Clara Spalding Brown: Tombstone Through a Woman's Eyes

By George Self and Claude, an AI assistant from Anthropic

A Reporter, Not a Diarist

Clara's husband, Theodore Brown, joined the rush of San Diegans who came to the new silver district in the spring of 1879. He worked as a teamster before he and two partners located a claim called the Saladin, a mile and a half southwest of Watervale, in June 1880. When the claim showed promise, he sent for his wife. Clara had already been supporting herself as a correspondent, filing dispatches to Boston papers about life in San Diego, so the move from housewife to working journalist in a mining camp was less of a leap for her than it might have been for most women of 1880.

She booked passage on a coastal steamer to Los Angeles, rode the Southern Pacific to a Tucson that struck her as "an odd city, more like an ancient Bible town than anything else," endured a rough night at the Palace Hotel, continued by rail to Pantano, and finished the last forty-eight miles into Tombstone by stage, through blinding dust and 110-degree heat at Yuma. She described the whole ordeal in vivid, wry detail in her very first letter home, and the tone she struck there, observant, a little amused at her own discomfort, never entirely serious, held for the next two and a half years.

Theodore settled her in a small cabin near Fourth and Bruce streets, on a lot obtained from the Tombstone Townsite Company, and went back to working the Saladin. Clara, childless and unwilling to confine herself to housework, did what she had already been doing in San Diego: she wrote. Her column, headed simply "Tombstone" and bylined "Clara S. Brown," ran in the San Diego Daily Union roughly every four to eight weeks between July 7, 1880, and November 14, 1882. She also wrote a longer, more technical piece for The Californian in July 1881, "An Arizona Mining District," a systematic tour of the district's mines, mills, water companies, and social character aimed at readers who had never heard of the place.

Editor Lynn R. Bailey, who compiled her letters into a 1998 book, drew the contrast with Tombstone's other famous diarist directly:

Her style is concise and vivid, like that of a trained journalist. Much different than the hard-to-read prose of her contemporary, up-tight George Parsons.

Lynn R. Bailey, editor's introduction, Tombstone from a Woman's Point of View (1998)

The difference matters for more than style. Parsons wrote for himself, a private outlet for a young banker's ambitions, grudges, and religious anxieties. Clara wrote for publication, for a general readership back in California who wanted to know what was actually happening in the silver camp everyone was talking about. She covered the same major events Parsons did, but she consistently noticed things he didn't: women's social conditions, dance-hall and dressmaking economics, boardinghouse life, amateur theater from a performer's perspective, and a correspondent's habitual attention to population counts, postal receipts, and business turnover.

What She Saw

Clara's dispatches put her at, or near, most of the events that made Tombstone's reputation. Her June 1881 letter, written the day after the Arcade Saloon fire tore through four blocks of the business district, reported her husband's employer, McKean & Knight, absorbing $25,000 in losses and rebuilding fireproof on credit from San Francisco backers, a decision that would matter to her personally within the year.

Three days after the gunfight near the O.K. Corral on October 26, 1881, Clara filed an account for readers who had no local stake in the fight and no reason to take sides. She described the "lightning-like rapidity" of the gunfire, the instant confusion in the street as neighbors shouted "The cowboys!" and "The Indians!" without knowing which, and the sudden public discovery that Tombstone had an organized Vigilance Committee capable of mobilizing on a whistle signal. She also described the funeral procession for Billy Clanton and the McLaury brothers, headed by the town band, as "the largest ever seen in Tombstone," carefully noting that the town's sympathies were divided and that, according to inquest testimony, only two of the four cowboys had actually been armed.

She tracked the Tombstone Townsite Company's fraudulent land scheme across several letters with open skepticism, reporting in August 1880 that the dispute was already provoking talk of "establishing a Vigilance Committee, and of hanging to the nearest telegraph pole whoever attempts to seize the homes of hardworking men," a vigilante threat that predates the Committee of Vigilance's better-known activity during the Earp-Cowboy feud by more than a year. When Morgan Earp was assassinated in March 1882, her letter home described Virgil and Allie Earp's departure for Colton, the makeup of the Earp party riding out after his killers, and a town split between residents who denounced the vendetta and those who thought it deserved.

