Tuesday, May 16, 2006

Tombstone

We are spending the night in Tombstone, Arizona. We will drive down to Bisbee in the morning, just to see another old frontier town, then back up to Phoenix.

We had to drop by to see one of the top holstermakers in the cowboy action field, Big Ed of San Pedro Saddlery. Big Ed is making the holster for my left hand gun and he never answered my last E-mail telling him that I needed my order changed from a four and three quarter inch barrel to a five and a half inch. Turned out that his E-mail server was down for a while so it is lucky that we drove south. This time I had my rig together so we had a good chance to match colors. It is going to be an odd looking rig, though. My right hand holster is a border tooled two loop holster, it was made by the craftsmen of Old El Paso Saddlery. This will be Ed's Gunfighter Holster. This is a single loop design with a much abbreviated skirt. The two holsters won't look much alike, except they will both be leather. Well, I can live with that, few of the real old west types wore two guns and those that did seldom had matched pairs. Shootin' irons were expensive.

Anyhow, having done our business we wanted to eat dinner and look around, again. Historic Tombstone is now a place of shops and boutiques, along with a couple of nice restaurants. So we walked up and down Allen Street, past the site of that famous gunfight, we wandered in to the old Oriental Saloon, where Wyatt Earp owned the Faro tables, we went into the shop that was once the billiard Hall where Morgan Earp was murdered, stood where Virgil was shot and crippled.

The trip to Bisbee was a spur of the moment idea. Our kids in Phoenix work very early so by fooling around in Tombstone it would have been a pain for them. So we'll drive to Bisbee in the morning, spend a couple hours and then hit Phoenix just after the kids get home from work. I'll let you know what Bisbee is like. I think they still mine copper there. If there is anything worth taking pictures of I'll shoot a few.

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