January 26, 2012

We camped in Deming, NM yesterday.  For some reason we were not in the mood to appreciate Deming; it’s a perfectly nice little town, popular with snowbirds everywhere, including some of our friends, but we just weren’t feeling it.  We did visit the St. Clair winery where Randy bought some good port, and we tried to visit a nearby hot springs, although that was closed.  So we left this morning, agreeing that we didn’t give Deming a fair shot and should visit here again later.  

Before we left we found a gas station offering gas at less than $3 a gallon - the pumps are set up to accept credit cards only and nobody is working there.  How awful is it that we were excited to find gas at less than $3.00 a gallon? 

Shortly after we crossed into Arizona the landscape changed; it was still dry and rocky, but there were huge red boulders now instead of small gray rocks, and the beautiful mountains were closer to the road.  We pulled into the Benson I-10 RV park and settled in for a couple of days.  I’ve never been to Tombstone, so Randy drove me over there so I could be a tourist.  

Tombstone is a neat place to be a tourist because that’s the name of the game there.  We bought a couple of cold sasperillas and started walking around.  The Court House is a big two-story brick and stone building with a great cuoplla on top.  It’s full of memorabilia about the town, including a reconstructed hanging gallows out back.  A few blocks away, historic downtown is as much unchanged as can be managed.

The Crystal Palace is still a saloon, with a really fine wooden bar, the original wooden floor, and the original tin ceiling with a lot of bullet holes in it.  Marshal Virgil Earp used to have an office upstairs but a big fire destroyed the the second story. 

Next we visited the building of The Epitaph, which has been the town's newspaper since 1880.  The little museum has the original printing press and many pictures by editor and photographer John Clum.  I learned that besides his work in Tombstone, John also went to Alaska, climbing up the Chilkoot trail and establishing post offices. 

Of course we wanted to see the OK Corral.  The front entrance has been blocked off, so you have to go to the show to see it.

But the main reason to going to Tombstone is to see where the Gunfight at the OK Corral occurred, so we bought the tickets.  There are a few extras thrown in for the ticket price, such as examples of cribs and saddles, but it’s mostly about the fight.  In the area of the original corral that is still there, life-sized figurines have been placed in the locations where the men stood, according to a sketch made by Wyatt Earp.  Then some actors put on a play about the events leading up to the fight, which was full of odd bits of made-up statements.  The actors were OK, and the actor who played Doc was quite good, but it all lacked impact.  So did Boot Hill Cemetery, outside town.  The headstones are all obviously fairly new, which made it seem more like something Disney would put up outside their Haunted Mansion.  But the outlaws really are buried here, achieving an odd sort of fame they could never have anticipated.

Basically it has all the markings of a perfectly normal tourist trap, perhaps a cut above many, and very enjoyable if you accept it for what it is.  And I was really glad we went.  I didn’t expect anything more, and I recognize that the people are doing their best to recreate a single, significant event from a specific, fascinating time.  There is just enough there to make it work on some level, just enough to help me imagine what it would have been like.  I am glad I didn't miss this.