Tombstone, Arizona. Even the name sounds dusty and desolate, with a streak of violence, doesn’t it? You can’t get more “wild west” than this.

Tombstone was a silver mining town that went through its cycles of boom and bust, like so many other mining towns. Back in the late 1800s it was booming — for a while it was bigger than San Francisco.

It was October 1881 when the famous gun battle took place — the Clantons and McLaurys on one side, the Earps and Doc Holliday on the other. The causes were complex: money, power, politics, pride, and a woman too. Here in Tombstone they had a way of settling those differences.

Shootout at the OK Corral: 8 gunslingers in close quarters for about 30 seconds. Results: 3 dead, everybody else wounded except Wyatt Earp. There’s considerable disagreement over who were the good guys and who were the bad guys. The Earps won this round, but the cowboys got revenge later. But that’s another story…

We visited the famous Boothill Graveyard, and found the graves of the OK Corral losers. There was a tourist sitting right on top of them, fiddling with his camera equipment. (I cropped him out here, but how tacky.) There’s a strikingly high percentage of graves here marked “shot”, or “murdered”.

With a wild west heritage like this, is it any wonder that Arizona’s proposed answer to school violence is to have more guns in the classroom?

Arizona’s a fascinating place, and there’s a lot here to discover! Adventurous Wench does tours to Sedona, Arizona a few times a year, and we’re planning more Arizona trips, too — coming soon!