For some reason, I didn’t take any pictures of the place we stayed the rest of our journey, but I also highly recommend it to anyone who goes to south Arizona for birding. The Casa de San Pedro is a small inn, run by a charming couple (Karl and Patrick) who, while not hard-core birders themselves, both enjoy birdwatching and know how to cater to birders. The guest rooms are more like a traditional hotel (in-suite bathrooms, modern amenities, etc.) but they’re joined to a wonderful great room / kitchen / dining room space, making it feel more like a traditional bed and breakfast. Speaking of breakfast – it’s not the typical buffet or continental much fest; it’s a sit-down, served full-meal breakfast that fills you up. There are feeders around the lodge, including outside the dining room windows, so birders can get an early start watching what’s outside before heading out to more exotic locales.
We chose to spend Friday focused more on historical and touristy pursuits, partly because I felt guilty about dragging Damon out to all these bird spots. So our first stop Friday was Old Bisbee, the original part of the town of Bisbee, once a major mining center in southeast Arizona. The old part of town is now a tourist attraction, mini-arts&crafts mecca, and all-around bohemian sort of place.



Nestled in the hills, Old Bisbee is marked by a giant “B” marked in the dirt on a hill above downtown:

And one of its signature attractions is the Art Deco-style 1935 statue “Iron Man” celebrating the mine workers:

One attraction we didn’t visit, mainly for time constraints, was the Bisbee Mining and Historical Museum. It looked like a pretty nice attraction, though – it’s a local affiliate of the Smithsonian, so I assume that means it has to maintain some standards.

However, we did make a quick pass through the local historical association’s “museum” – which, like many small-town historical association museums, is full of clutter and junk, arranged in a strange order and with no connection between items other than it all came from the locals. Don’t get me wrong – preserving this sort of stuff is important, and if you dig through it hard enough, a good historian could assemble some interesting exhibits on life in Bisbee at various points in the past – but it’ll take a long time and a lot of sorting to get there. (And someone needs to explain to these wonderful folks and all those like them that you don’t have to cram every single object you own into public exhibition space. You get people to come back by rotating exhibits and showing different things, with different themes, at different times.
Still, one artifact caught my eye. This early typewriter has the QWERTY keyboard layout we expect, but there’s no shift key function. Instead, there’s a second set of keys for upper-case letters. Additionally, the numerals zero and one are missing, because typists didn’t distinguish between a lower-case “L” and one, or between an upper-case “O” and zero. Instead, there are a variety of fractions (1/8, 3/8, 5/8, 7/8, 1/4, 1/2, and 3/4) and the cents symbol (¢).

So, we left Old Bisbee, and headed out towards Tombstone. We knew going in that Tombstone (and the OK Corral) would be a tourist trap, and in that, we were not disappointed. However, I was surprised how much I learned about Tombstone, the gunfight, and more.
For starters, I’d always pictured Tombstone as a town in the middle of the desert, the way it’s pictured in the movies, and the OK Corral as a sort of round, fenced enclosure for horses out at the edge of town. Kind of like this:

Surprisingly, the OK Corral was actually a stableyard, in town (though admittedly close to the edge of the town at the time of the gunfight). It was a place where carriages could be stored for people staying in the town’s hotels or other accomodations, and where horses could be stabled during a visit to town. In fact, most of the walls of the corral were formed by the buildings on either side of it, with only gates at each end (the corral reaches from one side of the block to the other).
More surprisingly, the famed gunfight did not take place in the corral itself. Although some of the gunfighters crossed through the corral on the way to the fight, the shooting took place in an alley between two other buildings, one of which also bordered on the OK Corral. Although I don’t think “Gunfight in the Alley by a Building Next to the OK Corral” would have been as big a hit as a movie title.
Anyway, the spot where the actual fight took place is marked on the sidewalk at the street:

And just down the street, a sign marks the location of the actual corral, which has largely been restored:

Naturally, the site’s kept closed off, so people can’t wander through without paying the admission fee, but for once, I thought it was worth it. Despite the tourist trap settings, including street vendors hustling carriage rides and such, it’s obvious a fair amount of research has gone into researching what actually happened at the gunfight.
At the time, Tombstone was the county seat of Cochise County, and it was a classic mining boom town, like San Franciso during the Gold Rush. Unfortunately, there were no other industries to keep the town going (unlike San Francisco’s shipping, for instance), and when the mines dried up (or, in one case, flooded out), the town almost died too. The handsome courthouse, however, has been restored as a museum.

Just outside of town is the famed Boot Hill Cemetery. I learned that this is actually a common name for cemeteries in the old West, where “dying with your boots on” generally meant you were killed, usually in a gunfight or other dubious circumstances, rather than dying peacefully in your sleep. Tombstone’s, though, is the most famous, partly because the dead from the OK Corral gunfight are buried there, partly because of some of the grave markers.

The three members of the Clanton “gang” killed at the OK Corral gunfight are buried side-by-side. Although general public opinion was that they got what was coming to them, one thing to remember is that family and friends generally get to write our epitaphs, and the Clanton gang made it clear what they believed happened (or at least what they wanted people to believe):

As for the other gravesites, they range from the quaint:

to the comedic:


to the poignant:

After Boot Hill, we headed back to the Inn, where we rested up for our final day of birding – with a special focus on hummingbirds.