THE CONSTELLATIONS ACCUMULATED AND LIKEWISE THE GHOSTS POINTED IN EVERY DIRECTION
by Nellie Papsdorf
Doc Holliday shows up to work in uniform smoking a cigarette and carrying a massive Polar Pop like a baby. Off to the side, one of the Clanton brothers vapes. The tell-tale rectangle of cell phones fray many a back pocket. Outlaws and lawmen alike mill about in the dusty street and invite people to the show.
Adults dress up in Tombstone, Arizona. The reenactors of course, and the families getting their photos taken at faux bars in sepia tone, but plain old tourists, too. All over Allen Street, the heart of the town’s historic district, old men fan themselves with the rims of their cowboy hats. Teenagers play at Val Kilmer and Kurt Russell in long wool jackets and skinny mustaches. Even the horses, clomping up and down the street with their stagecoaches and dressings, seem to be in costume.
In the Tombstone of 2025 circa 1881, a white man can be a lawman, or a cowboy, or a rancher, or a miner, or a gambler, or a saloon owner, or an outlaw, or a hotelier. At my own old timey photo shoot, the guy asks what I wanna be. There were only two options: a saloon girl or a lady.
The options dwindle even further for the nonwhite visitor. Chinese women in the late 1800s of the American west sometimes didn’t even get to use their own names–“China Mary” was a popular nickname given to them by American men too lazy and ignorant to learn the real thing. What reference I could find to Native Americans in Tombstone’s tourist attractions was most often a throwaway reference to raiders and marauders, or worse, or nothing.
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Tombstone is becoming a Disneyland, complained Sally Alves, owner of Curly Bill’s Bed & Breakfast, back in 2005.
The town was at risk of losing its status as a National Historic Landmark after repeated and continuous instances of disregard for historical authenticity. “Newer buildings bear false dates from the 1870s to 1880s,” an article explains. “Storefronts are painted colors like chartreuse–not found in Tombstone 125 years ago.”
Just a few blocks from the OK Corral, where Doc Holliday and the rest perform the famous eponymous gunfight three times a day, a residential trailer is decorated with a Jolly Roger and a massive Confederate flag.
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The site of the gunfight at the O. K. Corral, Tombstone, Arizona
As early as 1929, the same year the OK Corral shootout’s famous hero Wyatt Earp died in Los Angeles, Tombstone was self-mythologizing. “A true to life reproduction of Tombstone’s Rip Roaring Days,” says a flyer from 1930, advertising the town’s second annual “Helldorado” festival.
These annual celebrations kicked off the same year the county seat was moved to nearby Bisbee, the town’s last heart line after the closure of the local mines led to decades of decline. When there’s nothing in the future, what else can you do but look back?
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Admission to the OK Corral gunfight grants you access to next door’s Tombstone Historama, a moving diorama narrated by horror legend Vincent Price in 1963. In a small theater, Price highlights major events from Tombstone’s past in his syrupy baritone as a diorama the size of a small room and reminiscent of a middle school history project slowly swivels. Between Price’s famous affect, the dimmed lights for showtime, and the rickety, worn-out look of the automated mules and watermills, the room wouldn’t be out of place in a scary movie. Like its namesake, the Tombstone Historama participates in its own ghostly spectacle.
Almost perhaps by a predestined miracle, Tombstone lives, Price proclaims at the end of the 25-minute show. A town which is truly a museum. A museum which has remained a vibrant, high-spirited town. And now, as you roam these ageless streets, side by side with the ghosts of Wyatt Earp, Ed Schieffelin, Doc Holliday, Nellie Cashman, Curly Bill, Billy Clanton, and hordes of others, good and bad, and sometimes a mixture of both, you too now know why Tombstone will always be the town too tough to die.
A dead town that’s kept alive by the fact that it’s dead, or undead, a ghost town walking around in circles, singing the same old song over and over again in front of false houses, named after a grave.
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The Latin root spect (to look, to see, to watch) and all its descendants have been tickling me lately. I’ve been long working on a poetry project that wrestles with lots of them: spectacles, specters, spectrums. Once you put your mind to it, you kind of see them everywhere. Inspections. Suspects. Aspects. And on and on.
Inspired by this longtime preoccupation, I’m reading Ian Baucom’s Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History even though I’m meant to be digging into the borderlands instead. The book focuses not on the American southwest but on the story of the British slave ship Zong and a massacre in which 142 enslaved men, women, and children were thrown overboard for insurance money in 1781. Baucom argues that these murders, the subsequent trial that ultimately awarded Zong’s owners insurance money for all those killed by their employees, and the way that the tragedy was understood and processed after inform not only our understanding of the Atlantic slave trade but of modernity more generally and particularly the impacts of speculation and capital.