That same season cost Clara personally. McKean & Knight, the firm whose fire losses she had reported the year before, collapsed in the spring of 1882 with her family's savings inside it. She and Theodore lost $950.85, one of twenty-four depositors wiped out by the failure. Her final letter from Tombstone, filed November 14, 1882, closed out her run with two more breaking stories: Joseph Zeigler's murder two weeks earlier, with the correction that suspect Ed Williams had just been captured at Benson, and the shooting of Billy Claiborne by Frank Leslie that same morning outside the Oriental Saloon. Then she said goodbye to the town in French: "Voilà! Voilà! There is more pleasure, for the most of people, in living in a very humble way in California than with all the accessories that wealth can command in Arizona."

Life Beyond the Notebook

Clara didn't just report on Tombstone's social life; she was part of it. She was a founding member of the Tombstone Dramatic Association and took a role in the three-act drama Lost in London, staged at Schieffelin Hall on November 8, 1881. The Daily Nugget's editor was impressed enough to write the next day that "Clara Brown was very acceptable, and for an amateur equalled some of the professionals who have visited this place." A few weeks earlier she had also taken on the secretaryship of a newly formed Tombstone Dramatic Relief Association, organized to put its proceeds toward public charity.

After Tombstone

Clara and Theodore left Tombstone in mid-November 1882, not for San Diego but for Los Angeles, where Theodore turned to farming. Her first letter from the new home captured the whiplash of the move: "Lovely Los Angeles! ... What more charming transition can be imagined than that remarkable one from the deserts of Arizona to the orange orchards and the vineyards of Southern California?"

Her writing career outlasted her Tombstone years by half a century. She published essay and travel pieces through the 1880s and 1890s, co-founded the Southern California Women's Press Club in 1894, and even tried her hand at fiction: a 1895 short story collection includes a chapter transparently set in a fictionalized Tombstone, a saloon morality tale built around a false report of an Apache ambush. In Los Angeles the couple bought farmland for $1,300 and sold it in 1887 for $15,000; Theodore then went prospecting in Baja California, where he died around 1890. In 1900 Clara remarried, to Edward Sylvester Ellis, a New Jersey widower and one of the era's most prolific dime novelists. Ellis had started out as a teacher and risen to superintendent of the Trenton, New Jersey public schools before turning to writing full time; his first notable book, Seth Jones, or The Captive of the Frontier (1860), sold roughly 600,000 copies, and he went on to write dozens more, under his own name and under pseudonyms including J. H. Randolph and Capt. "Bruin" Adams. Clara moved with him to New Jersey, where she kept writing for eastern magazines and newspapers for sixteen years. After Edward's death in 1916 she returned to Southern California, remaining active in the Women's Press Association and the Daughters of the American Revolution well into her seventies.

Death and Legacy

Clara Spalding Brown Ellis died July 25, 1935, in Los Angeles, at age eighty. Her seventeen Tombstone letters, along with "An Arizona Mining District," were largely forgotten until Lynn R. Bailey compiled and published them in 1998 as Tombstone from a Woman's Point of View. Historians researching the boom years now treat her dispatches, alongside Parsons' diary, as one of the handful of genuinely first-hand accounts of what Tombstone was actually like while it was happening, the only one written by a woman, for publication, in real time.

What she left behind isn't a different set of facts from Parsons' Tombstone so much as a different set of things worth noticing: who kept a boardinghouse running, what a dressmaker charged, how a town buried its dead after a gunfight everyone had opinions about, and what it felt like to lose your savings to a bank that had just rebuilt itself as fireproof. It's the Tombstone the postcards and the movies leave out, reported at the time by someone who was actually there to see it.