During the summer of 1880, John Plesent Gray, a recent graduate of the University of California, alighted from a train at Pantano, the end of the line of the Southern Pacific Railroad then under construction across southern Arizona Territory. There he boarded a Concord stage—“jammed like sardines on the hard seats”—for a dust-laden journey across the sweltering desert.



“I will always remember our thrilling entry into Tombstone about sundown. Our driver cracked his long whip over the six weary horses and forced them into a gallop up Allen Street. Then with a grand flourish, brought the coach to a stop in front of the Cosmopolitan Hotel….”



Established just nine months prior, Tombstone was a mining boom town. “All roads led to that Mecca—the promised land for the toiler, the down-and-outer, the confidence man and, last but not to be ignored, the gunman, who seemed to figure always in our frontier outposts.”



The gunmen referred to by Gray were the Earps, Doc Holliday, the Clantons and others made famous—or infamous—by events etched in Tombstone’s turbulent history. “When I heard the first sound of rapid firing, I knew the fight was on,” recalled Gray in a remarkable eyewitness account of the shootout near the OK Corral. “It was all over almost as soon as it began.”



Donated to the Arizona Historical Society in 1940, this valuable memoir remained unpublished until it came to the attention of historian W. Lane Rogers. “I read and re-read the manuscript and knew at once that it had to be a book,” said the editor. “I called my publisher immediately.”



When All Roads Led to Tombstone chronicles the mining and ranching industries, the military and the Apache wars, and outlawry in 1880s Cochise County—all from the keen eye of a critical observer. “The adventures of most of the trigger men, who attempt to live by their wits backed by quick shooting, are generally ended in a lonely mound on the prairie or as a number only, sewed on their shirts as their only identity at the penitentiary.”



Gray's penetrating observation of this wild and rugged place, its people and the towns they built is essential reading for those interested in the history of Arizona Territory and the latter days of the Westward Movement.