Tourism keeps alive The Town Too Tough to Die.

(Tombstone, Ariz.) Many Arizonans think of Tombstone as too touristy. They wouldn’t be caught dead here. But plenty of life still clings to this collection of one and two-story structures spread out on a little grid of wide streets in southern Arizona.

And why not? It’s got a killer name; that alone draws curiosity seekers. And for a recession-era destination, it’s great: there’s no admission fee to enter the town. Families enjoying a stay-cation don’t mind driving a couple of hours to get here from Phoenix or Tucson.

A parade on Allen Street circa 1881, on the same main drag as shown above.
(Photo: Kansas State Historical Society/W.B. Shillingberg)

Tombstone has had a turbulent past. There’s plenty of historical lore for anyone who is interested; all of it started with the discovery of silver in 1877.

The town was supposed to die in 1881, when the gunfight at the O.K. Corral exposed the dangerous feuds between the roving “cowboy” gangs from the south, and the immigrants and investors from the north.

Character players in 2009 look tough enough for the Tombstone of 130 years ago.

The town was again supposed to die in 1882, after fires pretty much destroyed the place.

Again, the town was supposed to die in 1885, when the mines had been emptied of silver and flooded with water. That helped deflate the population from more than 10,000 in 1882 to only 700 people in 1900.

The town sells not just stage coach rides, but bonnets, too.

It didn’t take long for locals to realize that tourism would help Tombstone stay alive. Buildings that were burned were rebuilt. The notorious gunfight at the O.K. Corral is still endlessly dissected; daily reenactments have been held for visitors’ pleasure for decades, at least since the annual “Helldorado Days” festival, held since 1929.

These reenactments employ varying numbers of actors, who find work with competing repertory companies. Barkers drum up business for stagecoach and mine tours. They hand out coupons, alert customers of coming “gun-fights,” and promise cold beers and sarsaparillas inside the saloons.

Barkers know how to lure in customers.

Of the 1,700 or so year-round residents, some of the rest are service professionals, or they work for the city or mom-and-pop establishments. There are no national chains here.

This past January, former First Lady Laura Bush announced Tombstone had been designated a “Preserve America Community.” Tourists don’t seem to mind that the town isn’t as authentically preserved as it could be, and that stucco and tile have been mixed in with the wooden storefronts.

Richard, 85, said keeping up his long acting career beats being in a rest home.

During the day, saloons, restaurants and shops are swarming; Tombstone’s official web site claims 400,000 tourists come each year. After sundown, the locals take over the establishments. It creates an unusual community.

A few months ago, Leah, a local server at the Six Gun City Restaurant, suffered a heart attack during her shift. She isn’t yet 30, but was in dire straits when no ambulance was available. An actor’s wife later said Tombstone officials had sold it to the nearby city of Bisbee. (Leah, she said, was airlifted to Tucson and received a pacemaker.)

Leah prepped for the Saturday night crowd at the Six Gun City Restaurant.

Daniel Raphael lives in Tucson and moonlights in Tombstone on weekends. He sized up Tombstone politics as “crazy.” He pointed out two blocks of the main drag, Allen Street, where the pavement was deliberately strewn with grit and sawdust.

“Some folks like having ‘authentic’ dirt streets,” he noted. “But bikers complain because it stops them from parking their hogs in front of the saloons.”

Reenactment player Daniel Raphael said competition among troupes is contentious.

As a consequence, he explained, “That means less business. So the mayor wants to paint the streets a dirt color.”

Anita Turner of the Tombstone Chamber of Commerce claims that tourism is up in 2009—there are about 500 visitors per month more than the average of the past two years. Her analysis explaining the positive trend?

“More advertising,” she said, “and several of the cable channels ran Tombstone again.”

One of the world's famous cemetaries: Tombstone's Boothill.

Tombstone’s official web site.

Jain Lemos is an established photography and publishing consultant.

New Orleans celebrates three kinds of events.

The first are mystical insider rituals, many rooted in the Catholic tradition of this former French colony, such as St. Joseph’s night or All Saints Day.

The second type follows the sports seasons; the home opener of the NFL’s New Orleans Saints is circled on calendars from Uptown New Orleans to the Jefferson Parish suburbs.

Finally, there are the huge spectacles that draw tourists by the thousands, the blow-out events like the Mardi Gras Carnival and Jazz Fest.

Hurricane Katrina hit nearly four years ago, adding anxious poignancy to each of these traditions: Would the local customs survive? Would visitors return? The tonnage of debris from Mardi Gras has even been weighed and measured as an indicator of the city’s resurrection.

Locals have their own benchmarks. The re-opening of a favorite restaurant. The return of a neighborhood second-line parade. The cursed futility of the Saints.

This year’s Carnival pulled off another small but important milestone toward recovery. For the first time since the storm, the parade offered a full contingent of flambeaux carriers.

These torch-bearers of the city’s nighttime Carnival parades were almost non-existent since Katrina—until now. This past Carnival, residents cheered the rugged men who carry the traditional flaming torches to light the nine February parades that precede the Lenten season.

The tradition goes back to the pre-Civil War era, when many of the flambeaux carriers were slaves of wealthy parade organizers. The earliest torches were fueled by oil dripping from cans affixed to wooden poles. Walking with a stick of dripping fire for a six-mile parade route was sweaty, soot-covered and often dangerous work.

Today, the parade routes are even longer and the large wooden contraptions are just as heavy. Kerosene has replaced lantern oil, but any experienced flambeaux carrier can display burn marks to attest to the risks. But that’s part of the tradition. Most of the flambeaux men are poor African-Americans who are blue-collar laborers by day, and the prospect of scooping up more than $100 in change tossed by parade spectators is worth the work.

It’s certainly not the money, though, that fuels the tradition. Deep inside, a flambeaux carrier is really a showman, and the best of them make a dance of it: dipping and twirling their fire sticks as they march and step alongside massive paper-mâché floats, sustained by the roar of the bead-hungry crowd and the marching band just up ahead.

These are portraits of some of this year’s New Orleans’ flambeaux carriers. Some are regulars who learned the tradition from a father or uncle. Others are some of the characters that decide to give flambeaux a try, some maybe just once, lighting one of New Orleans’ famed parades with kerosene lanterns shining against aluminum sheet metal, just as it was done more than 150 years ago.

But whether they’re first-timers or the original pre-Katrina old guard, the important thing is: they’re back.

Michael Perlstein covered crime in New Orleans for 20 years for the New Orleans Times-Picayune before earning two Pulitzer Prizes for his coverage of Hurricane Katrina.

All photos: Michael Perlstein.