While the case was used by abolitionists to advocate for the end of slavery and has been memorialized in famous works such as J. M. W. Turner’s painting The Slave Ship and M. NourbeSe Philip’s book of poetry Zong!, it has been largely lost to mainstream history. But Baucom argues its influence persists nonetheless–in the way we think and talk about value and historical narrative, how we grapple with memory.
City marker leftovers in Douglas, Arizona
Put another way, our systems, societies, relationships, the means by which we understand the world—they are all haunted, whether we recognize it or not. “For no matter how strenuously we might forget what was begun, or wish to call an end to it, what-has-been is, cannot be undone, cannot cease to alter all the future-presents that flow out of it,” Baucom writes. “Time does not pass or progress, it accumulates, even in the work of forgetting or ending, even in the immense labor it takes to surrender what-has-been, or to make reparation on it, or to address its ill effects.”
But it’s hard–it is hard. To step back from the zoetrope. To look at history not like a movie or a photograph or a record, but as a pile.
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In Bisbee, 20 minutes from Tombstone, we put on costumes of another kind. With fluorescent vests and lamps around our necks and hard hats on our heads we ride a trolley into the Copper Queen Mine. The mine, one of dozens of copper mining operations developed in Arizona starting in the late 1800s, closed down in 1975. Like their neighbor Tombstone, Bisbee pivoted to narrativizing its most prominent feature rather quickly. By early 1976, the Copper Queen, on lease from the mining company, was open to the public and running its first tours.
Depending on your direction, your first or last encounter with the town of Bisbee is a massive, dusty red hole, the leftovers of an open pit mine owned by the same company. The many-leveled rupture in the earth covers 300 acres, reaches 900 feet into the earth, and calls to mind other planets or the post-nuclear war landscapes of apocalypse movies.
The so-called Lavender Pit is the most visual of the mining industry’s many impacts–the local high school, library, museum, and more were all built by the company and its money. Over the course of a hundred years, more than 8 billion pounds of copper was pulled from the Bisbee mines.
The first mining claim in the area was declared in 1877. In 1885, the operation was bought by Phelps Dodge, an import-export firm founded in 1834 that turned to mining as the United States expanded west in the second half of the 1800s.
Before becoming one of the largest mining companies in the country, Phelps Dodge made its fortune as a corporation importing metals to the United States and exporting cotton from the Deep South to England.
Time (and money) doesn’t progress–it accumulates.
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At the Copper Queen, a trolley takes us 1500 feet into the rock. A measly depth considering the area’s mines include 2,500 miles of tunnels (or 13,200,000 feet.)
Once underground, our tour guide directs our attention with a flashlight and details the history of the mine, the logistics of the operation, the different techniques and tools used to carry deposits out of the earth and mill them into something usable. He’s young, specific, and has a habit of ending his sentences with right there.
They were looking at a 23-percent superrich copper ore motherload right there. They implanted dynamite in a timed spiral right there.
He’s telling us about the mules that lived and worked underground so long their eyesight degenerated when he makes his one and only reference to unions. It’s a joke that gets some laughs from the tour group–bet these mules were wishing they had a mule union right there.
Warning sign in Bisbee, Arizona
Later, once we’re back above ground returning our outfits, I ask him about the labor strike and the resulting forced deportation of striking miners to New Mexico in 1917.
Oh yeah, that did happen, he says. I don’t mention it on the tour ‘cause it’s pretty complicated. He looks a little uncomfortable. That’s some dark stuff right there. But I will say that the company learned its lesson. Things got better after that.
My friends and I talk about that description on the walk to the sandwich shop for lunch and a long time after. I’m a little riled up. I’m the kid in the haunted house, gesturing to creaky closets and secret basements, showing my frustrated disbelief with my face, desperately pulling at nearby hands.
Most days, I like the stickiness of confusion–its blurred edges and its stretchy potential. But sometimes it makes me feel crazy. Did you hear that?
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The funny thing about taking on the reckless and sometimes charming appeal of anachronism and the tidy commercialism of American public history is that I find myself risking the same simplification of the present. Oh, we lost figures in the post history information overload fake news disasterland, forever replaying these disintegrated and degrading tapes. What silly creatures we are, playing with stereotypes like dolls.
Is this not another illusion? Another kind of high-stakes misdirection, masquerading as play? Another way of pretending it’s possible to look at things from an uncomplicated distance?
So often, about so many things, I feel like that kid in a horror movie, eyes sunken and circled in dark purple, whirling around, asking if anybody else saw the light flicker, the shadow move in the corner. Once again somebody’s saying the room is clean, but I’m looking around and the piles are everywhere, trying to speak. Right there, and there, and there–
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In 1917, World War I raged and the International Workers of the World (IWW) organized labor unions across America. Because of the war effort, mining was not only patriotic–it was lucrative. The Copper Queen Mine and others like it were pulling in record profits. At the same time, union membership was booming. The IWW saw its peak membership that year at an estimated 150,000 members.
