RIDE 'EM, COWBOY
demanded Daniela Schmid, a photographer assigned to document my transformation from city slicker into cowboy. When she said this, I was perilously perched atop Odessa, a massive and stubborn horse. We were at the Lazy K Bar dude ranch in Tucson and I had been promised a tame ride for my introduction to cowboying, but tug the reins as I might, Odessa brutishly ignored my every command. The lead wrangler kept yelling at me to give Odessa a kick in the flank to get her moving, but he wasn't sitting atop this equine thug, I was -- and I surely had no plans to irritate the beast."Can't you look more relaxed,"
"Look more natural, okay," said Daniela. Natural? Whatever could she want -- whiter knuckles than I already had? Deeper worry furrows? Maybe screams for help?
The other ten riders out for the evening ride seemed, well, relaxed and natural. Not me. I longed for the comfort of my desk chair, the familiarity of a computer keyboard. What I had instead were reins in my hands and an obstinate horse underneath me. "Just a little poke -- that's all it takes to get her going," somebody in back yelled.
I gingerly poked a toe in the horse's side and -- miracle -- she moved. Daniela began snapping photographs, all the horses including mine were moving along nicely, and by all accounts I seemed at ease in my cowboy role. But still I knew that at any moment the beast could rear up like Roy Rogers' Trigger and I would be unceremoniously dumped. Only the lure -- the magic -- of the Old West kept me from fleeing to the comfortable safety of home.
Just what is this magic? Last century, it's what prompted hundreds of thousands before me who went in search of new lives to America's west . . . which was where?
It kept moving, the west did. At the time of the Revolution, Kentucky counted as far west as anyone wished to trek. By the Civil War, the west was Dodge City, Kansas. And by the late 19th century, the west had moved further, to Arizona. Dreamers streamed into Arizona because they knew this was their main chance. Others often laughed, though. When ne'er-do-well prospector Ed Schieffelin walked the southeastern Arizona desert with his pick and shovel, soldiers he encountered scoffed at his search through this mean countryside. Schieffelin habitually explained his quest by saying he "only wanted to collect some stones." Hearing that -- and knowing this territory was loaded with Apache warriors, rattlesnakes, and bad men -- one soldier snickered: "The only stone you'll find will be your Tombstone."
The soldier was wrong, but when Schieffelin unearthed a huge silver vein he liked the joke well enough to name the place "Tombstone." Mind you, by putting his shovel in the right place, Schieffelin had instantly transformed himself from a no-account prospector into a rich man. Before the Tombstone mines played out, $37 million in silver had been sucked from the ground.
Most who came west fared less spectacularly than Schieffelin, but for all it was the ultimate adventure. Is the adventure still to be found in Arizona? Can we still find the west amidst the fast-growing prosperity of Phoenix and Tucson? In fact, the west is everywhere in Arizona -- but, as Ed Schieffelin knew, to find what you want, you've got to look for it.
Tombstone: Start your looking where Schieffelin did, in Tombstone Territory. No western town is more celebrated yet Tombstone nonetheless lived a life of only eight years. Schieffelin got lucky in 1877, drawing thousands overnight to Tombstone to work the mines, but by '84 the mines were flooded and that put an end to the boom.
But the years in between were lived at a fast-forward pace. Dentist turned cardsharp Doc Holliday won his share of pots at Tombstone's gaming tables. Bat Masterson ran a gambling concession in the Oriental Saloon. The Earps (Wyatt and brothers Virgil and Morgan) served as deputies and did their bit to impose a taste of order -- most spectacularly in a 30-second slice of October 26, 1881. The Earps plus Holliday faced the Clantons and their cronies the McLaurys inside the OK Corral. When the guns finished their work, Frank and Tom McLaury and Billy Clanton were dead. The Earps had triumphed against "the cowboys" -- a word then meaning cattle rustlers -- but only for the moment. Within the year, Morgan was murdered on the streets of Tombstone. Virgil was shot and crippled. Wyatt left town and later ran a saloon in Alaska's gold fields before coming to live in California, where the west's most famous lawman died at age 81 in his own bed on West 17th Street in Los Angeles.
There is no marker for Earp in today's Los Angeles, but in today's Tombstone the town's bloody history is literally visible on Allen Street, the town's main strip. A sign marks where Morgan Earp was gunned down, for instance. Another sign pinpoints where "Curly" Bill Brocius killed Marshal Fred White. Still more signs tell of other murders.
