Tombstone: Bird Cage Theatre

Sometimes it’s hard to discern what’s real and authentic in Tombstone, and what has just been recreated for the multitude of tourists who come to see the Old West. The Bird Cage Theatre is no exception. The building itself dates from 1881 (see photo above) and most accounts report that when it was reopened in 1934 after being shut for decades, all the furniture and other accoutrements inside are original and had been left exactly as they were fifty years before. However, I met one person who disputed all this and suggested that all the information reported about the Bird Cage was false. My own opinion? I believe that what I saw inside the building and what the employees told me was true.

In Which Way to the OK Corral? Heyes and Kid find themselves sharing a stagecoach to Tombstone with Georgette Sinclair. The boys are on a mission to clear Big Mac of a murder charge and George has an audition at a dance hall, which turns out to be the Bird Cage Theatre because the name can be clearly seen on the glass front of the building. This ASJ episode is fun but the Bird Cage depicted in it bears no resemblance to the real Bird Cage Theatre of Tombstone (see photo above). All that was accurate in the episode was the fact that singers, as well as actors and other types of entertainers, graced the stage of the Bird Cage.

At present, the Bird Cage is a museum and visitors can take a self-guided tour of the premises. The first floor has a stage at the front with a piano just below. Much of the floor space is occupied by tables piled with period artifacts and furniture lines the walls, including several display cases filled with objects such as chamber pots, medical and mining instruments, and leg irons (see photo above). There is also a second floor with more objects on view, including a hearse that carried Tombstone’s deceased to Boot Hill.

Towards the front of the first floor room, along the wall to the left, is the faro table where Doc Holliday played cards (see photo at right). His fight with Johnny Ringo occurred between the table and the piano in front of the stage. Faro was very popular during this time period and it was an easier game to play than poker.

On the two sides of the main room, lining the walls, were seven boxes, called cribs, in which prostitutes entertained customers (see photo at right). Drinks and cigars could be hauled up from the basement bar in such a way that no one had to leave the compartment. There were other rooms in the basement where men could avail themselves of the favors of soiled doves as well.

The basement also was where the poker games were played. One game ran continuously for over eight years and had a $1,000 buy in. Heyes would have loved it! Perhaps The Biggest Game in the West should have been set in Tombstone instead of Lordsburg. The way this room appears now is how it looked back in the heyday of the Bird Cage (see photo at right). Note the “dice spinner” on the table—it looks just like the one seen in Exit from Wickenburg and numerous other ASJ episodes.

Video interview about the Bird Cage Theatre:
http://clantongang.com/oldwest/birdcage.html

More information about the Bird Cage Theatre:
http://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/11288

Tombstone: Old Butterfield Stage Line

Riding in an authentic Butterfield stagecoach is an experience not to be missed! There are at least three stagecoaches in which visitors can take a guided tour of Tombstone, but only the Butterfield stage is actually from the nineteenth century (see photo at right). Butterfield stagecoaches transported mail from St. Louis to San Francisco in a journey that took over three weeks. My trip was fun but if I had to spend several hours a day for several days riding in a stagecoach, I’d probably have a different opinion!

According to my driver/tour guide, this particular stagecoach was built in Montana in the early 1860s. Mules instead of horses were used because they ate less and cost less to maintain. The interior had two reddish-colored velour-covered seats facing each other (see upper photo at right). It was comfortable to sit on them but inside the stage it was quite small. For tall people or when the stage had six people riding in it, I imagine it felt rather cramped as leg space was limited. The dimensions of the floor were, I estimate, about three by three feet, perhaps a little less (see photo above).

The guided tour I took lasted about twenty minutes and took me on a loop of the downtown area of Tombstone while the driver described landmarks and other points of interest. One of the places was the Tombstone office for the Butterfield stage company (see photo at right). At the Tombstone Western Heritage Museum, I learned that most stagecoaches arrived in Tombstone around midnight so when Heyes, Kid, and George arrive in the middle of the day in Which Way to the OK Corral?, that apparently is not historically accurate, though I do have to laugh when George tells Marshal Earp when she first goes to report the deputy's threat upon her life, that she doesn't care if the stage comes and goes at midnight. The distance from Tombstone to Tucson was 70 – 80 miles; a one-way ticket cost $10 and according to information at the Tombstone Courthouse State Historic Park, the trip took 17 hours. By the end of 1878, two stage lines, the Tucson and Tombstone Stage Company and the Arizona Mail and Stage Company, operated six trips per week between the two cities. The Arizona Mail and Stage Company also ran from Tombstone to Fairbank, where customers could connect with a train to Benson; that trip cost $1.50 and left Tombstone at 1:45pm.

About Wells Fargo stagecoaches, including rules for passengers:
http://www.legendsofamerica.com/we-wellsfargo.html

Tombstone: The Town Too Tough To Die

Despite two devastating fires in June 1881 and May 1882, in which much of its downtown was destroyed, Tombstone’s epitaph has yet to be written. In fact, The Tombstone Epitaph, the town’s newspaper (see photo at right), is the oldest continuously published newspaper in Arizona, having been started in 1880. Epitomizing the Wild West, Tombstone was reincarnated as a tourist destination in the last half of the twentieth century.

A mix of the historical and modern greets visitors to Tombstone (see photo at right). The downtown section encompasses a grid that includes First Street to Sixth Street and Toughnut, Allen, and Fremont Streets. In this compact area, tourists can find restored nineteenth century edifices, many of which have been converted to shops or restaurants, and other buildings which maintain their original function or have been repurposed to present the history of Tombstone to outsiders.