While the copper mining industry created a gold mine for some, most were excluded from these massive gains, and some more than others. According to historian Katherine Benton-Cohen, local laws banned Chinese immigrants and barred Mexican workers from higher paid positions. Miners of all kinds suffered from dangerous conditions and managerial abuse.
Mobilized by the IWW, the miners sent a list of demands to Phelps Dodge that included safer working conditions, better pay, and an end to the discrimination between workers. Attributing the organizing effort with communist and anti-war sympathies, Phelps Dodge refused all demands.
When a strike was called in response to the denial, corporate leadership conspired with Sheriff Harry Wheeler to end the strike by force. In the early morning of July 12, Sheriff Wheeler deputized 1200 local men and shut down communications with the outside world. Tracking down a list of strikers, armed men scoured the town, rounding up miners and their supporters alike, many from their homes and beds.
Ultimately, an estimated 1200 strikers and alleged sympathizers were herded into cattle cars owned by the company. The train took the men nearly 200 miles and left them in a long stretch of empty desert near Hermanas, New Mexico, threatening them with physical violence if they tried to reenter Bisbee. Sentinels set up by Sheriff Wheeler at the city’s borders controlled access for months after.
Approximately 80% of the deportees were immigrants from at least 34 countries, mostly Mexican or Slavic. Most never returned.
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Later, there were several trials. President Wilson’s Mediation Commission, created in 1917 to respond to a proliferation of labor disputes across the country, found that the deportation was “wholly illegal and without authority in law, either state or federal,” and the U.S. Department of Justice ordered 21 men, including Phelps Dodge leadership and local law enforcement, arrested. But a resulting Supreme Court case, 1920’s United States v. Wheeler, determined that no federal laws applied–it was up to the states to prosecute individuals for wrongful interference with the right to travel. And, despite the governor’s condemnation of the deportations, the state of Arizona declined.
There were some civil suits settled with Phelps Dodge out of court. Only one suit brought by deportees against individual deputies went to trial. The verdict was not guilty.
What lessons were learned? I should have asked.
To be fair, the strike and the illegal deportation are mentioned on some small signs in the lobby of the Copper Queen mine tour, though I didn’t notice many people reading as we waited for our groups to be called. And there’s only so much you can fit on two notecards.
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Years before moving to Tucson, I got a tattoo to commemorate a cross-country road trip and a few private lessons and my own fondness for Americana’s kitsch. A saguaro grows along a swiveling desert road while some prickly pear leans in close to the viewer. In the suggested distance, tiny rock formations mimic Monument Valley, a place too far north for the Sonoran saguaro to grow.
Nice tattoo, people say. Are you from Arizona? And sometimes I say I was born here but didn’t stay long, and sometimes I tell them I got the tattoo before I moved back, and a lot of the time I say, thanks.
I’m a little embarrassed of the tattoo these days. Different eras of my life deformed and polished in strides by my remembering and arranging, getting their revenge, teasing me, revisited over and over again in awkward conversation. But that’s what it’s like to be haunted–to feel the imprint of past decisions and be reminded of their influence, all within the twisted convex of the mess created in the past-present, and if you’re lucky, if you survive it soul intact, to be forever changed but maybe learn something new.
According to our guide, those non-union mules were retired once they couldn’t keep up with the work. Back in the sun after years of darkness, they had to be exposed to the light gradually. They were outfitted with sunglasses, special pairs with tiny holes, bigger and bigger until they could handle being exposed to the world again normally.
Specters get stuck in certain tunnels. What are they really getting at, in their ceaseless repeating? There’s some truth in the overworked signifiers of my silly tattoo.
A pinch in the dark can once in a while lead to a new world. Sometimes a pinprick grows.
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With that we’ve arrived at the last stop of our ghost tour: the Mariposa Land Port of Entry, built in 1976 to accommodate increasing commercial traffic and one of the busiest land crossings in the United States.
The first usages of border in English go back to Middle English’s bordure, when it referred to decorative bands on shields, textiles, art. Time does not pass, it accumulates, and sometimes the accumulation tricks you into thinking the mess’s been there forever.
Many say that the high walls, metallic structures, and barbed wire that straddle Nogales, Arizona and Nogales, Sonora remind them of the hallways that lead cattle to slaughter. It makes a sad sort of sense physically and metaphorically but to me, with its corrugated metal and utilitarian architecture and intentional landscaping, it looks like the MSA Annex in Tucson, an open-air market made of shipping containers where you can order $17 ramen and drink elderberry cocktails and shop for local boutique souvenirs. Apart from the barbed wire and armed guards, the Mariposa crossing simulates the design of pseudo industrial coffee shops in gentrified cities across America.
