Enid on Allen Street, Tombstone, Arizona
Our RV park is right next to “downtown” Tombstone, so we walked around the old historic town today, and visited a number of different museums and exhibits. We started at the old Cochise county courthouse, which is now a state historical site museum, and looked at the exhibits in it, which told some of the story of the area in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. Included in that part of the tour was a replica of the gallows that were used to hang a number of thieves and murderers.
Next we walked to the OK Corral and bought tickets for the gunfight show at 2 pm. That allowed us to also view the historama, a combination of old diorama and video that told the story of Tombstone’s discovery and the history of mining and it’s eventual collapse. It was interesting as an example of how multimedia presentations were done in the past with a rotating stage and animated diorama with action figures.
We then walked to the Epitaph, the old town newspaper, where we saw the printing presses and some of the history of the paper and the career of its editor, before walking back to the town park and eating our lunch.
After lunch we saw some of the exhibits in the OK Corral itself while waiting for the main show to begin. They were pretty much what you’d expect to see in any old western town – a blacksmith forge, old wagons, the red light district, and so on. The gunfight is acted out as a play, and for a melodrama, wasn’t bad. Lots of arguments between the cowboys trying to show both sides of the story, and culminating in a thirty second gun battle. We especially enjoyed the acting of the drunken Doc Holliday.