WEEKEND GETAWAY: TOMBSTONE

CITY HALL TOMBSTONE getaway weekend TOMBSTONE'S TRUE PAST Lives On - Along Its STREETS as Well as in Its MUSEUMS

AMID THE PERSISTENT CLICKING OF SPURS, I walked up Tombstone's Toughnut Street to get an omelet at Nellie Cashman's restaurant. It was the morning of the first day of the 71st Helldorado Days, a celebration of the Wild West that includes a parade, carnival, gunfight reenactments and numerous saloon parties.

Within an hour, Allen Street would fill with pistols, walrus mustaches, women in fishnet stockings and loud taunting from make-believe McLaurys and Clantons calling out makebelieve Earps.

But I had spent the early morning hours in pursuit of a different side of Tombstone its little-known places and artifacts that still bear the authentic flavor of the 1880s.

I began at the Pioneer Home Museum, the only remaining unaltered miner's residence in town and a National Historic Landmark since 1961. Its first resident was one of the thousands of Cornish miners, known as cousin jacks, who flocked to the West in the 1870s. Frank Garland came to Tombstone soon after its founding in 1878. Julia, his mail-order bride, came to America from Cornwall, England, in 1892, and they produced one son, Frank Jr.

At Frank Jr.'s death in 1958, the childless recluse willed the house to neighbor Eddie Manriquez, who still lives next door today. Manriquez and his wife, Nellie, serve as caretakers of the board-and-batten house, which remains virtually unchanged from Frank Sr.'s time.

The bedroom still sports the original wallpaper and the Garlands' fourposter bed with Frank's derby resting on it. Display cases in the front room hold dozens of personal items and historical photographs. One, a Tombstone street scene, circa 1885, shows the original home of the Tombstone Epitaph newspaper, then known as the Record-Epitaph, and Schieffelin Hall, named in honor of town founder Ed Schieffelin.

"When we started going throughthe trunks and boxes, we saw that every item in here told a story," said Nellie. "We'd been left a treasure."

West of the Pioneer Home Museum, the San Jose House preserves another slice of old Tombstone. With its 16-inch adobe walls, the operating boardinghouse looks as it did when it was built in 1879 by businesswoman Samantha Elizabeth Fallon of San Jose, California.

Schieffelin, who was "badly gone on the entrepreneur," fronted her the cash to construct the place, according to the writings of miner and diarist George Parsons.

Fallon saw some thrilling history from her boardinghouse windows. On the night of February 25, 1881, she watched Bat Masterson lead Charlie Storms out of the Oriental Saloon across the street to his room at the San Jose. But Charlie went back to the Oriental and got himself shot dead by the short-tempered gambler Luke Short. Masterson and his good friend Wyatt Earp, who dealt faro at the Oriental, carried Storms' body back to the San Jose. In his early days as a lawman in Tombstone, before the town had a jail, Earp held prisoners in the boardinghouse until they could be taken to the county seat in Tucson. The same names came up everywhere I went in Tombstone during the weekend.

Parsons once kept a shack on the property of The Buford House, my next stop. The grand old adobe a two-story bed and breakfast today, and a one-story home when built by a promi nent mine owner in 1880 boasts a Territorial style wraparound porch and beautifully kept Victorian and Western-style bedrooms. As I toured the grounds with owner Richard Allen, we discussed Parsons.

Anyone with a serious interest in Tombstone knows of Parsons and his diary, an invaluable record of everyday events in the silver boom town. One of his frequent topics was violence at the Oriental Saloon.

In March 1881, shortly after the Storms killing, Parsons wrote: "Oriental a regular slaughter house now."

A shop, also called the Oriental, now sits at the old saloon site on the corner of Fifth and Allen. Owner Suzanne Wilson sells fine repro ductions of period clothing, including black cut away coats and gamblers' hats with pin-roll brims for men, as well as calico day dresses, boned corsets and taffeta ball gowns for women. Before opening in May 2000, Wilson renovated the building, outside and in, to look as it had when Earp and Masterson dealt faro there. Visitors step from the street into what was once the Oriental's gambling hall. The arches that led into the saloon portion of the Oriental have been blocked off, but they're still visible against the store's east wall.

Wilson's attention to detail included hanging

LOCATION: 111 miles southeast of Phoenix. WEATHER: Average October high, 81; low, 61.

