Cui servire est regnare

Re: “To Serve is to Rule” essay by Doug Henwood, Harper’s Magazine, November 2019, p. 37-45. https://harpers.org/archive/2019/11/to-serve-is-to-rule-wasps-doug-henwood/

One a day early in 1882 a dust-covered young gentleman, newly arrived by rail from the East, rode the stage from Benson to Tombstone, regaled en route by the driver’s tales of a holdup on the line the previous year and a gunfight that past October behind a corral only a block from where that young man would build his church. He was Endicott Peabody, seminarian on leave from Episcopal Theological Seminary, whom the town fathers had invited west. And he saw that church building to completion by the fall of that year. (“The oldest Episcopal Church in Arizona, and the only Adobe Gothic Revival church in the world”--current advertisement.) He had a fine time introducing muscular Christianity to the magnates and miners of the boom town at the height of its prosperity. Then, feeling his talents better deployed as rector of a boys’ school than of a parish, he went home and founded Groton. Readers of Henwood’s essay will be pleased to learn that Endicott Peabody Day is now a feast day in the Episcopal diocese of Arizona, and its celebration this November 17th will be led by the Rt. Rev. Jennifer Reddall, and led by the current pastor, the Rev. Heather Rose. As one who has served in the same pulpit as Peabody, for the same length of time, -- only 135 years later -- I wouldn’t miss this celebration. P.S. Peabody presided at the wedding of Eleanor Roosevelt to her cousin Franklin, the latter of whom paid tribute to his former schoolmaster by saying: “I’m still afraid of the old son of a bitch.”

The Rev. Dr. John R. Leech

Tucson, Arizona.

October 21, 2019.

“Preacher in Helldorado” by Henry Walker, Journal of Arizona History, 1974

Thomas Peterson, MA thesis on Tombstone stage lines. 

That's not my Tombstone.

The New Yorker magazine posted a story online on June 3rd, 2019, about modern-day vigilantes and re-enactors of the old days of the Wild West. The author visited Tombstone as a tourist, and paid her way into such tourist attractions as Boot Hill Cemetery, the Bird Cage Theatre, and the reenactment of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. 

That's not my Tombstone.

Visitors come to the southwest and they find what they are looking for.

It's an old story. These days, we call it confirmation bias.

In the case of Tombstone it's a place easily associated with a colorful past. For many visitors Tombstone is a place of stories of the old, wild west. Of rustlers and gunmen.

And that is what they expect to find when they visit. That, and some modern-day vigilantes.

Put the two together and call it a continuum.

There is some explanation for that equation, but that is not my Tombstone.

Let me tell you about my Tombstone.

For six months a couple of years ago I was the vicar of Tombstone. That is, I was the priest who served Saint Paul's Episcopal Church in Tombstone. Like many a predecessor of mine I arrived from the direction of Benson. Approaching from the northwest the first sight I had of town was of the steeple of its church. For 137 years that has been a prominent feature of the town.

And I'll tell you about it through its people. Four sets of them.

First, the pastor and people of Saint Paul's Episcopal Church. When the town was new, things were a little dusty, and leaders of the community called a young seminarian to lead the effort to organize and build a building for the church. Over six months of effort, using plans by Richard Upjohn and with the aid of resident mining experts, the congregation laid a solid stone foundation. The members of the congregation, including their young minister,  made adobe bricks on site, and put them in place. They've been there ever since. And the church, the living church that is composed of its people and its leaders, thrives. Their pastor now is the Reverend Heather Rose.

As vicar I used to pull on my boots and put on my hat and walk down the wooden sidewalks of the old town. "Here comes another one," I heard once. Apparently some visitors thought I was a re-enactor. An understandable mistake - but I was just walking the bounds of my parish. On Sunday morning sure enough you could find me at the liars' table in the O.K. Cafe on Allen Street. There is a picture over the table - I'm the one in the black clericals, my hat is on the table. In that group is someone whose family has been there since before the church was built. My closest relative in town has been there a much shorter time than that.

Second, the founder of the Tombstone Hearse and Trike company, Jack Feather. A few years ago he called my cousins in Eureka, California, and invited them into an extraordinary project. Two crews made almost entirely of veterans, in northern California and southeastern Arizona, built a replica of Abraham Lincoln's hearse. They delivered it for the 150th anniversary reenactment (there's that word) of the funeral procession to the 16th President's final resting place in Springfield, Illinois. It's in the museum there now.

Third, the single parents I met who work in the businesses on Toughnut Street and Allen Street. You wouldn't know it, as they serve you a beer or a sarsaparilla, but they have children to raise that are growing up in the local schools. They drop them off on the way to work and pick them up at the end of the day.

And fourth, there are those guys at the liars' table at the O.K. Cafe on Sunday mornings. Dressed up, some of them, as the period characters they portray on weekends, they get together and, well, tell stories. They are part of the town. Don't be surprised to see the mayor, or the tourism director, thereabouts, discussing what next to do for the community.

These people are all part of the living community. They are my Tombstone, the town I came to know in six months as vicar of Tombstone, one in a long line of ministers that continues. This fall that town, and the church, will celebrate Endicott Peabody Day, celebrating that young seminarian who came to town on a dusty stage 137 years ago, and the people who built the church, and the building they built, and the town so blessed it thrives.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/06/10/the-wild-west-meets-the-southern-border

Photograph by Jon Donahue. Used with permission.

Tombstone - Bisbee Reading List

(Tombstone, Allen Street)

Books, and television and film, about Tombstone Arizona especially historic St Paul's Church, and Bisbee

Under Cover for Wells Fargo
The Unvarnished Recollections of Fred Dodge
By Dodge, Fred
Book - 1969

Tombstone, A.T
A History of Early Mining, Milling, and Mayhem
By Shillingberg, Wm. B.
Book - 1999

Wyatt Earp
The Life Behind the Legend
By Tefertiller, Casey
Book - 1997

Going Back to Bisbee
By Shelton, Richard
Book - 1992

Bisbee, 17
By Houston, Robert
Book - 1979

Helldorado
Bringing the Law to the Mesquite
By Breakenridge, William M.
Book - 1928

Preacher in Helldorado
By Walker, Henry P.
Book - 1974

Bonanzas to Borrascas
The Mines of Tombstone, Arizona
By Devere, Burton
Book - 2010

The Devil Has Foreclosed
The Private Journal of George Whitwell Parsons : the Concluding Arizona Years, 1882-87
By Parsons, George Whitwell
Book - 1997

A Tenderfoot in Tombstone
The Private Journal of George Whitwell Parsons : the Turbulent Years, 1880-82
By Parsons, George Whitwell
Book - 1996

Tombstone, Arizona, "too Tough to Die"
The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of A Silver Camp, 1878 to 1990
By Bailey, Lynn Robison
Book - 2004

Wyatt Earp
Frontier Marshal
By Lake, Stuart N.
Book - 1931

Tombstone
An Iliad of the Southwest
By Burns, Walter Noble
Book - 1929

And Die in the West
The Story of the O.K. Corral Gunfight
By Marks, Paula Mitchell
Book - 1989

The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp
Television 1955-1961
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0047750/

Tombstone
Film 1993
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108358/

Wyatt Earp
Film 1994
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0111756/

My Darling Clementine
Film 1946
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0038762/


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