Experience the “real” Tombstone, the right way, going beyond the half-minute gunfight. Your driver/tour guide will give you many of the stories behind Tombstone, from its discovery to its decline. We include a stop at the monument to the town’s founder, Ed Schieffelin, a trip by the historic courthouse, where the gallows are set up for two, harkening to the last (legal) hanging in the county, the Halderman brothers in 1900.
Then it’s off to visit the quieter ghosts lying lonely in the desert east of Tombstone. Historic mining camps all, these town rose and fell quickly, though there is still exploration activity, with the hopes of news lodes of gold and silver.
In Gleeson, you’ll see the old hospital, general store, school and jail. (Founder Johnnie Gleeson, by the way, is buried in Bisbee’s Evergreen Cemetery and our Mile High, Greater Bisbee and Mining Landscape tours will show you his grave.) Gleeson was originally named Turquoise, after a stone that was mined there by the Native Americans and some still find today.
Then we’ll move on to the remnants of Courtland and Pearce along the “Real Ghost Town Trail” of southeast Arizona.
Finally, you’ll return to Bisbee via the Sulphur Springs Valley, a 125-year-old agriculture area that once provided beef and vegetables to the mining camps and still today grows vegetables, fruit, nuts, grains and cotton. We’ll pass through the communities of Elfrida and Double Adobe and get outstanding views of the eastern side of the Mule Mountains.
If you want to learn more about the ghost towns of this region, click here.