A Profound and Profane Day

By Michael Patrick O’Brien

During a recent 24-hour period, I prayed at a peaceful monastery, visited a raucous brewery honoring a brothel, and paid money to watch cowboys shoot at each other. 

It was just another day in the Old American West.

My wife and I were visiting a friend who lives in Southern Arizona. Our day started at her serene little abbey perched on a mesa overlooking a desert vista just outside of Tucson. 

While there, we chatted with friends, shared footpaths with white tailed deer, heard the good sisters chant, and listened to the silence of the remote retreat (see: A Journey to Santa Rita Abbey).

When that wonderful morning ended, ironically at about high noon, we had some free time. We decided to drive a few more miles west and visit Tombstone, arguably the most raucous and notorious cowboy town in American history. 

We were hungry, however, so first we stopped to get a bite at the Copper Brothel Brewery in nearby Sonoita. The food was great, but the restaurant’s backstory may be even better. 

A family owns it. When it opened, a proprietor told the local newspaper, “Brothels were the cornerstone of mining towns in Arizona, and this is our homage to women and those roles in the Wild West.” 

The brewmaster is a woman. She’s named her beers with the world’s oldest profession in mind, including “Menage a Trois,” which the menu describes as “a fruity threesome of Orange, Passion Fruit, and Guava packed into our flagship wheat.”

Our Copper Brothel Brewery lunch was the perfect way to transition from the profound (Santa Rita Abbey) to the profane (Tombstone).

If for no reason other than location alone, Tombstone was destined to be iconic. 

The surrounding area is steeped with the images and the legends of the Southwest. Yucca plants and huge Saguaro cacti grow everywhere. Native Americans first lived here over 14,000 years ago.

Spanish explorer Francisco Vásquez de Coronado visited in the mid-1500s, seeking—but never finding—the mythical Seven Cities of Gold. A Coronado memorial 30 miles away and just north of the Mexican border commemorates his expedition.

Tombstone sits in Cochise County, named for a Chiricahua Apache who was a key leader during the Apache Wars. After Cochise died in 1874, his friends buried him in a long lost rocky grave in the nearby mountains, a place now called the Cochise Stronghold.

A prospector founded Tombstone in 1879. Soon the town boomed as local mines produced millions of dollars in silver. 

The population grew quickly, as did the town’s troubles and notoriety. The Earp brothers—Wyatt, Virgil, James, and Morgan—moved in from Dodge City to seek their fortune.

Ranchers/cowboys (like the Clantons and the McLaurys) and mining/business interests quickly came into conflict. Some of the Earps joined law enforcement, sided with the business folks, and started to clash with the Clantons and McLaurys. 

That heated rivalry climaxed with the famous thirty-seconds-long gunfight at the O.K. Corral at about 3:00 p.m. on Wednesday, October 26, 1881. Cowboy/rustler Billy Clanton died in the shootout, along with Frank and Tom McLaury. 

Two of the Earps and Doc Holliday (fighting with the Earps) were injured. Wyatt Earp, Ike Clanton, and Billy Claiborne (fighting with the Clantons/McLaurys) were uninjured.

The Tombstone we visited is a fascinating blend of a twenty-first century small town and a Western theme park forever defined by that 140-year old gunfight.

There’s a Circle K and Family Dollar store. On our drive in, we passed the local high school and its football stadium. The athletic teams are called the Yellowjackets. 

The historic dirt-covered main street, however, has been preserved (or perhaps more accurately restored) for horses, stagecoaches, and legends of the Wild American West. 

There you find famous old haunts like Big Nose Kate’s Saloon. Kate, a well-educated immigrant from Hungary and a nun for a short time, was one of Tombstone’s first madams and the on-again-off-again domestic partner of Doc Holliday (whose cousin, BTW, was a nun too).

One old Tombstone bordello building—prostitution was legal and licensed back then—is now marketed as a haunted bed and breakfast. 

Another, the Bird Cage Theatre, is a museum decorated with authentic saloon-era furnishings and bullet holes in the walls. In Tombstone’s early days, the Bird Cage also offered opera, magic shows, wrestling contests, and gambling. 

Just around the corner we found the offices of the Tombstone Epitaph. Arizona’s oldest continuously published newspaper first reported the tragic 1881 events at the OK Corral, an old stable for boarding horses. 

Just down the street, OK Corral visitors can see the site of the famous gunfight and—for a small fee—enter an outdoor theatre to watch a reenactment with live actors (see photo). We bought tickets, of course.

Soon an erudite, witty, and quite stylishly dressed John Henry “Doc” Holliday introduced himself to the crowd. Walking stick in hand, he told us the whole backstory, identified the key players, and described the conflicts leading to the brief but bloody gun fight. 

Tombstone honors the dentist/gambler each August with “Doc Holli-Days,” a festival featuring gunfights, a parade, and a look-alike contest. Val Kilmer and Dennis Quaid—who each played the Doc in separate films—have served as grand marshals.

The OK Corral show ends with the 30 second gunfight, which even by today’s standards is a loud and shocking outburst of violence in close range. I’d never before paid to watch cowboys shoot at each other.

I admit, it was entertaining. The actors handled their roles with an appropriate mix of seriousness, professionalism, and self-deprecation. They even encouraged the audience to cheer for the good guys and boo the villains.

After the show, as we left, the good guys stuck around for photo ops and soon fans surrounded them. Instead, I gave a nod and congratulatory word to the villains, noting it’s not easy to play the bad guys. 

“Sure it is,” replied ringleader Ike Clanton with a big grin.

The same year the gunfight at the OK Corral erupted, locals also started a Catholic parish in Tombstone, and built the first church building in the rough and tumble town. It is now known as Sacred Heart Church.

The surviving church complex, dating back to 1881, is also listed on the National Register of Historic Places. At the end of our Tombstone day, we stopped by, hoping to visit. 

Unfortunately, no one was there and this little part of local history was closed. I should not have been surprised. 

After all, while in Tombstone, even we were more interested in the profane than the profound.

*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Paraclete Press published his bookMonastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, in August 2021. The League of Utah Writers chose it as the best non-fiction book of 2022.