{"id":1467,"date":"2017-10-13T06:00:20","date_gmt":"2017-10-13T13:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/?p=1467"},"modified":"2017-10-12T20:42:32","modified_gmt":"2017-10-13T03:42:32","slug":"heldorado","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/2017\/10\/13\/heldorado\/","title":{"rendered":"Helldorado"},"content":{"rendered":"

Years ago, when my mother joined her father on a trip to Sweden to visit his brothers, my father gave her a ride to Bowie, Arizona (Pronounced BOO EE, for you non-Arizona types) where she caught a Greyhound Bus.\u00a0 She took that far enough to meet up with Grandpa Anderson and their flight arrangements.\u00a0 From then on, though, we always said that she went to Europe by way of Bowie.<\/p>\n

Next week, for Tombstone\u2019s big fall celebration, Helldorado, I\u2019ll be there as the event’s Official Author of 2017. I’ll be going there by way of Barcelona.\u00a0 Long story.<\/p>\n

\"\"Bisbee is 23 miles away from Tombstone.\u00a0 When I was growing up in Bisbee, my mother would hardly let my dad take his foot off the gas pedal as we drove through Tombstone.\u00a0 She said it was a \u201ctourist trap,\u201d and she didn\u2019t want to go there.\u00a0 So we didn\u2019t.\u00a0 I do remember visiting Boot Hill Cemetery once when we had visitors from South Dakota.\u00a0 I came away with a pair of Mexican dolls that I bought with my own money from the gift shop, but I don\u2019t remember stopping off for lunch along the way.<\/p>\n

Being true to my roots, once I grew up, I didn\u2019t slow down when passing through Tombstone, either.\u00a0 Then I married Bill, a guy who hails originally from Chicago.\u00a0 He grew up fascinated by all things \u201cout West,\u201d Tombstone, Arizona, included.\u00a0 So once we married and drove down to Bisbee, he wanted to stop, and so we did.\u00a0 On that trip we did the standard stuff\u2014Boot Hill, the Rose Tree, the OK Corral.\u00a0 The problem is, I came away with my needle stuck on the \u201ctourist trap\u201d mentality.<\/p>\n

In one of the Joanna Brady books\u2014Outlaw Mountain, I believe\u2014a lot of the action takes place in Tombstone.\u00a0 So we went there again, this time doing research rather than hitting the high spots.\u00a0 We started with the Ed Schefflin monument north of town.\u00a0 Ed was a prospector who wandered the Arizona wilderness looking for gold and silver and hoping to strike it rich.\u00a0 At the time, the Apaches pretty well had a lock on the whole territory.\u00a0 Ed took mineral samples from that neck of the woods and then he and his mule made their way to the nearest assay office to have them evaluated.\u00a0 Something makes me think he walked all the way to Miami, Arizona\u2014a distance of 188 miles.\u00a0 Eventually, Ed filed his mineral claims and he did hit it big.\u00a0 Those original claims were where Tombstone got its start.<\/p>\n

On that same research trip, we went to the real cemetery in town as opposed to Boot Hill.\u00a0 Walking among those aging headstones, it was clear that people tended to die in their thirties and forties.\u00a0 Back in the 1880’s, people didn\u2019t go to Arizona to retire because they didn\u2019t live long enough to retire.\u00a0 That was a sobering realization.<\/p>\n

On that trip, we had a friend along with us, a guy from Washington.\u00a0 We were trying to explain to him the difference between yucca and agave.\u00a0 In order to do that, we were driving along one of Tombstone\u2019s back streets when we went past a house with a birdbath in the front yard.\u00a0 And what did we see on that birdbath?\u00a0\u00a0 An EAGLE.\u00a0 No one had a cell phone camera back then because they hadn\u2019t been invented, so we didn\u2019t snap a photo.\u00a0 We stared at the eagle slack-jawed, and he stared right back at us as if to say, \u201cHey, this is a birdbath.\u00a0 I am a BIRD!\u201d<\/p>\n

The tourist trap needle moved downwards after that, but I still didn\u2019t bestir myself from Tucson to go down to Tombstone for Helldorado.\u00a0 Until now.<\/p>\n

How did that happen?\u00a0 Last summer, on our Barcelona to Southampton cruise, we met a couple named Cotty and Andrea Peabody.\u00a0 We struck up a conversation while they were out on the deck reading books and I was out doing my steps.\u00a0 In the course of those conversations I learned that Cotty\u2019s grandfather founded St. John\u2019s, Tombstone\u2019s Episcopal Church, which was also the first protestant church established in Arizona.<\/p>\n

At the moment, the church has an aging congregation and is tottering towards extinction.\u00a0 Cotty has joined forces with a committee to preserve the church.\u00a0 When he asked if I\u2019d be willing to do an event there to help with their efforts, I said yes.\u00a0 That affirmative answer morphed into my being the official Helldorado Author of 2017.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m going.\u00a0 I\u2019ll be doing an event at St. John\u2019s on Saturday afternoon.\u00a0 I\u2019ll be riding in the parade on Sunday followed by another signing that afternoon.\u00a0 Books will be provided by Tucson\u2019s Mostly Books.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll be there wearing my black Stetson from Arizona Hatters.<\/p>\n

So get out your own Stetsons and come on down.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Years ago, when my mother joined her father on a trip to Sweden to visit his brothers, my father gave her a ride to Bowie, Arizona (Pronounced BOO EE, for you non-Arizona types) where she caught a Greyhound Bus.\u00a0 She took that far enough to meet up with Grandpa Anderson and their flight arrangements.\u00a0 From […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6,165,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1467","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tour-2","category-traveling","category-writing"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3nsBA-nF","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1467","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1467"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1467\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1472,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1467\/revisions\/1472"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}