The Can Can Restaurant (see photo below) was owned and operated by a Chinese entrepreneur, Quong Kee; an entire section of Tombstone known as “Hoptown” was where the Chinese inhabitants lived. There was also a Jewish community in Tombstone that included several merchants and even some of the lawmen. Near the OK Corral, the boarding house and studio owned and managed by Camillus S. Fly, a well-known photographer, and his wife Molly, also a photographer, can be visited. Perhaps one of his many trips was to Denver, where he took the infamous photograph of Heyes, Kid, and Clementine mentioned in Dreadful Sorry, Clementine.

Museum exhibits provide background information about the history of Tombstone from its founding by Ed Schieffelin in 1877 to the present, and the many shops offer tourists numerous opportunities to take a piece of that history home with them. From reenactments of gunfights and bank hold ups, to period fashion shows, to the many saloons and crib houses where prostitutes plied their trade (see photo of crib above), along with opportunities to ride in stagecoaches and visit a silver mine, which was the source of the town’s original wealth, the Old West comes alive in Tombstone.

Website for The Tombstone Epitaph:
http://www.tombstoneepitaph.com

Legends of America website about the history of Tombstone:
http://www.legendsofamerica.com/AZ-Tombstone.html

Bisbee, Arizona

“We like the West. That’s why we travel a lot…”
-- Hannibal Heyes to Lucy Fielding in Six Strangers at Apache Springs

Bisbee, the county seat of Cochise County, doesn’t really have a connection to ASJ but it’s one of those towns that Hannibal Heyes and Kid Curry likely passed through as they roamed the West and certainly would have enjoyed if they ever did spend time there. Located in the southeastern corner of Arizona, Bisbee has a laid-back, funky atmosphere that makes it a nice place to relax for a couple of days (see photo above). I suspect that even if they were recognized, the local law probably would have let Heyes and Curry leave town without being arrested.

Nowadays, Bisbee is known as a center for the arts but back in 1880, when the town was officially founded, it was because of the rich deposits of copper, silver and gold in the surrounding Mule Mountains. The Queen Mine and other mines in the Bisbee area yielded eight billion pounds of copper during their approximately one hundred years of operation. Dynamite was used to blast the rock to obtain the ore (see photo above of miner demonstrating how charges were placed). A tour of the Queen Mine, led by one of the former miners who worked there, offers an excellent introduction to mining in the 1880s.

Although children were not employed in the mines, boys who were fifteen and sixteen years old sometimes lied about their age so they could work there. The pay of $3.50 - $4.50 per day was a decent wage for that period and was sufficient, in fact, to support a family. Miners spent ten hours underground during their shift; they brought their lunches with them and used two-seat commodes (as seen in the photo to the right) to relieve themselves. Maybe Han and Jed, after leaving the Valparaiso Home for Waywards, found their way at some point to Bisbee and got work in the mines. Perhaps that's how they knew what to do when they accompanied Seth to his gold mine in Smiler with a Gun.

Another slight connection to ASJ is that in Bisbee, master hatmaker Grant, at Optimo Hats (see photo of store sign at right), has a website with many styles available for purchase and he can also create a custom-made hat from a photo. After seeing a picture of Kid Curry’s second-season hat, he helped me design a hat that is similar but not exactly the same because the conchas are different. I have searched a long time for conchas that resemble the Kid’s and have not been successful so instead I finally decided to create my own hat, which will be an homage to Kid Curry.

 

Related Link:

Website about mining in Bisbee, which includes a short video of the Queen Mine tour

Flaming Star

What a surprise this 1960 color movie was! Elvis Presley stars, playing a half-white, half Kiowa man who is forced to choose between the "civilized" life of his white father and stepbrother, or the Indian ways of his mother. His torment over what to do propels Flaming Star to its haunting conclusion.

Flaming Star is a fast-paced movie filled with action as well as philosophical comments about whites settling on land in Texas that traditionally belonged to the Kiowas, who have been steadily losing it to the newcomers. It's 1878 and the Burton family, with John McIntire as the father, Dolores Del Rio as the mother, Steve Forrest as stepbrother Clint, and Elvis as Pacer, are celebrating Clint's birthday with friends who have gone to their homestead for the evening.

But tragedy strikes some of the guests upon their return home, and that is the catalyst for everything else that happens in the movie. Despite the Burtons' well-meaning attempts to find a peaceful solution to the problems, another calamity occurs and as a result, everything worsens exponentially. Caught in the middle, Elvis doesn't know which people he "belongs" to, and the pain he feels is palpable. Elvis is excellent and completely believable in this role.

Ford Rainey (appearing in six episodes of ASJ, most notably as Warren Epps in Exit from Wickenburg, Christine's father in Never Trust an Honest Man, and the rancher Collins in The Biggest Game in the West) and L.Q. Jones (Clint Weaver in Stagecoach Seven and Peterson in McGuffin) have small roles as a craven doctor and one of the birthday guests, respectively. Barbara Eden plays a sympathetic role as a girl who tries to help Pacer.

The stark landscape is filmed in a beautiful, severe manner. Elvis sings two songs in Flaming Star. At one hour and forty-one minutes long, the film is tautly directed and well worth the time. There are no bonus features except two trailers for other Elvis movies.