Silver, Water, and the Town Too Tough to Die
Near Tombstone, Arizona
Tombstone was built on silver, and drowned by water. In its brief boom the district pulled something like eighty five million dollars in silver from the ground, and by eighteen eighty two nearly five thousand three hundred people crowded these streets. But as the shafts drove deeper, they struck the water table.
By the mid eighteen eighties the lower workings were flooding faster than anyone could bail them. Two enormous Cornish pumps were hauled in, and at their peak they lifted about two and a half million gallons of water out of the mines every single day. Then, in eighteen eighty six, a fire destroyed the pumping works at the Grand Central mine, and the company could not agree on the huge cost of starting over.
The deep mining essentially stopped. A later attempt in nineteen oh nine flooded out again when the pumps failed at the one thousand foot level. By nineteen thirty the population had collapsed to fewer than nine hundred souls.
And yet Tombstone refused to become a ghost town. Thanks to books, movies, and a celebration called Helldorado Days begun in nineteen twenty nine, the place reinvented itself around its own legend and earned the nickname it still carries today, the town too tough to die.
