Gunfighting in Tombstone

tombstone A Twinkle in the Devil's Black Eyes

Fun things to do in Tombstone when you're dead

by Leo W. Banks photograph by David Zickl

Joe Muñoz has the devil's black eyes. His mustache is a sinister bit of embroidery that curls like a snake below the corners of his mouth. In conversation, he can chill your soul with matter-of-fact observations about his favorite Wild West character, Filemeno Orante.

"I like him because he could finish you with a knife or a gun, and not give it a second thought," says Muñoz. "He was a true killer. He had no remorse."

Now, most employers would bolt the door and punch in 9-1-1 if they saw Muñoz coming. But for a gunfight re-enactor in Tombstone, Arizona's capital of makebelieve, looking like a cold killer beats a Harvard MBA every day of the week.

Muñoz has held that surprisingly difficult job for 10 years, which must be some kind of record in the fast-to-burn-out world of Western shoot-'em-up.

What keeps him going? Well, it might just be his belief in reincarnation. But more on that later.

At the moment, Muñoz is dragging himself out of the dirt at Six Gun City, a Western set at 5th and Toughnut streets. It's a beautiful October 1 afternoon and Muñoz has just completed several minutes of shouting out his lines in his booming, Spanish-accented voice, then squeezing off several cannonlike gunshots.

tombstone

To no avail. He's been shot dead again, and like every other time, he collapses onto the hard ground-convincingly deceased. The tough part, at age 57, is coming back to life.

"It's getting harder and harder to get back up," says Muñoz, breathing fast after his work. "I'm sweating under these heavy clothes, I'm dirty, and I smell like eggs from the gunpowder. But that's okay. I'm living the way I always wanted to live."

Muñoz grew up in Caguas, Puerto Rico, 25 minutes from the capital of San Juan. Even as a boy, he loved the American West, and got a taste of it at age 8, when his grandfather, a cattle rancher, gave him a horse as a birthday gift.

But with a condition: If the horse threw him and he cried, he couldn't keep his present. If little Joe didn't cry and got right back into the saddle, the horse was his. "My grandfather was pretty oldschool, but it worked," says Muñoz. "I learned to ride like nobody else."

As a teenager in the late 1960s, he joined other adventurous youngsters from his neighborhood and emigrated to New York City. Muñoz rented an apartment in Greenwich Village and enrolled in high school, spending nights working odd jobs, even studying acting for a year.

He thoroughly enjoyed his "hippie days," but after graduation he heeded his dad's advice and became an accomplished airplane mechanic based in San Diego.

Still, he never lost his abiding love for the Wild West, fed by favorite movies like Clint Eastwood's The Outlaw Josey Wales. So he helped start the Alpine Outlaws, a gunfight re-enactment group in San Diego. In 1996, he came with them to perform in Tombstone and decided to stay. "My friends thought I was crazy, moving here with no job at 47," he says. "They asked what I was going to do. I told them I'd figure that out later."

His look of sun-baked evil made gunfight work inevitable, and although he plays several roles, his fascination with outlaws drew him to Filemeno Orante. With the help of his wife Joanne and Tombstone historian Ben Traywick, he wrote scripts that centered on Orante.

This real-life villain stumbled into the Capital Saloon in Tombstone at 7 A.M. on July 8, 1882, looking for trouble. A short time later, he became one of the fabled men that Tombstone had for breakfast every morning.

Deputy Marshal Kiv Phillips shot him in the groin, while himself taking a round from Orante's pistol and dying within 20 seconds. The ornery Orante took four agonizing days to pass this realm, and when Dr. George Goodfellow examined his corpse, he found four previous bullet wounds dotting the gunman's chest.

"What impresses me about Joe is the amount of research he did," says Traywick. "He went through my files to get background on Orante and came back several times to ask questions. He gets this man right. I tell Joe he was born to be a Mexican bad man."

