After The Boom In Tombstone And Jerome, Arizona: Decline In Western Resource Towns

8. The Painful Necessity of Closing the Church

Just before midnight on the evening of 11 May 1890 Tombstone’s police chief, Dick Gage, entered McDonough and Noble’s saloon and pool hall on Allen Street, walked to the back of the building, drew his pistol, and blew his own brains out. “The causes that led to this rash act are several,” the Tombstone Prospector informed its readers the next day, “although the immediate cause was his inability to meet a note of $100 due today.” Gage, age Wfty-nine, had informed a creditor earlier in the evening that he had eighty dollars of the amount, and would get the rest. The creditor told him to leave what he had at the billiard parlor and to forget the rest, but Gage promised to get it, proceeded to lose the eighty dollars at a faro table, and then killed himself. Gage had discussed his sagging fortunes with the Prospector’s editor a few days before and had indicated that his concern was not for himself, but for the well-being of his wife and Wve children.1 Certainly, suicide is the most dramatic display of personal distress imaginable, and others besides Chief Gage escaped from bust in that manner. Both the silent partner and the cashier of the failed Hudson andCompanyBankultimatelycommittedsuicide.Sometimestheemotional stress, economic dislocation, and uncertainties of bust could chapter eight The Painful Necessity of Closing the Church badly traumatize individuals, but it is important to look beyond these sensational cases to examine general indicators of social and psychological duress in busted communities. Such indicators might be less dramatic than individual episodes, but they may permit us to discover trends in the social relations of busttowns.2 The changes bust brought to these societies are frequently ambiguous . Several scholars have commented upon the caustic eVects bust inXicts upon the social health of communities through increased economic competition, malicious gossip, and damaged town pride. Sociologists have carried out most of the examinations of the inXuence of boom and bust on the social health and structure of communities. Their studies of modern boomtowns have concluded that boom brings increased social tensions, manifested by greater crime and violence, alcohol and drug abuse, number of divorces, and alienation.3 Sociologists have not devoted much attention to bust, per se, but their studies of mass unemployment have produced less consistent results than their observations about booms. They are generally agreed that the mass unemployment that accompanies the collapse of a town’s economy ought to produce insecurity, stress, and lowered self-esteem among those involved, leading to increased alienation, alcoholism, number of divorces, violence, and suicide rates. One informant, visiting the copper towns of southeast Arizona during a bust period in the 1980s, found “a pervasive tension that I had never witnessed in a community before. I was particularly struck by the pain in the eyes of middle-aged men as I caught them at home in the middle of the day watching game shows on television rather than at work.”4 But when they try to quantify the damage, these same researchers have often failed to discover obvious correlations. One team that studied plant closures and mental health believed unemployment to be “one of the major environmental sources of personal stress,” but also concluded “that none of [their research] groups was severely aVected by the closing, one or two years later. Indeed, psychopathological The Painful Necessity of Closing the Church 157 behavior was no more prevalent among individuals in our samples than one might expect among the general public.” Several researchers have noted an almost universal disregard of available mental health services by unemployed workers and have concluded that the stresses caused by unemployment can usually be managed without professional help. Although most of these sociological observations are drawn from the era of the modern welfare state, the historical evidence from Tombstone and Jerome shows similar ambiguities.5 Statistical records of social behaviors are neither abundant nor comprehensive for the bust periods of either Tombstone or Jerome, but existing evidence betrays no signiWcant discontinuities one could associate with bust. Suicide and homicide statistics would seem to be good barometers of stresses caused by bust, but these give mixed indications when viewed over an extended period rather than episodically . Several authors felt Tombstone’s legendary boomtown violence to be overestimated, but even if so, the number of murders seems to have dropped sharply after the bust. One author calculated a total...