Tombstone's Yesterday Lives Again

They're Shooting It Up Again at Tombstone's Helldorado Days

Text by Sam Negri Photographs by Richard Maack PAUL BREUER AND I WERE SITTING IN the sun at the south end of Fourth Street in Tombstone. Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and the others were 40 feet away, mingling with the girls at the Oriental Saloon.

Suddenly a man wearing chaps and spurs approached Breuer and said, "That guy says he's Wyatt Earp's cousin, and he wants us to take him out of the audience and hang him."

Breuer stroked his long brown beard and shook his head. "Not gonna do that," he said. Then he turned to me. "I like to have a week's notice if we're going to hang somebody. I think after we do our O.K. Corral Fight, we'll just drag him out of the audience and introduce him."

This sort of conversation, which undoubtedly would seem arcane and incomprehensible in most parts of the world, might be called Helldorado-speakit's exactly the kind of strange exchange that passes for normal discourse during Tombstone's Helldorado Days, an annual celebration held on the third weekend of October.

Helldorado is a two-day event during which local residents, assisted by volunteers from nearby communities, stage reenactments of incidents from Tombstone's boisterous past. Some of the events reenacted actually occurred, and others, as a narrator put it with a straight face, could have happened.

Tombstone started its Helldorado celebration in 1929, the same year, by coincidence, that Wyatt Earp died in Los Angeles. As everyone from Calgary to Bali seems to know, the steely-eyed Wyatt Earp was Tombstone's most famous lawman, and the incident that came to be known as "the gunfight at the O.K. Corral" became Hollywood's most famous metaphor for the triumph of good over evil in the Wild West. The O.K. Corral is in Tombstone around the corner from the actual site of the famous gunfight between the Earp brothers and their adversaries: Billy Clanton and brothers Frank and Tom McLaury.

As I sat there in the sun watching those reenactments of violent episodes, it occurred to me that in the 1880s Tombstone was the kind of frontier town where you could get shot to death for nothing more serious than uttering a lighthearted remark about someone's new plaid shirt (one such spectacle was documented by local historian Ben Traywick). Melodrama clearly played a significant part in Tombstone's early years. As I listened to Breuer talk about the preparations for Helldorado, I realized how much work went into perpetuating the image of the romantic Wild West.

Breuer, for example, is an auto mechanic at a Ford dealership in nearby Benson, but for the two days of Helldorado, he is the quintessential flatlander carrying a .45 Dakota six-shooter and wearing knee-high llama fur boots, a dusty black Stetson, and a genuine bear-hide vest that was made for a Kit Carson TV series some 40 years ago.

"Oh, we're sheep people, and we come into town once a year to raise cain and terrorize the marshal," he explained in a tone that implied it was still 1881.I noticed some notches in the wooden handle of Breuer's gun.

"Yeah," he said, "three notches." He pulled the hammer back and added, "See, I cut off part of the hammer so it'd be easier to fan [fire several bullets in rapid succession], but it also makes it easier to get the skin between your thumb and index finger hit by the hammer: Ouch! I did that three times and put a notch in the handle each time!"

Tombstone's permanent aboveground population is 1,200, but it swells by about 8,000 during the Helldorado Days celebration. Among this year's guests was Jerry Earp, a retired police officer from San Diego, California. Earp said that his father and Wyatt Earp's father were cousins, but he had never paid much attention to the connection. Before his retirement from the El Cajon Police Department, he said, other officers would jokingly call him Wyatt. But as a modern-day lawman, he had too many other matters to investigate to spend much timechecking into his link to a famous relative. For the record, it was evidently his friends who tried to get the Tombstone Vigilantes, This year's Helldorado Days will take place Saturday and Sunday, October 21-22. Tombstone is located 181 miles southeast of Phoenix via Interstate 10 and State Route 80. For more information about Helldorado Days and Tombstone attractions, contact the chamber of commerce, P.O. Box 995, Tombstone, AZ 85638; (520) 457-9317.

who stage the Helldorado reenactments, to drag him out of the audience and hang him. Earp was just told to show up for the Saturday morning performance. After the show, he was starting to leave when he was called to the set and introduced to the crowd. Then he became a minor celebrity: everybody wanted to take a picture of Wyatt Earp's first cousin, once removed.

The character of the Helldorado celebra-tion has changed over the years. Most of the shoot-outs used to be staged on Allen Street, Tombstone's main drag, which still has plank boardwalks for sidewalks. Performers would be shot down, year after year, in front of the same buildings where their characters joined eternity a hundred years ago. In those early days of the celebration, the town would close Allen Street to all vehicular traffic, put gates at both ends, and charge tourists admission to view the events. Then one day a lawyer came to Helldorado and gave the locals a bit of advice: you cannot seal off a public thoroughfare and charge me admission, he said. Forget about the fact that this is what's done on toll roads all across the country; the Tombstone burgermeisters saw the light and eventually built a Hollywood-style set on a hillside two blocks south of Allen Street. Given that so many of the historical facts connected to Helldorado Days have been nudged mercilessly into entertainment, it was a pleasure to sit on something as solid as this hillside above the set of a reproduced Tombstone. I say this because directly under this hill was a genuine historic mine, the Good Enough Mine. It was oddly comforting to know that those of us in the

audience were sitting on a network of 147

From the Crystal Palace Saloon, a place where Wyatt Earp used to gamble, thinking about places like the old Bird Cage Theatre at the other end of the street, which a reporter for the New York Times in 1882 described as the wildest and most wicked night spot between Basin Street and the Barbary Coast. Now a museum, the place was named for the 14 bird cages suspended from the ceiling over the dance hall and gambling casino. The bird cages were display cases for prostitutes.

Helldorado also is a good time to make new friends. As I was warming that bench on Allen Street, Floyd Nugent of Union, Missouri, came along and sat down. Nugent had once lived on the outskirts of Tombstone, long before his retirement, and this year he came back with a bad ticker and a well-brushed Stetson. He told me all about of a yodel, and Mrs. Nugent at his side just leaned back and gave him a warm and patient smile.

"You know," Nugent said, "my heart being what it is, this could be my last chance to make this trip. I'm glad I got to see this Helldorado, but - who knows maybe I'll do it again."

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