“Contrary to Donald Trump’s claims, the U.S. government isn’t neglecting its borders,” an article declared shortly before the 2016 election. “It’s just the opposite: The U.S. is investing in them heavily, replacing border stations that used to be little more than shacks with facilities that are modern, secure, and welcoming.”
Inocencia en la frontera painted by Ruben Daniels, Nogales, Sonora
In this vein, the renovated Mariposa Land Port of Entry, designed by Phoenix-based Jones Studio and built in 2014, won a General Service Administration Design award for its efforts. On the Jones Studio website for the project, the page announces, “MARIPOSA LAND PORT OF ENTRY / the border does not separate, it connects.” The line comes from Alberto Ríos, Arizona’s inaugural poet laureate, and a poem of his that decorates one wall.
From the Jones website, “Materials like concrete, steel, and glass reflect the ruggedness of the desert terrain that connects the borderland. A pattern of footprints are cast in the exposed face of the insulated concrete walls, alluding to the journey that many migrants take across the border each day.” Two pairs of footprints loop around each other, one set larger than the other, calling to mind a parent and child. Or a child migrant and an adult in pursuit.
“Leaving the pedestrian processing area, the inverted topography of the Baboquivari Mountain range hangs above those entering into the U.S., marked by a trail indicating the once treacherous passage of people across the landscape.”
I think of the bit by comedian Mitch Hedberg: I used to drugs. I still do, but I used to, too.
The passage of people across the landscape was once treacherous. It still is, but it once was, too.
Spearheaded by 1994’s “Prevention Through Deterrence” immigration enforcement policy, increasing militancy of the American border and its ever-growing walls forces migrants further and further into treacherous and remote terrain. Humane Borders recorded 4,288 migrant deaths along the Arizona border from 1981-2023, making it one of the world’s most dangerous border crossings. As of September 2025, bodies have been retrieved as recently as August 26.
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The Jones Studio website concludes its overview of the project with this: “visitors are left with the lasting impression of a humane welcome to the United States.”
In January of this year, the US government announced people could no longer apply for asylum at the border. Trump has announced that the southwest border will become a military base, making for easier and faster arrests of migrants and bypassing the Posse Comitatus Act, which has historically kept the army (mostly) out of civilian affairs.
And at the border there’s a poem. And some sculptures and some footprints. A living place is turned into a story. A border turned into a museum.
Graffiti on the Mexican side of the US-Mexico border, Nogales, Sonora
On the Mexico side, if you take a right as you exit the pedestrian crossing, you’ll find other kinds of art. Plenty of graffiti (chinga la migra, no más frontera), colorful installations such as Paseo de la Humanidad, and a painting of José Rodríguez, a 16-year-old shot and killed by U.S. Border Patrol agent Lonnie Swartz in 2012. Swartz was tried for murder and acquitted. The defense team alleged Rodríguez was throwing rocks from the Mexico side. The wall there is 18-24 feet tall.
Time does not pass, it accumulates. It’s bad now and it was bad before, too.
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These time capsules: the old streets of Tombstone and the shutdown mines of Bisbee and the decorated walls of the modern American border, they attract our attention. It’s easy to mistake lineation for clarity–borders make things stand out.
But it’s risky, I think, to look at such snapshots for too long. It’s easy to stagnate, like looking at the desert and mistaking dry for dead. To think this thing has only been two: it’s once-upon and it’s end (now.) A now that’s been going on for a while. A long, dead now, where things are over and nothing’s new. Where everything is as it will be.
What leeway do we have in places like this? Everything that has and will happen performed for us forever after, easy and designed?
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The reality is, Tombstone’s not dead, except for its most famous and smudged part, the ghost of its former self that’s taken on six square blocks and the entirety of its public image. The Bisbee mines are not abandoned relics–while closed, they’re still owned by Freeport-McMoRan, the world’s largest copper mining company, which acquired Phelps Dodge in 2017. Freeport to this day runs massive mining operations in Indonesia, Peru, and Morenci, Arizona.
Outside of Patagonia and outside of Tucson, new mines are proposed, already being built, betting on their ability to financially and politically outlast the backlash they face including legal appeals due to environmental concerns. The awful metal arm of the border grows, is called beautiful. Kills humans and animals and the environment but the possibility for something else is alive. People leave water in the desert. Migrants keep walking.
At the edge of the Lavender Pit, a sign provides a timeline of copper. In the bottom corner, a box considers the possibility of mining’s return to the area: “Goodbye – and welcome back?”
I walk around and bump into things. Goodbye, the ghosts say. And welcome back.
We don’t live at the end of history, as much as it feels like it in this age of homogenizing globalization and convenience technology and the rate of media and that every thrum of progression, whispering, just a little bit longer, I promise, then we’ll all be clean in utopia.
Despite all our historical markers and lines in the sand, accumulation grows. And the ghosts hidden in the piles cast their shadows, beseeching.