Heather K Michon
The Provenance of a Desert Rose: An Essay In Developement
Downtown Tombstone Today
When my husband and I retire -- if such a thing still exists in twenty-odd years -- I somehow imagine we'll move back to Arizona, closing the circle of our lives together in the place where we first met. I used to think I'd like to live in Ahwahtukee, just north of Phoenix, for no particular reason other than the fact that I like to say "Ahwahtukee." Now, I envision a little house in Tombstone.
Not only is "Tombstone" equally fun to say, and a delightfully ghoulish place to pass one's golden years, it also happens to be one of my favorite things....a contradiction: a desert town that watched its wealth drown in the waters of an vast underground reservoir, a spot where for the briefest periods the roughest of roughnecks rubbed elbows with legendary Western figures, a place caught between a dimly remembered past and a commercialized present and uneasy in both.
Not only is "Tombstone" equally fun to say, and a delightfully ghoulish place to pass one's golden years, it also happens to be one of my favorite things....a contradiction: a desert town that watched its wealth drown in the waters of an vast underground reservoir, a spot where for the briefest periods the roughest of roughnecks rubbed elbows with legendary Western figures, a place caught between a dimly remembered past and a commercialized present and uneasy in both.
Boot Hill
The Old West of modern Tombstone is filled with the stock characters of a dozen novels and movies. You know them: the incorruptible lawman, the snaggle-toothed desperado, the good-hearted madame and her cote of spoiled doves. Even the dead are not immune to the celebration of violence and debauchery. Most of the cheeky epitaphs over the graves at Boot Hill Cemetery -- like "Here Lies George Johnson, Hanged By Mistake, 1882, He Was Right/We Was Wrong/But We Strung Him Up/And Now He's Gone" -- are over the graves of men and women whose true names and real stories were lost to decades of neglect.
Some of its rowdy reputation was well-deserved. Tombstone was, after all, a mining camp, and mining camps were not notable producers of saints. Men worked a 10-12 hour shift deep underground, in cramped and dangerous conditions, for a grand total of $4 a day. That many came to the surface ready for a trip to the saloon or the gambling hall or the dance hall or the opium den is no real surprise. Much hard-earned cash was lost to the working girls, or the cockfights, or the card tables, while the easy availability of guns and alcohol spurred plenty of mayhem.
Some of its rowdy reputation was well-deserved. Tombstone was, after all, a mining camp, and mining camps were not notable producers of saints. Men worked a 10-12 hour shift deep underground, in cramped and dangerous conditions, for a grand total of $4 a day. That many came to the surface ready for a trip to the saloon or the gambling hall or the dance hall or the opium den is no real surprise. Much hard-earned cash was lost to the working girls, or the cockfights, or the card tables, while the easy availability of guns and alcohol spurred plenty of mayhem.
Stem of the Tombstone Rosebush
But the miners of Tombstone -- along with the shopkeepers and bankers and lawyers and mining executives -- were just as likely to spend their off-hours at the baseball diamond or the gymnasium, the glee club, the drama guild, the debate society. Some took the temperance pledge or found solace in any of a half-dozen churches; others joined their fraternal brothers in meetings of the Masons, the Knights of Pythias, the Odd Fellows, the Red Men, the GAR, the Irish Land League, and the Ancient Order of United Workingmen. They settled their grudges in competitive, non-lethal shooting matches, foot races, horse races, and wresting matches. They celebrated the opening of the skating rink and the ice cream parlor, the installation of gas street-lamps, the establishment of the mail service and school district, and their selection as the county seat. It was this civic pride, these stable structures, that allowed Tombstone to survive where a hundred other played-out mining towns could not.
For me, Tombstone is summed up not by the pointless shootout OK Corral (re-enacted daily at 2 PM, admission $5.50, children under six free), but a grand spectacle of nature at the corner of Fourth and Toughnut streets: the home of the world's largest rosebush.
As the name implies, this is no dainty little desert scrub. It sits on a single stem 10 feet high and almost 13 feet around. The foliage, supported by a massive overhead trellis, covers 8,600 square feet. When the clusters of tiny white-and-cream flowers appear in April, all of downtown Tombstone is bathed in the scent, strangely, of violets.
