May 2026

History

The Surgeon Who Was Always There

Dr. George Goodfellow came to Tombstone in 1880 as a young Army surgeon, and within months had established himself as the most capable physician in southeastern Arizona. He was also an accomplished poker player, a prodigious whiskey drinker, and a man whose sardonic humor made him memorable to anyone who encountered him. When a gambler named Charlie Storms was shot at point-blank range during a dispute, Goodfellow arrived on the scene and devoted much of his attention to studying the trajectory of the bullet. His friend George Parsons, watching from nearby, wrote in his journal that Goodfellow "seemed more anxious to examine the ball than to save the man." Storms died anyway.

What made Goodfellow remarkable was not just his skill but his presence at nearly every defining moment of Tombstone's boom years. When the gunfight near the O.K. Corral left three men dead and two wounded in October 1881, Goodfellow treated the survivors. When Virgil Earp was ambushed on Allen Street two months later, a shotgun blast shattering his left arm, Goodfellow had been visiting George Parsons just across the street moments before the shots rang out. He was among the first to reach Virgil and performed the surgery that saved him. When Morgan Earp was shot at the Campbell and Hatch billiard parlor in March 1882, Goodfellow was there within minutes. The wound, he told those gathered, was fatal. It was.

His proximity to violence gave him an unmatched case study in gunshot wounds. By the mid-1880s, Goodfellow had assembled enough data to write a series of papers published in major medical journals and read by physicians across the country. His work on penetrating abdominal wounds, considered nearly unsurvivable at the time, demonstrated that aggressive surgical intervention could save patients conventional doctrine would have abandoned. He became a nationally recognized authority on traumatic surgery, his reputation built entirely on the cases that walked through his Tombstone door.

In May 1887, a powerful earthquake struck the Sonoran border country. Goodfellow was dispatched on a U.S. government commission to survey the damage, spending weeks documenting fault lines, collapsed buildings, and the lives disrupted by the quake. His official report, illustrated with photographs by C.S. Fly, remains one of the most detailed eyewitness accounts of the earthquake's effects. Goodfellow eventually left Tombstone as the boom faded, settling in San Francisco and continuing his medical career until his death in 1910. The frontier surgeon who had kept Tombstone's residents alive through a decade of remarkable violence died, somewhat anticlimactically, of appendicitis.

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New on the Site

Recently Published

Four new articles went up this month:

• Dr. George Goodfellow: Tombstone's Surgeon — The frontier physician who treated the victims of the O.K. Corral gunfight, saved Virgil Earp's arm, and became a nationally recognized authority on gunshot wounds.
• Cochise's People: The Chiricahua Apache and Their Homeland — The people who lived in this country for centuries before silver was discovered, and what happened to them when the boom arrived.
• Endicott Peabody: The Boston Parson Who Came to Tombstone — The Harvard-educated young minister who arrived in 1882, built a church partly funded by a poker game, and later became one of America's most celebrated headmasters.
• The Assayer's Art — How Tombstone's assayers used fire, chemistry, and precision scales to determine the value of ore samples, and why their work was the foundation of the entire silver economy.