Tombstone Historic District

Tombstone crammed a legend into a single generation: a silver-boom town that exploded from nothing in the Arizona desert, became one of the wildest settlements in the West, and produced the thirty-second gunfight that would define the American mythology of the frontier. The 1881 shootout near the O.K. Corral between the Earps, Doc Holliday, and the Clanton-McLaury faction has been retold in countless films, but the real Tombstone — its saloons, courthouse, and 'Boothill' cemetery — still stands remarkably intact.

Prospector Ed Schieffelin discovered rich silver deposits in the hills southeast of Tucson in 1877; friends warned him he'd find only his own tombstone in Apache territory, and he named his claim in defiant response. The boomtown that grew around the mines reached a population of around 10,000 by the early 1880s, complete with saloons, gambling halls, theaters, and a notorious lawlessness that drew both fortune-seekers and outlaws.

Tensions between town lawmen Wyatt, Virgil, and Morgan Earp (with their friend John 'Doc' Holliday) and a loose faction of outlaw ranchers known as the Cowboys, including the Clantons and McLaurys, erupted into gunfire near the O.K. Corral on October 26, 1881. The thirty-second exchange left three Cowboys dead and became the most famous gunfight in the history of the American West, followed by further violence including the ambush of Virgil Earp and the murder of Morgan Earp.

Tombstone's silver boom collapsed after the mines flooded in the mid-1880s, and fires and economic decline followed, but the town refused to disappear, earning its motto 'The Town Too Tough to Die.' Much of the 1880s townscape survives, including the Bird Cage Theatre, the Crystal Palace Saloon, and the Tombstone Courthouse, now a state historic park. The Tombstone Historic District was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1961.