Tombstone Silver Newsletter
September 2026
Issue 7 — September 15, 2026
Only one new article joins the archive this month, but it's a big one: a full profile of George Parsons, the diarist without whom most of what this site knows about Tombstone's boom years would be lost entirely. And starting with this issue, the newsletter is trying something new: a running feature pulled straight from the primary sources this whole site is built on, to show what a given month actually looked like in the boomtown, across the years of its rise and fall. This month, naturally, is September.
History
The Man Who Wrote Tombstone Down
Almost everything this website knows about daily life in early Tombstone passes, at some point, through one man's handwriting. George Whitwell Parsons arrived in the boomtown in February 1880 with no plan beyond restlessness, and kept a diary there, and everywhere else he ever lived, for sixty straight years.
He was out of town, on a mining inspection trip, the day of the O.K. Corral gunfight, but was back in time for its tense, bloody aftermath. He cheered on the Earp vendetta from the sidelines, drilled rock by hand for three dollars a day, and later, in California, became a genuinely important civic reformer who spent decades trying to keep desert travelers from dying of thirst.
His own diary editor called him "a prominent and important, but little remembered, citizen." His own reference book calls him, more bluntly, "not a likeable man." Both things can be true, and neither explains why, without him, we would know far less about what it actually felt like to live in Tombstone.
This Month in Tombstone — New
Septembers of the Boom
Drawn straight from George Parsons' diary, the pages of the Weekly Epitaph, and Clara Spalding Brown's letters home to San Diego. Clara once described the season this way: "the heats of September" merging into "the refreshing coolness of October and November." Here's what else happened in past Septembers, across the decade of the boom:
- September 3, 1877 — Ed Schieffelin has his "Tombstone" claim officially recorded at the land office in Tucson, the discovery that would eventually put a name on the whole town. Read his story →
- September 15, 1880 — The Grand Hotel opens under Mrs. Holly's management. George Parsons breakfasts there that morning and calls it "the best place I've been thus far in the Territory... only four bits."
- September 5, 1881 — Word of the Cibecue Creek uprising reaches town, and a mass meeting at Schieffelin Hall edges toward real panic until attorney Tom Fitch's evening speech "restored confidence," per Parsons, who was in the crowd.
- September 17, 1881 — The Epitaph reports an exceptional wild hay harvest on the mesas outside town: "millions of tons" of grass two to four feet tall, cheap enough to keep the district's mine animals fed through winter.
- September 16, 1882 — The Epitaph reprints in full a letter from botanist J. G. Lemmon describing a hidden "natural fern conservatory" he and his wife found deep in a Huachuca Mountains canyon, twenty-six possible new plant species collected on one near-vertical scramble.
- September 4, 1886 — Geronimo surrenders to General Nelson Miles at Skeleton Canyon, ending the Apache Wars that had shadowed Cochise County for the entire span of Tombstone's boom. More on the Chiricahua Apache →
New on the Site
Recently Published
- George Parsons: The Man Who Wrote Tombstone Down — George Parsons kept a diary for sixty years and never meant for strangers to read it. It became the richest eyewitness record of Tombstone's violent, formative years, and the source behind much of what this website knows.
Until next month, keep digging up Tombstone's past.
George Self