Tombstone is in jeopardy of losing landmark status.
“The Wyatt Earp era has come and gone. Wyatt has been done to death. It’s time for the city and the historians (and Tombstone has some great ones) to move on. I’ve never been in a mine shaft. I’d love to get a tour of one of those.”
One would think a historian who’s covered other notable gunfighters, such as Pat Garrett, John Wesley Hardin and Dallas Stoudenmire, would be on the side of Wyatt. But Leon C. Metz believes “Tombstone has largely worn out its gunfighter image.”
When the Interior Secretary placed Tombstone, Arizona, on its “Threatened List” this July, after decades of the town violating historic building preservation codes, the Arizona Republic was quick to call Tombstone the “Faux West.” No longer one of the best-preserved frontier towns in the U.S., Tombstone has suffered at the hands of business merchants who have turned the town into one you may see in a Hollywood Western, says Greg Kendrick, National Park Service manager for the landmark program.
Metz and other historians and people of note participate in this roundtable discussion about the problems facing Tombstone, advice on how to save it and whether the landmark status matters at all.
Roy Young
“I’d like more signs posted telling what the original buildings at each address contained in 1880s,” historian Roy Young says.
Michael Reed
O.K. Corral Gunfight re-enactors should look like the real deal, True West reader Michael Reed says. “Last I read, Billy Clanton was not 50 years old, didn’t weigh 270 and didn’t have a flowing white beard and wear glasses.”
Emma Bull
Narrow Highway 80 through Tombstone so that you can restore the historic frontages on Fremont Street:Schieffelin Hall, the City Hall building and Harwood House, True West reader Emma Bull recommends. This “will provide the town with another historic focus besides the purely commercial one of Allen Street, where merchants may be resistant to historic preservation efforts because of the cost to them.”
Sherry Monahan
“The city officials need to comb through old photos of Tombstone to get the structures right—14-feet double doors, signage, styles. They should research what Victorian buildings in the 1880s looked like,” says Sherry Monahan, author of Taste of Tombstone.
Johnny D. Boggs
The problem seems to be the merchants, who would rather do things their way, such as “adding a second story for more payola,” travel writer Johnny D. Boggs says. “I think the people of Tombstone will have to shoot it out to decide what’s right and what’s wrong. And afterward, who knows, another Tombstone Vendetta?”
Steve Sederwall
As mayor of Capitan, New Mexico, Steve Sederwall says “I understand the problem facing Tombstone. The town pays its bills through the gross receipts tax. If the merchants don’t make it, the town doesn’t make it. It’s hard to sell history to a family with a seven year old weaned on Hollywood’s West. Up pops the shops peddling t-shirts, rubber tomahawks and Hollywood’s vision of the West, and out goes historic integrity. It’s a shame; neither we nor the government can have it both ways.”
Jim Hatzell
What not to do: Legalize gambling and set aside a portion of the revenue like Deadwood did in 1989. The buildings are fixed up, “but the flavor of ‘Old Deadwood’ is lost forever to the drone of the slot machine noise,” says Jim Hatzell, whose Artist Ride re-creates the Wild West every August.
Mark Boardman
Larry McMurtry’s new book, The Colonel and Little Missie, made Mark Boardman, owner of Scarlet Mask, the official book distributor for NOLA, realize “we may have to blame Col. Cody.” Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West show was not an accurate representation of the West, but he “believed that his show was the best way to tell the Old West story.” He’s the inspiration for selling phony history for a profit. “For the purists, [phony history] is a blasphemy of major proportions .... But many of the visitors won’t care—so long as they’re entertained.”
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