Muñoz hangs much of his desire for authenticity on appearance. He keeps his holster buckle, for instance, against his back, while in most movies the actors keep the buckle in front. But that would slow access to the bullet loops, making reloading cumbersome. No 19th-century gunmen would do that.

"I study the pictures and see these men in my imagination, and I know how they should look," says Muñoz.

This devotion to accuracy presents an interesting problem at home. "The only thing we fight over is mirror time," says Joanne with a laugh. "He gets an hour and a half and I get 10 minutes. When he's getting ready for a competition, everything has to be perfect."

Muñoz's pistol of choice is a .45 caliber Ruger Vaquero. The blanks that Muñoz and other Six Gun City actors use consist of real brass shells filled with 18 grains of gunpowder, packed beneath Styrofoam wads. A primer in the bottom of the shell ignites the gunpowder when the hammer falls.

With no bullets, it sounds safe, but the blast still propels the gunpowder out of the barrel. An actor once broke a cardinal rule and aimed his gun too close to Muñoz and fired, embedding gunpowder grains in his face.

Another time Muñoz fired on an opponent just as a wind gust blew the skirt of his duster into the powder's path. The duster caught fire. The man Muñoz supposedly killed looked up from the ground and whispered, "You're on fire, Joe!" Keeping to the script, Muñoz held his position until the narrator finished, then strolled off the set with his duster still smoking.

Those loud gunshots have taken their toll, too. Muñoz came to Tombstone with significant hearing loss already from years spent too close to roaring jet engines. Ten years of booming pistols have only made the problem worse.

He also suffered damage to his eyes when jet fuel splashed into them, and now he can no longer produce tears. But isn't that perfect for the remorseless Orante?

In fact, everything about Muñoz's second career has been perfect, including the acting roles his abilities have won. He played a Mexican informant in the 1997 TV movie Buffalo Soldiers with Danny Glover, and he did stunt horseback riding in the currently running cable show, Wild West Tech, hosted by David Carradine.

In spite of its physical demands, and as he begins cutting back on his gunfight schedule, Muñoz says he couldn't be happier. "I've lived a kid's dream in one of the West's last frontier towns," he says.

But it goes a bit deeper than that. You see, Muñoz believes he's done this very same thing before. In Tombstone. Back in the 1800s. Reincarnation.

"That first time I came to Tombstone, when I walked down Allen Street, I had the feeling I was here before," Muñoz says. "It was powerful. I'd never thought about reincarnation. But I knew right then that this was the place I wanted to spend the rest of my life." Al Tucson-based Leo W. Banks covers stories in Tombstone whenever the opportunity arises.

► when you go

Location: About 75 miles southeast of Tucson. Getting There: From Tucson, drive 45 miles southeast on Interstate 10 to Benson. Take Exit 303 onto State Route 80 toward Bisbee and Douglas. After 2.3 miles, take the right fork on State Route 80 and go 23 miles to Tombstone. Additional Information: Six Gun City, (520) 4573827; www.sixguncity.us/index.html; Tombstone Chamber of Commerce, toll free (888) 4573929, (520) 457-3929; www.tombstone.org.

Morning Brew Andy Hutchinson (above) of Colorado savors his morning coffee on October 1 on the Marble Platform of the Grand Canyon's North Rim, with the Vermilion Cliffs picking up the sun's rays in the background.

Holy Ground Bride Christa Reiter and groom Greg Aitkenhead (left) celebrate marriage at the edge of the Grand Canyon on Toroweap Overlook. Benn Pikyavit, a Southern Paiute holy man and national park ranger at Pipe Springs National Monument, performs the ceremony. BOTH BY KATE THOMPSON

cave creek

RESPECT A cloud of dust envelops Tuff, a young stud horse at Diamond Tree Ranch in Cave Creek, and trainer Dallas Wedel as he establishes the horse's respect during a late afternoon October 1 groundwork session. Photographer Scott Baxter, whose daughter takes reining lessons from Wedel, says, "I photograph Dallas a lot when he's working with my daughter. You get a lot of atmosphere with the dust kicking up." SCOTT BAXTER