Tales of Old Tombstone

Tales of Old Tombstone pairs Bob Boze Bell, the longtime editor of True West magazine and a painter who has drawn Arizona frontier scenes for decades, with historian Stuart Rosebrook. The two of them sit down and talk about the town that refuses to die and the people who made it famous. Episodes go deep on the Earp brothers, Doc Holliday, the Clantons and McLaurys, Curly Bill, Johnny Ringo, and the local characters who never made it into the Kurt Russell movie. Because Bell has spent a lifetime in the subject and Rosebrook has written extensively about Western myth-making, the conversations move easily between what happened, what was reported at the time, what Hollywood invented later, and what the physical town still shows visitors today. You get the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, obviously, but you also get the Bird Cage Theatre, the mining economy, the Chinese community, the newspaper wars between the Epitaph and the Nugget, and the stagecoach routes that fed the boom. The tone is warm and a little gruff, two friends who know the material cold and enjoy arguing over small details. Good pick if you have read the books and want the commentary track.