Tag: wild west

Tombstone, Arizona   is most famous for being the scene of the gunfight at the OK Corral in which Wyatt Earp , his brothers and Doc Holliday tried to run ‘The Cowboys’ our of town, but there are several threads of history running through the town, from the silver rush which bought everybody to the town, to the gunfight, to the creation of the courthouse where several men were hanged at the gallows.

We only had a couple of hours in Tombstone today but it’s impressively preserved and we had time to tour the town, visit the courthouse museum and see a slightly strange re-enactment of the gunfight just yards from the scene of the original gunfight (strange because the original gunfight lasted only 24 seconds and they managed to stretch the show to about half an hour).

We’ve just arrived in Roswell. Haven’t seen any aliens yet but we’ll see if we can find any tomorrow morning.

 

 

 

Thanks to our quick sprint from Chicago we had an extra day in Cody, Wyoming today, named after William Frederick “Buffalo Bill” Cody . We’re in the heart of cowboy country and today couldn’t have been more “yeee-haawww” if we’d tried.

We started out at the Old Trail Town , a re-creation frontier town in Cody which has been recreated from historic buildings and artifacts, dismantled, transported from their original locations and painstakingly rebuilt here. Really impressive.

Next we moved onto the Buffalo Bill Historic Centre which was a huge museum (actually 5 museums in 1), considering the small town it’s in. We had time to check out the Buffalo Bill exhibition and the Yellowstone exhibition. Unfortunately we didn’t have time to see the American Indian, Western Art or “Firearms” exhibitions because we had to get to dinner.

For dinner we’d checked ourselves into a “Chuck Wagon” dinner with a live show . A “Chuck Wagon” dinner seems to be another excuse for Americans to serve you as much meat as you can possibly eat, basically a self-service, all you can eat indoor barbecue where you can “add steak for $6” (classy!) We were treated to an hour of country and western music while we duly ate as much as we could.

The day finished with at the Cody Nite Rodeo . I wasn’t sure what exactly to expect but it was great. There were some genuinely impressive moments, including some scary looking bull riding, cattle roping and some incredible gymnastics (they may look like they’re falling off in the photos but they’re not).

Tomorrow we continue to Yellowstone.