Roadside Rest

ROADSIDE REST Tombstone's Unflappable Frontier Preacher Was as Adept with His Fists as with the Bible

To appreciate the obstacles to worshiping the Lord in the roaring silver camp of Tombstone more than a century ago, consider the competition: "Experts from the waning goldfields of California and Australia, in many cases booted out by vigilante committees, arrived to open gambling halls; two out of every three buildings in the business district were saloons and gambling dens. The gamblers of Dodge City, at that time an infamous hellhole, moved in en masse; an immense red-light district sprang up...."

During the first three years of its raucous reign, the Birdcage Theatre at Sixth and Allen streets never closed its doors. Staged variety, melodrama, chorus, vaudeville, and risque comedy induced 24-hour thirst slated by three full-time bartenders. Showgirls earned commissions by generating sales of strong drink.

Real gunfire frequently punctuated the make-believe performances. Once, offended by a foot dangling from a box, Buckskin Frank Leslie shot the heel off the boot. Another time, during a production of Uncle Tom's Cabin (as reported by The Arizona Star): "Just as Eliza was crossing the icy river, a drunken cowboy in the audience got excited and shot the bloodhound that was pursuing her. After something of a fight, the cowboy was lodged in jail, and the show continued minus one good hound."

An early-day minister summed up the status quo: "The town contained a great body of men and women unmoral, shameless, and cruel. There was no such thing as public opinion, for the community was unorganized and each person did what he chose to do."

So it was in Tombstone's first months, the Sabbath was merely one more day in a week of claim-jumping, stage holdups, Apache raids, and violent deaths. In a town where nothing was easy, church attendance was possibly the most difficult of all. Small knots of the faithful met in tents, in lodge halls, in schoolrooms, in private parlors.

"Hard to preach," wrote one George Parsons in his diary after an 1879 service in a church with a canvas roof. "Dance hall racket in rear. Calls to rally to the Lord do not mingle well with 'hug your gals in the corner.'"

But amid such disruptions, work was begun in 1881 on St. Paul's Episcopal Church. Men of the parish baked adobe bricks in the sun and squared roof timbers freighted by teams of oxen off the Chiricahua Mountains. Churchwomen raised funds with rummage sales. Meticulous records document the costs: $4,653 for the church and furnishings and $300 for the rectory next door.

In early 1882, the fortunes of St. Paul's took a dramatic upward turn with the arrival of a new clergyman, the Reverend Endicott Peabody. Massachusetts born, he was educated at Cheltenham College in England and the Episcopal Theological Seminary at Cambridge, Massachusetts. An amateur boxer weighing 200 solid pounds, Mr. Peabody was not inclined to kneel to the devil, even in the forms of Curly Bill Brocius and Buckskin Frank. The new vicar saw his church completed.

He preached at funerals of gun-battle victims, and he ministered to the private spiritual needs of sinful Allen Street. On a visit to nearby Fort Huachuca, Mr. Peabody witnessed an Apache Indian ride up to the quartermaster and trade his own father's head for 40 rounds of ammunition.

Writes Budge Ruffner, "He [Peabody] was fond of boxing and baseball, and was a student of the French novelist Balzac. A knowledge of Balzac had limited use in Tombstone, but boxing and baseball proved invaluable in the clergyman's new relationships.

"He pulled no punches either in the ring or the pulpit.

"On one occasion he delivered a sermon on cattle rustling (thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's cows) to which an advocate of the art took sour exception.

"The individual who thought he had been personally cited in the cattle rustling sermon began to confront and harass him. Peabody would attempt to reason and assure him, but the man stepped up his threats. To resolve the conflict short of a second O.K. Corral, Reverend Peabody suggested a boxing match in a local bar. Tickets would be sold to benefit Tombstone's less fortunate. The ruffian, clamoring for a chance to clobber the clergyman, gleefully accepted the challenge.

"It was no match. Peabody countered with nothing but defensive jabs until his opponent threw his Sunday punch, which never landed. The reverend's Punch was even more potent than his sermon..

The same Endicott Peabody in 1884 became founding headmaster of Groton School, a college preparatory school in Massachusetts, where he was a friend and mentor of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Peabody delivered the invocation at President Roosevelt's second inaugural.

St. Paul's today is listed on the National Register of Historic Sites, and it is lovingly preserved as a refuge for meditation and worship. Nearly all the furnishings of the parish church are original: baptismal font, a gift from a frontier Sunday school class; chandeliers from a whaling ship; the first organ in Tombstone; the carpeting covering a kneeling bench.

St. Paul's is said to be the oldest standing Protestant church in Arizona. It also is, in the opinion of many, the handsomest remnant of early Gothic architecture in the Southwest.

Something of a miracle it is, when taken in the context of the Tombstone community. The first steeple is missing, but that was God's will. Demolished by a lightning bolt, it was replaced by a brick tower.