We can’t go to the Old West. It’s lost to time. However, it’s not quite the distant memory its name suggests. A permanent place in pop culture and a physical, if sometimes decaying, presence in the southeastern USA mean that the Old West is still within the reach of modern pioneers.
Ironically, one of the youngest states—Arizona, admitted to the Union as the 48th state in 1912—is where you’ll find the ghosts of America’s expansion to the West.
Tombstone
Let’s find it first. Hollywood contributions such as the Kevin Costner-starring Yellowstone (2018), Magnificent Seven (2016), and Butcher’s Crossing (2022 – based on the John Williams novel) do a good job of keeping the Old West in the 21st century. In the gaming world, casino developer Playtech takes our entrance to the West one step further. The live casino gambling game Hi-Lo Western Live lets players take on a dealer in period-appropriate dress in a live lobby.
Media is as close as many of us will get to our cowboy/girl dreams but the state of Arizona claims some of the “wickedest” places in the West, to paraphrase the New York Times.
Towns like Tombstone, Bisbee, Douglas, and Jerome wear their frontier heritage on their storefronts. The former settlement, Tombstone, retains the “false front” architecture common to Spaghetti Western films. It’s not just tourist bait. Tombstone was the location of the 30-second Gunfight at the O.K. Corral in 1881.
Wickenburg
The official Arizona state website also recommends Wickenburg, a small town northwest of Phoenix. Wickenburg is a reminder of one of America’s earliest obsessions — gold and silver mining — having grown up around Vulture Mine. Prospectors pulled a reported 340,000 oz of gold from the Maricopa County hills here, as well as 260,000oz of silver. The plains around the Hassayampa River offered fertile land for ranchers, too.
It’s hard to talk about the past without mentioning its long-lost and forgotten things. Ghost towns are some of the United States’ most beloved fixtures.
Arizona lists many of the towns we’ve already mentioned, like Tombstone and Jerome, in this category even though they have permanent populations (Tombstone has a population of 1,312). This is largely due to the preservation efforts of the Bureau of Land Management.
“Living” West
The Bureau maintains the historic ghost towns of Swansea in La Paz county and Fairbank, described as “dead in the desert” by the Legends of America website. True ghost towns, spooky as they are, can be a little harder to find.
The Gibson Cooper Mine helped create Bellevue in Gila County in 1906 but the site was abandoned by 1927. The much older ghost town, Calabasas (1866-1913), remains as a series of walls in Santa Cruz.
For the “living” West, the state government provides the Arizona Heritage Center in Papago Park, Phoenix, and Tucson’s Arizona History Museum. Despite its name, Trail Dust Town, also in Tucson, exists as a time traveler’s route to the 1880s, with gold panning and Old West-themed saloons.
There’s plenty more to find out in the wilds of Arizona — just be wary of the sometimes inhospitable climate. The desert creates its own ghosts.
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