Tombstone Divided: By Alan Crowe

 

    

A view looking south on Allen Street with the Bird Cage Theater on the right. Photo by Vicki Stevens. The following article was originally published on Frontiertales.com and was the winning article on Frontiertales.com in July of 2025. The article was republished here with the Authors permission.

Tombstone Divided

by Alan Crowe

It almost seems surreal, the unsettling tension in the air, made even more unnerving by the howling wind. You lean in as you walk, pressing your hat down firmly. You sense more than hear the clinking of spurs and cocking of hammers, the quickening thumps of boot heels as a notorious cast of players exit the livery and cross the dusty street to a location now infamous, and eerily quiet.

Tourists from around the globe are drawn to the dusty little town of Tombstone, Arizona aka "the town too tough to die" to walk the streets and recreate in their minds the celebrated shoot-out across the street from the O.K. Corral. The tale of a deadly battle between two gangs hell-bent on control of that bustling burg, where the lines blurred between good and bad actors, and the one shared value was greed. This notorious struggle for control culminated in a skirmish that fired the public's imagination and turned the "next San Francisco" into an Old West icon.

Tombstone may well be iconic, but absent that chaotic ninety seconds on 26 Oct 1881, this legendary location appears to be just your typical run-of-the-mill boomtown. It had all the usual players; merchants, tradesmen and politicians on one side, and cattle rustlers, tinhorn gamblers and painted ladies on the other. Both sides competed energetically for the silver that flowed to their coffers via the miners and cowboys. So to say that Tombstone was your "usual" western frontier town would be accurate. But something made this town very un-usual. Tombstone was a town metaphorically and almost surgically divided.

The fact that all mining camps and boomtowns had those same two faces is generally accepted. But what made Tombstone so unusual by comparison, was that both sides, the good and the bad, the upright and the immoral, the yin and yang of the Old West, faced each other across a dusty main thoroughfare, Allen Street.

We all remember the old cliché of drawing a line in the sand, a definitive way of saying this is my side and that is yours, stay where you belong. Well, you could run a blade down the middle of Allen Street and cleave the two Tombstones. The "South" side of the street was the Tombstone of unlimited possibilities. Civic and business leaders envisioned Tombstone as the "next San Francisco" and proceeded to build schools, churches and public buildings. Real estate offices, cafes and theaters lined the main thoroughfare. Medical offices and mercantile stores selling imported wares from around the world. Swiss clocks, Chinese porcelain and Turkish rugs made their way to this dusty outpost in a land populated by hostile Apaches. Tombstone imported fresh seafood daily from Baja, Mexico and "Coors" beer from Colorado. Telephones arrived in 1882. A race track and bowling alley soon followed. As enormous wealth flowed from the mines, Tombstone imported as much fine, and not-so-fine culture as their money could buy.

In stark opposition to the productive energy of the south side, a mere sixty feet away was the sordid "North" side of Allen Street, the side most civilized folks called "Rotten Row". Like most of the other mining camps turned burgs, the entrepreneurial citizens of Tombstone cheerfully provided all the essentials needed for as much gambling, drinking and general debauchery as their miner-cowboy patrons could desire. At its peak, Tombstone had over a hundred saloons, fourteen gambling halls and a wide assortment of dance halls and brothels.

The north side produced a non-stop around-the-clock din of blaring pianos, raucous laughter and clinking glasses. Hotspots like the Crystal Palace, the Bird Cage and the Oriental Saloon were frequented by the typical cowboys and miners, along with swindlers and con artists and gamblers alike. All your vices could be fed on the north side of Allen Street, be it alcohol or opium, gambling or debauchery, it was all there if you had the silver. And some of the most productive silver miners in Tombstone were the ladies of easy virtue, these temporary companions sported colorful names like Squirrel-Tooth Alice, Crazy Horse Lil and Lizzette the Flying Nymph. They competed enthusiastically for the hard earned dollars of their miner and cowboy dominated clientele.

Facing this immoral onslaught, social norms and community vigilance worked together to maintain the physical separation represented by our mental incision. A watchful community and fear of losing reputation and status were enough to ensure no respectable lady would venture down the sidewalks of the north side, while the communal eye closely monitored the respectable men as well, to assist them in quelling any temptation they might have to venture down "the Row". To a surprising degree, this status quo was maintained through some of the wildest years.

As in all mining boom towns, their source of wealth and the reason for their existence eventually play out. For those excavations around Tombstone, underground water flowed into the mines, and despite valiant efforts to keep them pumped out, flooding forced their closure. This brought the inevitable dwindling down of north side denizens as the miners moved on to new strikes, followed in close succession by the itinerant gamblers, confidence men and ladies of the evening.

As the scar of our fictitious bisection slowly faded, optimistic business-minded citizens managed to absorb most of the Rotten Row into Tombstone proper, with only the well-known establishments such as the Crystal Palace and Bird Cage surviving. Struggling to keep Tombstone from the fate suffered by so many dwindling mining towns of the west, civic leaders continued to work diligently and successfully set the stage for Tombstone's newest reiteration as a tourist mecca, with visitors travelling from around the globe hoping to find a piece of America's Old West.

Tombstone, divided no more, has survived. Through hard work, hard times, and blessed with a sprinkling of historical luck, "the town too tough to die" has once again lived up to its well earned reputation.

The End

Alan Crowe is a freelance writer from southern Arizona. His writings have been published in Cowboy Poetry Press Anthology "Unbridled", High Country News "Writers on the Range", Post Road Literary Magazine, The Writing Disorder Literary Journal, Rokslide Sporting Journal and local Tucson print media. Covering a wide range of topics from the outdoors, history, to the arts and sciences, the University of Arizona grad draws from a wide variety of experiences he has collected in a half century exploring the back roads of Arizona and the American west. He can be contacted at ravenheadranch@gmail.com.