Tombstone’s Public Schools
In February 1880, less than a year after Tombstone was laid out on a silver prospector’s claim in the Sonoran Desert, a woman named Miss Lucas opened the town’s first public school. She did it in a small room with a dirt floor and a mud roof, somewhere near the corner of Fourth and Allen Streets. The furniture, an old resident named F. R. Shearer later recalled, was improvised from lumber stacked in the building: “They had laid planks for desks and benches.” It was a rough start, but it was a start, and Tombstone never stopped building on it.
The fact that a school existed at all tends to surprise modern visitors who picture Tombstone mainly through Hollywood Westerns. But education was a priority for the families who poured into the booming camp. Two private schools had already operated before Miss Lucas arrived, run by a Mrs. Gaston and a Mrs. Howe. When M. M. Sherman took over as principal in September 1881, he found 135 pupils waiting on the first day, already more than the building could hold. The Turn Verein Association hall and the Presbyterian church were pressed into service to handle the overflow. By 1882–83, more than 300 children were enrolled. According to scholar Matia McClelland Burk, whose 1959 article in Arizona and the West remains the definitive study of these early years, Tombstone’s population at its peak rivaled Tucson and dwarfed Prescott and Phoenix combined.
A Curriculum That Matched Any City
What those children were learning would not have seemed out of place in a Boston schoolroom. Sherman documented the subjects taught during the 1881–82 school year: reading, spelling, writing, arithmetic, geography, grammar, drawing, United States history, bookkeeping, algebra, physical geography, and physiology. Report cards were printed with formal expectations. Students were required to be present at nine o’clock and at one o’clock in the afternoon. Any grade below 70 did not earn promotion. Sherman noted with pride that some graduates of the tenth grade “passed direct entrance into universities.”
Visiting dignitaries lectured the students. Among them, Sherman recalled, were a professor from Columbia University and the superintendent of the Contention silver mine, one of the richest operations in the territory. George Parsons, the San Francisco banker-turned-prospector whose journals document daily life in Tombstone with unusual candor, attended the school’s closing exercises in June 1882 and found them worth noting. “I attended the exercises and found them interesting,” he wrote. “A bright lot of children.” Two years later, the school trustees asked Parsons to lecture at the schoolhouse for pupils and parents. “Guess I’ve got cheek enough to,” he admitted in his journal. “Never back out of anything.”
Guns at the Schoolhouse Door
Teaching in Tombstone required adaptations not covered in most instruction manuals. Sherman discovered early on that a significant number of his students arrived armed. He first asked them to leave their six-shooters at home. When that approach failed, he ordered the firearms confiscated until the end of the year. The Tombstone Epitaph estimated that roughly half the town’s boys between ages eight and sixteen owned pistols. The trouble this caused was not theoretical. The paper described a fifteen-year-old named Willie Simms who nearly killed himself in his own backyard by looking down the barrel of a misfired pistol: “The bullet entered the bridge of his nose, and penetrating upwards, came out at the roots of his hair.” The paper called on parents to “prevent them from carrying pistols” and urged police surveillance of the auction houses selling handguns to boys.
The Earp-Clanton gunfight of October 1881 took place one afternoon during Sherman’s tenure. A student named Charlie Laughlin later recalled that the children scattered to see things in spite of their teachers’ objections, and stood in the street to look at the dead men. Parsons noted in his journal that on February 28, 1882, the schools were dismissed for two weeks because of a smallpox outbreak, a reminder that frontier life brought its own variety of classroom interruptions. Sherman, looking back on those years from 1933, chose to emphasize what he had seen beyond the violence: “Outstanding in my mind is the fact that there were more people in the hey-day of Tombstone, ranking high in education, in culture, in genuine accomplishment, than could then or even now be gathered in a city of ten times its population.”
The Disciplinarian and the Earthquake
By 1886, the mines had begun to fail and the school was in financial trouble. It closed briefly in February of that year when its account held only $173 and a deficit of $700 came to light. Emergency meetings were held, taxes voted, and the school reopened within weeks. A new principal arrived that fall: George A. Metcalf of Santa Barbara, California, described by a colleague as “a perfect specimen of muscular young manhood” weighing more than two hundred pounds and possessing, in the words of local historian Ethel Macia, “a violent temper.” The trustees reportedly told him, “You rule the school if you don’t teach them a damn thing.”
On May 3, 1887, an earthquake struck while school was in session. Metcalf recognized what was happening and led the pupils out of the building without a panic. One teacher, Miss Hart, was not immediately accounted for. When a colleague rushed to the door and called for her, Miss Hart replied from inside, calm as ever, “Why, I’m conducting a recitation. What do you think?” Told they were having an earthquake, she answered: “Is that an earthquake? I thought it was Mr. Metcalf upstairs whipping some of the boys.” The Tombstone Epitaph, perhaps reassured by the whole performance, declared that fall that the public schools were “running as smoothly as clockwork.”
The new school building completed in 1883, which replaced the original Fourth Street room, stood on Seventh Street between Allen and Fremont. Its timber came from the Chiricahua Mountains. When it was finally razed in 1947, the Epitaph noted that the cut nails inside were “just as shiny as the day they had been put in” sixty-five years before. The location would have raised eyebrows elsewhere: the building was flanked by a brewery on one side, and the ghostly neighborhood to the west once included the rooms where Doc Holliday and Big Nose Kate lodged.
The school outlasted the mines. When the Contention and Grand Central shut down in 1886 and much of the population drifted away, the school kept going because Tombstone remained the seat of Cochise County. Ranch families sent their children into town for the school term. Courthouse personnel, lawyers, and office-holders stayed because the county needed them. The institution that had begun in a dirt-floor room on Fourth Street survived boom, bust, financial crisis, and earthquake alike. As Burk observed, its story “reflects the era and the fluctuating fortunes of the famous mining camp.” It also reflects something the era is rarely given credit for: a community that put children in school the same year it put Ed Schieffelin’s silver on the map.