PHONE NUMBERS: Area codes are 520 unless noted; 800 numbers are toll-free.

LODGING: The Buford House B&B, 457-3969; The San Jose House, 457-2203.

RESTAURANTS: Nellie Cashman's, 457-2212; Don Teodoro's, 457-3647.

ATTRACTIONS: Arlene's two shops, 9 A.M. to 5 P.M. daily, 457-3833 and 457-3344. Bird Cage Theatre Museum, 8 A.M. to 6 P.M. daily, (800) 457-3423.

The Oriental, 9 A.M. to 6 P.M. daily, 457-3922. Pioneer Home Museum,9 A.M. and 5 P.M. daily, 457-3853.

Tombstone Courthouse State Historic Park, 8 A.M. to 5 P.M. daily, 457-3311.

The Tombstone Epitaph office and museum, 9:30 A.M. to 5 P.M. daily, 457-2211.

EVENTS: Helldorado Days, October 19-21; Re-enactment shows daily at the O.K. Corral, 2 P.M., 457-3456.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: Tombstone Visitor Center, 457-3929 or (888) 457-3929.

The horse-drawn hearse, trimmed in 24-karat gold and sterling silver, on display at the Bird Cage Theatre Museum. The black moriah, as it was called, hauled bodies from 1881 until 1917.

The Bird Cage, a former variety-show venue, also houses a nicely preserved faro table and basement bordello rooms.

At the office of The Tombstone Epitaph, there's the Washington handpress used on May 1, 1880 to roll out the paper's first edition. And St. Paul's Episcopal Church, built in July of 1882, and still operating today, ranks as Arizona's oldest standing Protestant church.

Although they're not original, I'm also partial to the gallows at the Tombstone Courthouse State HistoricPark, and I'm not alone, according to park manager Hollis Cook. "It's a sad commentary, but they're our most popular display," he said.

Park, and I'm not alone, according to park manager Hollis Cook. "It's a sad commentary, but they're our most popular display," he said.

The gallows closely replicate the ones used to hang five Bisbee murderers in an 1884 mass execution that Nellie Cashman, a young Irish firebrand, tried her best to stop.

After a Mexican supper at Don Teodoro's, in preparation for evening saloon inspections, I knocked on the door of the Fifth Street office of writer Ben Traywick. He's lived in town more than 30 years, and whenever a merchant or bartender gets stuck on a question of what happened when, the inquiring tourist is sent Ben's way.

"I've had several people tell me they're direct descendants of Wyatt Earp," said a laughing Traywick, whose working digs were once the office of the Wells Fargo Co. "But there's no such thing because he had no kids. I've met three of Wyatt's great-grandsons and three of Doc Holliday's, and he didn't have kids either."

Laughter aside, Traywick's place represents a repository of the true Tombstone. One of the items he showed me was a copy of a slip of paper he found recently at the New York City Historical Society - the original telegram informing the McLaury family of the deaths of their beloved Frank and Tom at the O.K. Corral.

"See the date on that?" asked Traywick.

"October 27, 1881, the day after the gunfight. You can't get much closer to the real story than that."

I like that about Tombstone. Even amid the sizzle and smoke of today's make-believe shootouts of Helldorado Days, it's still possible to sidle up to the way things really were in "the town too tough to die." All All period wallpaper and brocade draperies and refinishing two 17-foot-high swinging glass doors that had been boarded-over for decades. "These are the same doors that Billy Claiborne ran through before he was shot by Buckskin Frank Leslie," said Wilson, referring to another famous bloodletting in November of 1882.

Yes, even shoppers get a dose of gunfighter lore.

Tourists have bought authentic Indian jewelry, pottery and sandpaintings at Arlene's in Tombstone for 22 years. The company now operates two stores in town, one on the south side of Allen, the other on the north side at the corner of Fourth Street.

This second Arlene's once housed Hafford's Saloon. Earp, known for his cool under pressure, bought a cigar there on October 26, 1881, shortly before walking with his brothers and Doc Holliday to the O.K. Corral for the famed showdown. During Helldorado I acclimated to the boom of re-enactors' pistols and the clink-snort-clop of stagecoaches rolling past. The latter sound goes well with some real sights, such as the