Our cowboys, Soren and Sebastian, ganged up with us and traveled to Tombstone, Arizona, an old western town that is rich in history from the 1880’s.
We stayed at the 1953 cowboy Larian Motel.
John Wayne gave the owners of the motel, Larry and Ann (hence the Larian Motel) an autographed photo. We’re sure that we stayed in the same room as The Duke, since our room was #1!
We all wore our cowboy shirts as we explored this wild west town where Wyatt Earp with his brothers and Doc Holliday had the famous gun fight in the streets of Tombstone.
We had dinner in the Crystal Palace where all the gamblers, cowboys, gunslingers, and the “ladies of the night" hung out.
The work was done by hand, without machines, in the 1880’s. It was dug out through solid rock with a hammer and spike. When the spike was hammered deep enough in several places, the mine was cleared out. Dynamite was packed into the holes made from the spike, charges were set with fuses, and a chunk of rock about two feet square was blown out of the wall of the shaft. The pieces of rock were put into a sack, and a man would drag the sack filled with rocks out of the mine to be processed into silver. Each sack weighed about 100 pounds.
Then the next day new holes where pounded out. Day after day, year after year, this process was repeated.
The miners worked 10 hours, six days a week by candlelight in these shafts. Their lunch was a can of peaches or pears. Unfortunately, the cans were lined with lead, so the boys who had started to mine at age 15 were kicked out of the mines by the time they were 30, due to their ill health caused by lead poisoning.
These dark rocks are unrefined silver….
There were tunnels and shaft which led off in all directions. We had traveled 110 feet underground, but the shafts led down to almost 500 feet! The water table was 500 feet, so the mine never flooded.
The refined silver was cast into 180 pound “Hershey kisses” shaped blocks. This helped to prevent theft, as they were difficult, if not impossible, to lift or transport by a single man.
The men who worked to refine the silver had an even worse fate than the miners. Mercury was used in the refinery process, which resulted in acute mercury poisoning within 2-3 years.
The miners port-a-potty….
These are the “Cribs” high above the stage where the "ladies of the night" “entertained” the cowboys and miners. The girls were virtually slaves who were not allowed to leave. They were mistreated and beaten.
The gambling room was behind the theater.
Statue of Ed Schieffelin, the man who discovered silver in the middle of the desert….the beginning of a booming mining town where men and women flocked to in hopes of finding their fortune.
Now that we had learned how to mine silver, we’re off to find our own vein of silver and strike it rich!
The Bird Cage Theater was a famous brothel and gambling house Tombstone in in the 1880’s.
Very few of these men and women found silver at the end of a rainbow. Most ended up living a hard, brutal, and short life.
We went back in time to the 1880’s this week. We had expected to relive the excitement and adventure of the rollicking town mining of Tombstone, where the Gunfight at the OK Corral unfolded. But instead, we discovered the story of desperate men and women trying to live and survive in a hard world. We felt the anguish of these people who lived 140 years ago in Tombstone.
Instead of reading about history, we stepped back in time, and lived in the history of a bygone era. And we’re happy to live in this country today, not in the wild west.
