In 1879, Ross Woods got the last breakfast eggs at the Stratford Hotel restaurant in Shakespeare, New Mexico. This didn’t sit well with Bean Belly...
Bean Belly Egged On
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Bob Boze Bell
The Legend of Red Ghost
One of the enduring, outrageous legends in Arizona is that a demonic, rogue camel with a skeleton on its back, killed and terrorized the country...
Legendary Dishwasher
In the spring of 1876, Henry Antrim worked as a bus boy at the Hotel de Luna at the edge of Camp Grant, Arizona Territory. Later he would change his...
Deadlines Missed
On July 8, 1859, in Tubac, silver capitalist Sylvester Mowry and newspaper editor Edward Cross squared off with Burnside rifles at 40 paces. Cross...
Getting Rich Behind a Counter
One of the most surefire, but unglamorous, ways to get rich in 1880s Arizona was to sell all the boomers merchandise. Tombstone merchants sold...
Cowboy Lingo
To the Arizona cowboy, language has always meant imaginative mangling. Something isn’t just loud, it’s noisy as a fog horn in a funeral parlor. A...
Russian Bill Swings at Shakespeare
William Rogers Tattenbaum hailed from a Baltic Sea port and claimed Russian nobility in his lineage. After arriving at San Francisco in the 1870s,...
Calling all fire adjusters!
The outhouse beind the Tivoli Gardens on Allen Street was the starting point for Tombstone’s second major fire in March of 1882. Within an hour, the...
Drunk As Skunks
Drinking too much alcohol in the Old West was a year-round sporting event and, of course, had its own slang. If someone was drunk they were “in...
Chuckin’ Wagons
In July of 1862, a U.S. Army advance detachment entered Apache Pass where they were attacked by some 500 Apaches led by Mangas Coloradas and...
The Legend of Kissing Jenny
Marshall Trimble told me this story, so it just might be true: In 1889 a Yavapai County legislator had a habit of heading over to Prescott’s Whiskey...
A Murder of Crows
July 27, 1890 Vincent van Gogh finishes his noontime meal at the Ravoux Inn, and heads for the wheatfields northeast of the tiny hamlet of...