Those signs stand in peculiar counterpoint to Allen Street's primary retailing focus -- the sale of tourist trinkets like Tombstone t-shirts, Wyatt Earp baseball caps, and turquoise cacti. At first this disappointed me, but then I realized -- it has always been so because a century ago Allen Street was founded precisely to separate the impulsive from their cash. There were bordellos, a billiard parlor, and saloons -- lots of saloons, 110 of them at one time in Tombstone history.
Today the remaining saloons -- like the Crystal Palace and Big Nose Kate's (named after a lady friend of Doc Holliday) -- may be the most authentic draws on Allen Street. While they are working taverns, they also are museums, filled with gambling and old-time saloon artifacts as well as staff dressed in 1880s-style garb.
So I stepped up to the bar at Big Nose Kate's and ordered a beer. In the saloon's dimness I almost thought I could hear Doc Holliday's tubercular chuckle as he won another pot. I touched the bar -- it's over 100 years old, Kate's owner Steve Goldstein told me -- and I pondered the countless hands and elbows that have been here before.
"You have to see the basement," Goldstein said and he led me away from the bar and down a rickety flight of stairs. At first I am baffled by what I am seeing -- heaps of musty debris and a hole in the ground. Goldstein explained: "The hole was a shaft into the mine. Miners could go directly from work to the saloon. It was a competitive advantage to have the shaft."
Big Nose Kate's is full of that kind of fey history and we could linger here, but in Tombstone there is a full agenda of history to witness, so we headed off to the OK Corral which, amazingly, is still there to be walked in. Life-size mannequins represent the Earps and their adversaries. "Stand next to the Earps," Daniela barked at me.
"Pretend you're holding a gun," she added and she pointed her camera at me like a gun. Me, I am empty-handed, with a finger extended the way little boy's do it, and I began to feel really silly. Only for the briefest moment, though. Other tourists swirled around us but the sheer magnetism of this historic place of law-and-order in action is so powerful that I quickly forgot my hesitations. I can picture myself standing there in 1881, facing the "cowboys" -- but I also found myself chewing on tough questions. Would I have fled (two "cowboys" did)? Or would I have stood my ground and faced the angry guns?
And perhaps landed in Boothill Cemetery, about a mile outside town. Headstones tell Boothill's stories: "Here Lies Lester Moore/Four Slugs From a 44/No Les[sic]/No More" reads one. Another proclaims: "Gone But Not Forgotten/Mollie Williams/Shot By Frank Leslie." Then there's the one we all come to see: "Billy Clanton, Tom McLaury, Frank McLaury MURDERED on the streets of Tombstone," says the marker for the graves of the OK Corral losers. Other markers tell of hangings -- plenty of them. What there aren't many of in Boothill are deaths from natural causes. In the west, it seems, death too often came suddenly, randomly.
Just as mine came: "Lie down. Pretend you're dead," Daniela issued another command. So I found a vacant hunk of rocky ground, lay down, and shut my eyes. When she stopped clicking the camera shutter, Daniela said: "You were very good dead."
GHOST TOWNS: People weren't alone in dying in 19th century Arizona -- whole towns expired and today's Arizona map is littered with ghost towns, with names like Vulture, Oatman, and Chloride. How do ghost towns come to be? Places die when their economic lifeblood runs dry and, in Arizona's history, that usually meant when whatever precious metal that had prompted the town's founding was no longer worth mining. "People think Arizona history meant gunfighters and cattle rustlers. But mining built this state. Without the mines, nobody would have come here," Larry Areingdale told me as he showed me around his little mining museum on Tombstone's Allen St. Larry has filled display cases with 100 year-old Bowie knives, guns, sheriff's badges, buttons, coins, bottles, and mounds more artifacts he has pulled out of abandoned mine shafts. "Kids find good stuff just playing in fields around here." he told me. "There used to be that much mining in this state."
In today's Arizona there is scant celebration of that mining past, but what do you expect? Tourist glamour attaches to the six gun, not the shovel. Still, I wanted to taste that mineral past, so I headed to Goldfield, a dusty speck that sits just beyond Phoenix's eastern fringe. In 1895, 5000 people lived in a tent city on the hills of Goldfield. The place sprang up in a matter of days and the newcomers had come for the gold of course, but within a few years they had all vanished. The gold hadn't run out -- it's still in Goldfield's mountains -- but the mines had been flooded by underground rivers and nobody could turn a profit extracting the ore.
Today's Goldfield -- with its dirt street and ramshackle wooden buildings -- exists only as a tourist attraction. Go -- it's a stark reminder that success did not come easily in the west. Take the mine tour and venture deep into the earth to learn how miners hammered away at the rocky soil to expose the veins of precious minerals. Six days a week, long hours daily, the miners labored with picks and shovels in an unventilated, candle-lit gloom. Many, we're told, went prematurely blind. The lungs of some became so thickly coated with dust that breathing stopped. Still others died in cave-ins and dynamiting accidents. Yet men clamored to work in the mines because the excitement was there, as was the possibility of wealth.
