The historic town of Tombstone, Arizona is a 30-minute drive from our site at Kertchner Caverns so we took a day trip to see what all the hype was about.

Tombstone

The town of Tombstone provides lots of free parking to visit their blocked off western-themed main street. Parking was plentiful when we arrived midmorning but was scarce, especially for larger vehicles such as Usain, by the time we left midafternoon.

Downtown Tombstone offers stage coach rides, gunfight shows to attend, and lots of little shops and restaurants. We spent a few hours doing the tourist thing and ate at the Longhorn Restaurant for lunch. We opted not to purchase tickets for the famous gunfight re-enactment but we could hear it from outside of the O.K. Corral entrance. The actual gunfight with Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, etc. lasted less than a minute.

Boothill Graveyard

Just out of Tombstone is a large sign advertising the Boothill Graveyard. We still had daylight left as we headed back to the park, so we decided to stop. After all, we could say that we saw the grave of the infamous Billy the Kid. You know the song by Billy Joel…

“And he never traveled heavy
Yes. He always rode alone
And he soon put many older guns to shame
And he never had a sweetheart
But he finally found a home
Underneath the boot hill grave
That bears his name”

Oops. Billy the Kid isn’t buried in the Boothill Graveyard. It also seems there are several other inaccuracies in the Ballad of Billy the Kid song as well; e.g., never robbed a bank, wasn’t from West Virginia, wasn’t hanged, etc. Never the less, it was still interesting to walk among the graves of those that are buried there including those that were killed at the OK Corral gunfight.

A $6 ticket gets you into graveyard armed with a pamphlet that provides brief stories (often from family members) about the people interred under rocks in a very well kept cemetery. As you can imagine, the Wild West was a dangerous place with many murders and (now) treatable diseases and injuries among the reasons listed for cause of death.