Everyone knows about the gunfight behind the O.K. Corral, but what was Tombstone really like? Hollywood got it wrong, and True West’s executive editor Bob Boze Bell touts this truer version as “a beacon in the darkest night.”
When founder Ed Schieffelin scouted Arizona for silver, soldiers warned that he’d only find his own tombstone. Ed so dubbed the town that grew up around a vein of high-grade ore that netted nearly half a million dollars in eight months. For a decade, Tombstone became a gambling and mining haven, complete with telephones, swimming pools and exotic saloons. Using old newspapers, census records, advertisements and photographs, this book uncovers the real story of this mythic city of the West. —Cynthia Green
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