Standing in that mine, I asked myself -- Could I have endured down there? As quickly as I raised this question, I answered it: I would have taken my chances on the streets of towns like Tombstone.
Yuma Territorial Prison: The possibility of enduring isn't even a question at the Yuma Territorial Prison, a sprawling adobe complex erected on the banks of the Colorado River just yards from the California border. It opened in 1876, taking in seven convicts, and when over-crowding closed it in 1909 it had been "home" to 3040 men and 29 women. They committed murder, rape, robbery and they got caught. For instance, Tombstone resident Mae Woodman's journey to Yuma started when a joker (nobody knows who) placed an ad in the Epitaph newspaper saying William Kinsman and she planned a wedding. This was news to Kinsman; he placed an ad saying he had no such intention. When Miss Woodman saw Kinsman's ad, she grabbed a loaded gun, stalked to the Crystal Palace, and shot Kinsman dead.
Once inside Yuma, inmates like Miss Woodman were securely imprisoned: Eight-feet thick, eighteen feet high walls surrounded the structure and a tall Guard Tower (equipped with a machine gun) overlooked all. It was a menacing structure and perhaps that is why, in the years after its closure, the prison remained largely intact until the state made it into a park in 1961.
It has proved to be a popular stop for tourists, and for good reason. A stroll into Yuma Territorial Prisoner is a fast study of what a 19th century prison stay felt like. There are cells to inspect, for instance, and one is equipped with furnishings of the type used by inmates. Two steel, triple-decker beds fill the cell. There is no mattress. The bed is there to be tested, so I climbed into it. It is every bit as hard and uncomfortable as you might imagine.
Yet these accommodations were far superior to a stay in the "Dark Cell," a windowless, unlighted room dug into a hillside and used to confine unruly prisoners. It is open to visitors, so I stepped inside. The blackness is enveloping. I cannot see six feet in front of me, but on the floor I glimpsed shackles used to chain inmates into their places. This is not a place where one lingers, so I left soon after entering.
Prisoners didn't linger in Yuma, either. Over 100 died in custody, usually from tuberculosis. Eight died attempting escape. Many won early release (thanks to frequently granted pardons), including Mae Woodman. She served just shy of a year before the territorial governor handed her release papers, on one condition. She had to leave Arizona forever. So Mae Woodman "took the first train to California and...disappeared," reports Ben Traywick, a western historian and author of Tombstone's Boothill.
Dude Ranches: A happier setting awaits guests of the dozen or so dude ranches that are scattered around Arizona. Of course we cannot fully recapture the feeling of life in the old west -- or can we? Will a stay at the Lazy K Bar and its kin let us for a few days come to feel as though we have indeed become cowboys? "This is like Bonanza. It's great," exclaimed Daniela, who happened to grow up far from the west in Augsburg, Germany. "We grew up watching Bonanza and, for us, that was America. And this is it," she added.
"When I was a little girl," Daniela went on, "I could even jump on the back of a moving horse."
Gulp. That is why, the morning after my hesitant debut atop Odessa, I dashed to the Lazy K Bar's corral for the morning ride. Odessa was nowhere in sight and I was handed the reins of a different horse. "What's its name," I asked.
"Trigger," said the wrangler. "Doesn't every boy hope for a ride on a horse named Trigger?"
Just so long as the beast didn't try Roy Rogers' rodeo tricks, it could wear any moniker it wished because that day I was determined to get this riding right. We headed out -- a small group of about six -- and the wrangler took us towards a nearby mountain. We started up a narrow trail that led over the top. "I hope the trail's clear ahead. I haven't ridden it in a year," said the wrangler.
He might have been pulling the legs of us city slickers, but the trail in fact was rock-strewn and steep. Underneath me, Trigger occasionally paused for a few pants of breath. I knew I could poke a foot into him to hurry his pace but I also knew I would be panting harder were I walking this trail, so I let the horse suck as much air as he wished.
Despite the difficulty of the ride, I found myself relaxing, even enjoying myself. Maybe it was Trigger, maybe it was me, but somehow it seemed that overnight I had taken a large step towards becoming a cowboy. It is slow-going up the mountain (the horses are moving at most a couple miles an hour as they gingerly pick out a safe trail), it is dusty, and it is relentlessly sunny. But it is an adventure and that, ultimately, is the meaning of the old west. And there is no doubt: The trip is worth it.
Originally printed in "Avenues Magazine. Copyright 1995 by Robert McGarvey. All rights reserved.