wild west new frontier create a neighborhood

When we got there, it turned out that we hadn’t done our research well: the town was privately owned and open only by appointment, and only for guided tours. It had museums, theatres, and another form of entertainment: “While you are enjoying the festivities you can be hung or have someone hung by the Tombstone Vigilantes at the hanging scaffold.” Corral,” which was staged four times a day. Tombstone had a world-famous reënactment show, “The O.K. At least I had heard of Billy the Kid, who, it was claimed, had washed dishes at Shakespeare’s only hotel-the Stratford, on Avon Avenue-after escaping from jail in 1875. But, reading their names out loud to the kids, I showed enthusiasm. To be honest, I had no idea who these men were. So we looked online and found that Shakespeare and Tombstone offered family-friendly activities: stagecoaches, historamas, and Wild West reënactments.Īpparently, some of the biggest legends of the Wild West had passed through Shakespeare. My husband and I were obsessively meeting deadlines, and the kids were getting impatient with us, feeling that we had scammed them into a vacation with no vacation plan.

It was 2014, the immigration crisis was very much in the news-unaccompanied children from Central America were arriving at the border in unprecedented numbers, seeking asylum-and I was beginning to do research on the situation.

Some years ago, I spent a summer in the Southwest with my then husband, our daughter, and my two stepsons, and we visited both places. They came into existence in the eighteen-seventies, during the silver strike, but soon suffered the same fate as most of the other mining towns in the region: boom, depression, abandonment, and then a strange kind of afterlife. Both are old mining towns near the U.S.-Mexico border.

Wild west new frontier create a neighborhood