Very Cosmopolitan

Tombstone attracted people from around the world.

In June 1880, Philip M. Thurmond walked around the newly formed mining camp of Tombstone and asked for the vital statistics of every person he could find. Acting on a federally mandated census, Thurmond tabulated 2,170 residents from all over the globe: Germany, Ireland, England, Canada, Mexico, Sweden, Switzerland, France, Spain, Japan, China and South America.

The death knell for Tombstone came when many of the mines flooded in the mid-1880s. The cosmopolitan town—with so many nationalities represented—nearly became a ghost town.