“Published by Clum, Sorin & Co…Every morning (Mondays excepted). Daily Epitaph, delivered per week, 25 cents.”

4 pp., 15.25 x 22.25”, six columns. Exhibits four small tears at margins, plus traces of archival tape neatly applied. Else VG, and entirely legible. A handsome piece, suitable for framing

Front page features a double column of advertisements highlighting the commercial attractions of this famed frontier mining town--site of the legendary 1881 “Gunfight at the OK Corral”, pitting Wyatt Earp & Doc Holliday & Co. against the Clanton Brothers.

More ads adorn the interior ages, interspersed with notices of mining patents, plus a “caution” against “Squatters” on Vizina Consolidated Mining Company grounds. All parties are warned against doing business these squatters, “each of whom [listed by name] occupy ground fronting on Allen Street, below third, Village of Tombstone.”

Also a $100 reward for a murder suspect posted by J. H. White, superintendent of the Western Mining Company. To wit: “Contention Mine, A.T. [Arizona Territory, August 11,1880…One Hundred Dollars will be paid for the arrest and detention at Tucson or Tombstone of M. Kelly, who attempted to murder Wm. Shaw, night foreman of Contention mine, on the evening of August 8, 1880…”

Starting from scratch, from a few shacks in 1879, Tombstone had, in the space of a year, blossomed into a wide-open, no-holds-barred boomtown on a par with Deadwood, South Dakota. And, by late 1879 all the legendary figures to figure in the 1881 Corral gunfight had began drifting onto the scene: Wyatt Earp and brothers Virgil, Morgan and James; Doc Holliday and his common law prostitute wife, Blue Nose Kate; the Clanton brothers, Curly Bill Brocious and Johnny Ringo.

By October 12, 1880, all were in town and bad blood had already been building between the Earps and Clantons. Fourteen days later (October 26) would occur the famed incident in which drunken Bill Brocious was arrested and pistol-whipped by Wyatt for shooting up main street and accidentally killing a town marshal. .

The rest, en route to the OK Corral, is either history or historical myth, take your pick. Either way, this October 12, 1880 Tombstone Epitaph makes for a magnificent collectible.  [jp]

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