The booming city was only 30 miles (48 km) from the U.S.–Mexico border and was an open market for cattle stolen from ranches in Sonora, Mexico, by a loosely organized band of outlaws known as The Cowboys.

After many months, while working the hills east of the San Pedro River, he found pieces of silver ore in a dry wash[10] on a high plateau called Goose Flats.

"[14] When the first claims were filed, the initial settlement of tents and wooden shacks was located at Watervale, near the Lucky Cuss mine, with a population of about 100.

As the mill was being built, U.S. Deputy Mineral Surveyor Solon M. Allis finished surveying the new town's site in March 1879.

By fall 1879, a few thousand hardy souls were living in a canvas and matchstick camp perched amidst the richest silver strike in the Arizona Territory.

The mine and business owners, miners, townspeople and city lawmen including the Earps were largely Republicans from the Northern states.

There was also the fundamental conflict over resources and land, with traditional, Southern-style "small government" agrarianism of the rural Cowboys contrasted to Northern-style "big-government" development.

The San Francisco Examiner wrote in an editorial, "Cowboys [are] the most reckless class of outlaws in that wild country...infinitely worse than the ordinary robber.

On the evening of March 15, 1881, three Cochise County Cowboys attempted to rob a Kinnear & Company stagecoach carrying $26,000 in silver bullion ($820,883 in 2023), en route from Tombstone to Benson, Arizona, the nearest railroad freight terminal.

Two months later, on the evening of December 28, 1881, Virgil Earp was ambushed and seriously wounded on the streets of Tombstone by hidden assailants shooting from the second story of an unfinished building.

On March 18, 1882, while Morgan Earp was playing billiards at 10 p.m. at Campbell & Hatch in Allen Street—in the heart of Tombstone's still-current downtown—he was killed by a shot through a window that struck his spine, as Wyatt looked on.

[26] Schieffelin left Tombstone to find more ore and when he returned four months later,[27] Gird had lined up buyers for their interest in the Contention claim, which they sold for $10,000.

In addition, because many of the lawsuits required expert analysis of the underground, many geologists and engineers found employment in Tombstone and settled there.

As the fastest growing boomtown in the American Southwest, the silver industry and attendant wealth attracted many professionals and merchants who brought their wives and families.

[15] By mid-1881, the town had fancy restaurants, Vogan's Bowling Alley,[35] four churches—Catholic, Episcopal, Presbyterian, and Methodist[15]—an ice house, a school, the Schieffelin Hall opera house, two banks, three newspapers, and an ice cream parlor, alongside 110 saloons, 14 gambling halls,[36][37] several Chinese restaurants, French, two Italian, numerous Mexican, several upscale "Continental" establishments, and many "home cooking" hot spots including Nellie Cashman's famous Rush House and numerous brothels all situated among and on top of a number of dirty, hardscrabble mines.

[43] The mostly young, single, male population spent their hard-earned cash on Allen Street, the major commercial center, open 24 hours a day.

On December 25, 1881, the Bird Cage Theatre opened on Allen Street, offering the miners and cowboys their kind of bawdy entertainment.

One of the prime entertainments at the Bird Cage Theatre was Cornish wrestling competitions, with the results being regularly published in the UK.

[44] In 1882, The New York Times reported that "the Bird Cage Theatre is the wildest, wickedest night spot between Basin Street and the Barbary Coast.

The prostitutes worked the saloons on the south side and in the southeast quarter of the town, as far as possible from the proper residential section north of Fremont Street.

[52] Currently, tourism and western memorabilia are the main commercial enterprises; a July 2005 CNN article noted that Tombstone receives approximately 450,000 tourist visitors each year.

[citation needed] Tombstone is a short drive away from Sierra Vista, which is considered the shopping hub of Cochise County.

[53] East Allen Street is the center of Tombstone's tourist attractions, featuring three blocks of shaded boardwalks lined with gift shops, saloons, and eateries.

She planted one of the roses by the patio of the Vizina Mining Company's boarding house, the first adobe building in town, located at 4th and Toughnut Streets across from the later site of the railroad depot.

In 2004, the National Park Service declared that Tombstone's historic designation was threatened, and asked the community to develop an appropriate stewardship program.

These deposits are usually deeply oxidized and enriched by irregular replacement bodies along mineralized fissure zones and anticlinal rolls cut by Paleozoic and Mesozoic sedimentary formations.

Ore deposits were formed by base metal mineralization occurring with oxidation found in fault and fracture zones in laramide volcanics and quartz latite porphyry intrusives.

Silver ore also occurred in manganese oxides with some argentiferous deposits in lenticular or pipe-like replacement bodies along fracture and fault zones, usually in Pennsylvanian-Permian age Naco Group limestones.

[70][71] Tombstone is within the Cochise Technology District, which assists in the development of career and technical education programs for high-school students.

One of the most prominent members of Tombstone's Chinese community was Sing Choy (or Ah Chum), a woman popularly nicknamed "China Mary".