and his voice at Sabbath services greatly impresses the congregation. The young choir ladies grow perturbed when they learn that this gentlemanly young fellow goes by the name of Deadeye Dick and sings for a living in the Alhambra saloon. Afterward they treat him with discreet politeness at choir practice but cut him dead on the street.

While a lawyer, “noted for his eloquence,” is soaring in a flight of spellbinding oratory before a jury in Judge Wells Spicer’s court, a burro beneath a window sets up a tremendous braying. Lawyer Marcus A. Smith, afterward United States Senator from Arizona, arises gravely. “If it please the Court,” he says, “I object to the two attorneys speaking at the same time.”

A visitor ships a burro to his home in Philadelphia for his small son to ride. The animal is billed as a burro, but the shipping clerk in Philadelphia, never having heard of such a beast and finding no furniture in the consignment, thinks a mistake has been made and turns in a report which reads: “One bureau short, one jackass over.”

Mayor James R. Leatherberry of Tucson calls a meeting to celebrate the completion of the first telegraph line and the inauguration of wire service between his city and the outside world. This is early in 1880. A delegation of Tombstone citizens journeys to Tucson to be present on the memorable occasion. Mayor Leatherberry reads telegrams of congratulation from many distinguished men. President Hayes send greetings. Mayor Leatherberry invites the crowd into the Palace Hotel bar and buys a round of drinks. Senators and Congressmen wire their compliments. After each message, Mayor Leatherberry buys another round of drinks. The crowd grows hilarious. But messages become fewer, rounds of drinks less frequent. Suddenly, congratulations begin to pour in mysteriously from all over the world. There is a message in French from the President of France. Mayor Leatherberry is a bit puzzled but buys again. Another message reads:

Her Majesty, Queen Victoria, feels honoured at the opportunity to felicitate the Hon. James R. Leatherberry, mayor of the ancient and honourable pueblo of Tucson, upon the enterprise that has at last connected this famous city with the world at large and expresses the hope that this will be one more tie binding together the two great English-speaking nations.

This is signed “Beaconsfield.” There is tremendous cheering. Mayor Leatherberry, without batting an eye, orders up champagne. Mayor Leatherberry is game. Then comes this message, signed “Antonelli,”

His holiness the Pope desires to convey to the Hon. James R. Leatherberry, Mayor of Tucson, the assurance of his apostolic joy that communication by telegraph between the pueblo and the Eternal City has been established. But the Holy Father, in hope of further enlightenment, desires to learn of the Hon. James R. Leatherberry where in hell Tucson is anyhow.

The hill back of Tombstone was now thickly dotted with mines, workshops, and office buildings, and smoke boiled into the sky from towering chimneys. Mining machinery had been hauled in from Yuma across deserts and mountains by teams of thirty mules to a wagon, and an army of miners was busy night and day working three shifts. Companies organized by Eastern capitalists had acquired control of the mining properties⁠—the Contention Consolidated, Grand Central, Tombstone Mining and Milling, Vizina, Empire, and Stonewall companies. Charleston and Contention, on the San Pedro River, had grown about stamp mills into booming towns. Benson, twenty-six miles to the north, came into existence early in 1880, when the first railroad was built through Arizona. With a rich copper strike in the Mule Mountains to the south, Bisbee, in its deep, narrow canyon, developed with the miraculous speed of Tombstone.

The Southern Pacific reached Tucson in 1880, and the following year established connection with the Santa Fe at Deming, opening a new transcontinental route. The first train went through March 20, 1881. Meanwhile, Tombstone had become the largest town in Arizona. At the end of its second year, it had a population estimated by some at 15,000, by others at 12,000. Tucson, its nearest rival, had at this time only 7,000, Prescott 2,074, and Phoenix 1,800.