Imagining Tombstone

When prospector Ed Schieffelin set out from Fort Huachuca in 1877 in search of silver, skeptics told him all hed find would be his own tombstone. What he did discover, of course, was one of the richest veins of silver in the Westa strike he wryly called Tombstone. Briefly a boomtown, in less than a decade Tombstone was fading into what, for the next half-century, looked more like a ghost town. How is it, Kara McCormack asks, that the resurrection of a few of the towns long-dead figures, caught forever in a thirty-second shoot-out, revived the moribund Tombstoneand turned it into what the Arizona Office of Tourism today calls equal parts Deadwood and Disney?A meditation on the marketing of authenticity, Imagining Tombstone considers this most authentic western town in America as the intersection of history and mythmaking, entertainment and education, the wish to preserve, the will to succeed, and the need to survive. McCormack revisits the facts behind the feud that culminated in the Earp brothers and Doc Hollidays long walk to their showdown with the Clantons and McLaurysa walk reenacted by so many actors that it became a ritual of Hollywood westerns and a staple of present-day Tombstones tourist offerings. Taking into account decades of preservation efforts, stories told by Hollywood, performances on the towns streets, the fervor of Earp historians and western history buffs, and global notions of the West, Imagining Tombstone shows how the towns tenacity depends on far more than a usable past. If Tombstone is The Town Too Tough to Die, it is also, as this edifying and entertaining book makes clear, the place where authentic history and its counterpart in popular culture reveal their lasting and lucrative hold on the public imagination.