Tombstone Silver Newsletter
July 2026
Issue 5 — July 15, 2026
Two new articles join the Tombstone Silver history archive this month, and together they complicate the version of Tombstone usually told through gunfights and mining claims. This issue features the businesswomen who built a second economy on Allen Street while the miners and gunfighters filled the history books, and it revisits the town's founding story from the perspective of the engineer most retellings leave out entirely.
History
The 137 Women Behind Tombstone's Boom
Between 1878 and 1884, at least 137 women owned businesses in Tombstone: hotels, restaurants, dress shops, and stores, built in a mining camp where adult men outnumbered adult women nearly nine to one. Popular memory sorts frontier women into two neat piles, the "decent" ladies and the "scarlet" women. The women who actually ran Tombstone's businesses fit neither box.
The town's own mythology drew a hard line down the middle of Allen Street: saloons and gambling on the north side, "stores, restaurants, ladies, and other harmless side issues" on the south. In practice the line was a fiction almost from the moment the city council made it official in 1881. Nellie Cashman's Arcade Restaurant sat on the same stretch of street as a saloon. Dressmakers sewed gowns for prostitutes and society wives alike, because the town's actual commerce never sorted itself into tidy moral geography, whatever the ordinance claimed.
Many of these women were not naive first-timers. Nearly sixty percent had already run businesses in California or Nevada before the Comstock played out and they moved south. Samantha Fallon arrived in 1879 with $600 to her name and built two Fremont Street businesses, one of which, the San Jose House, still stands today. Others arrived with nothing: Mary Toomey, widowed with three children, left her oldest with friends, found a backer, and had her family reunited under one roof within a year of opening the Bodie House.
Almost none of these women appear in the popular version of Tombstone's story, the one built around gunfighters and outlaws. But for every man who drew a gun on Allen Street, there was a woman running the hotel he slept in, the restaurant he ate at, or the shop that dressed his wife, for a fee, and on her own terms.
New on the Site
Recently Published
- Ladies of Enterprise: The Businesswomen of Tombstone — At least 137 women owned businesses in boomtown Tombstone, running hotels, dress shops, and restaurants on both sides of Allen Street, and their stories complicate the tidy myth of good women and bad women in the Old West.
- Richard Gird: The Man Who Made Tombstone Possible — Ed Schieffelin found the silver, but it was Gird who confirmed it was worth mining, built the mills to process it, and split his profits with the Schieffelins when they sold out too soon.
Did You Know?
He Split His Fortune With No One Asking Him To
When Richard Gird finally sold his share of the Tombstone mines in March 1881, he received $600,000, far more than Ed and Al Schieffelin had gotten for their own shares when they sold out earlier. There was no written partnership agreement among the three men, no lawsuit, no legal claim the brothers could have made on Gird's money. He calculated the difference between what he had received and what they had, then divided that excess equally among all three of them, so each partner ended up with the same total amount.
"We somehow tacitly understood that we had an equal share or interest," Gird wrote decades later in his own account of the discovery, offering no further explanation, as if the fairness of it were simply obvious. Read the full story of the engineer who proved Ed Schieffelin's silver was real in Richard Gird: The Man Who Made Tombstone Possible.
Until next month, keep digging up Tombstone's past.
George Self