12.23.08
Gunfight at the OK Corral
The Tombstone Economy
By MICHAEL YATES
My father took me to one movie, in 1957, when I was eleven years old. Our small town had two movie theaters then, the Roxy and the Ford, but we went to the State, in the larger town three miles north. This might seem not worth noting, but back then a trip to Kittanning, with its riverside park, big courthouse, and shop-filled streets, was an adventure. The movie was Gunfight at the OK Corral, starring Burt Lancaster as Marshall Wyatt Earp and Kirk Douglas as “Doc†Holliday. I still have a vague memory of the famous shootout. Great stuff. The good guys bring the outlaws to justice. Holiday, the sickly notorious gambler, comes to the aid of the Earp brothers, doing one good deed before he goes to Colorado to die.
The actual gunfight took place in Tombstone, Arizona on October 26, 1881. Tombstone is in southeastern Arizona, seventy miles from Tucson. It was founded in 1879 by prospector Ed Schieffelin, who had hit a rich vein of silver in a plateau near the present-day location of the town. He named his claim “Tombstone†after a soldier he met told him that the only rock he was likely to collect in these dry and dangerous hills (the Apache were a threatening presence for whites) was his own tombstone. Soon Tombstone, which took its name from the prospector’s claim, was a mining boom town, with as many as 15,000 residents within a few years. Eastern capital soon dominated the economy, while Irishmen and Germans did the mining and Chinese and other immigrants provided the services (there is a forgotten and sordid history of Chinese settlement, persecution, and dispossession throughout the west, even in small towns in sparsely populated states like Arizona, Wyoming, and Idaho. We learned about this in 2006 at an interesting exhibit we saw at the University of Wyoming Art Museum in Laramie). Poor Shieffelin sold his claim for $10,000, missing out on the millions of dollars of silver the mine produced. Silver was big business in southern Arizona, with many mines and silver mills. By 1881, 490 million troy ounces had been mined. Several mills operated along the San Pedro river a few miles west of town. When the silver mines petered out and the demand for silver fell when the United States demonetized the metal, a boom in copper began, setting the stage fro epic battles between mine owners and miners, the latter represented by radical unions such as the Industrial Workers of the World. In the summer of 1917, when striking miners in nearby Bisbee threatened the war effort, 2,000 armed vigilantes shipped more than 1,000 men to a New Mexican desert here they were abandoned.