Like many Tombstone residents, the rose settled there at the end of a long, strange trip. Botanically, the Lady Banksia rose is a Chinese evergreen varietal, which came to London in 1807 in the hands of a East India Company tea merchant and named in honor of the wife of Sir Joseph Banks, director of the Royal Botanic Gardens. It didn't particularly thrive in the cool, damp climate of the British Isles, but it found favor in enough family gardens that a rooting made its way to Tombstone -- as the story goes -- in a box of cuttings sent to a homesick young Scottish bride name Mary Gee in 1884.
Mary and her husband, Henry, had come to town when he was hired to manage the Vizina Mine. They took rooms at the Arcade, one of the the town's more reputable boardinghouses, where Mary befriended the owner's wife, Amelia Adamson. When the Gee's moved into their own home, Mary gave Amelia one of the rose slips to plant in beside an unsightly woodshed. To everyone's surprise, the rose thrived in the hot desert sun, outliving both the woodshed and the Adamsons and eventually turning the Arcade into the Rose Tree Inn. By the time it was featured in John Hix's "Strange as it Seems" comic strip in July 1933, it was estimated that "more than 7,000 bouquets of a dozen flowers each could be picked from its branches at once -- and still leave a few thousand roses." It came to international fame when Robert Ripley named it "The World's Largest Rosebush" in his "Believe It Or Not" column in 1937, a title it still holds today. Townspeople celebrate it's bloom with a festival every spring.
For me, Tombstone is summed up not by the pointless shootout OK Corral (re-enacted daily at 2 PM, admission $5.50, children under six free), but a grand spectacle of nature at the corner of Fourth and Toughnut streets: the home of the world's largest rosebush.
As the name implies, this is no dainty little desert scrub. It sits on a single stem 10 feet high and almost 13 feet around. The foliage, supported by a massive overhead trellis, covers 8,600 square feet. When the clusters of tiny white-and-cream flowers appear in April, all of downtown Tombstone is bathed in the scent, strangely, of violets.
Like many Tombstone residents, the rose settled there at the end of a long, strange trip. Botanically, the Lady Banksia rose is a Chinese evergreen varietal, which came to London in 1807 in the hands of a East India Company tea merchant and named in honor of the wife of Sir Joseph Banks, director of the Royal Botanic Gardens. It didn't particularly thrive in the cool, damp climate of the British Isles, but it found favor in enough family gardens that a rooting made its way to Tombstone -- as the story goes -- in a box of cuttings sent to a homesick young Scottish bride name Mary Gee in 1884.
Mary and her husband, Henry, had come to town when he was hired to manage the Vizina Mine. They took rooms at the Arcade, one of the the town's more reputable boardinghouses, where Mary befriended the owner's wife, Amelia Adamson. When the Gee's moved into their own home, Mary gave Amelia one of the rose slips to plant in beside an unsightly woodshed. To everyone's surprise, the rose thrived in the hot desert sun, outliving both the woodshed and the Adamsons and eventually turning the Arcade into the Rose Tree Inn. By the time it was featured in John Hix's "Strange as it Seems" comic strip in July 1933, it was estimated that "more than 7,000 bouquets of a dozen flowers each could be picked from its branches at once -- and still leave a few thousand roses." It came to international fame when Robert Ripley named it "The World's Largest Rosebush" in his "Believe It Or Not" column in 1937, a title it still holds today. Townspeople celebrate it's bloom with a festival every spring.
The Dragoon Mountains From Boot Hill
But even this seemingly simple tale provides us with a conundrum. A quick search of census and newspaper records yields no mention of the Gees in Tombstone before the 1890s. According to the 1900 Census, Mary and Henry Gee married in 1894, and Mary had a 16-year old daughter by a previous marriage. The daughter, Kathleen,was born in Scotland in 1884 -- making it impossible for her mother to be planting rose cuttings in Tombstone that same year. And this opens up a whole new line of questions: Who was the originator of the rose? When was it planted? Is it older than we thought? Younger? How did the Gee's get thrown into the story? Is history always like a child's game of "Telephone," where the story at the end in no way matches the original version?
So, two decades from now, if you happen to be looking for me, maybe I'll be in Tombstone, sitting on a patio, staring out over thirty miles of cactus and creosote,scorpions and snakes, pondering the provenance of an Scottish rose and enjoying the contradictions.
So, two decades from now, if you happen to be looking for me, maybe I'll be in Tombstone, sitting on a patio, staring out over thirty miles of cactus and creosote,scorpions and snakes, pondering the provenance of an Scottish rose and enjoying the contradictions.
(c) 2009 Heather K Michon. All rights reserved.