Blasting Open Tombstone’s Silver Mines Tombstone was built on silver. But finding a rich vein was only the beginning. The ore was locked inside hard rock, sometimes hundreds of feet below the Arizona desert. Getting to it required muscle, steel—and explosives. This period advertisement for the Giant Powder Company represents one of the everyday necessities…

Newton Earp: The Brother History Forgot Before Tombstone, before the O.K. Corral, and long before Wyatt Earp’s name became part of the mythology of the American West, his oldest brother had already gone to war. Newton Jasper Earp served for years in the Union cavalry. He farmed the Missouri and Kansas frontier, crossed the country…

Nogales, Arizona Territory — August 1896 At about noon, five armed men rode into Nogales and attempted to rob the International Bank. It should have been a quick job. Instead, the nerve of cashier Fred Herrera and the confusion inside the bank sent the robbers fleeing for their lives. The Hold-Up According to the period…

A Midnight Holdup on the Road to Bisbee — September 8, 1881 The desert was quiet in the early hours of September 8, 1881. Sometime around one o’clock in the morning, the Sandy Bob stage was making its run between Charleston and Bisbee when two masked men stepped from the darkness and stopped the coach.…

July 6, 1900 Nearly nineteen years after the gunfight near the O.K. Corral, the Earp name again appeared in Arizona Territory newspapers. This time the story came from Willcox, where Warren Earp was shot and killed by Johnny Boyett in the early morning hours of July 6, 1900. The surviving newspaper account describes no lawman’s…

The air was crisp and dry on the evening of December 14, 1881, when Mayor John Clum stepped into the stagecoach outside the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Tombstone. Clum, editor of the Tombstone Epitaph and the town’s first elected mayor, was bound for Benson, a small but vital rail junction 25 miles west. He had business…