Cowboy Bunkhouse

This stop on the guide map is the cowboy bunkhouse. Someone had to stay with the horses after the customers went back to Allen Street. The caretaker lived in this bunkhouse so he could keep an eye on them.

The O.K. Corral, Livery and Feed Stable opened in February 1879, when Tombstone was still a tent city of about 500 people. The partners were John Montgomery, called “Honest John,” and Edward Monroe Benson. A corral in that town did the work of a parking garage and a rental barn. A customer could leave a horse or a buggy while doing business in town, or rent a horse, a fancy buggy, or a work wagon. By 1880, eight men lived on these grounds helping to run the corral. The bunkhouse put the caretaker where the stock could be watched.

The original corral was built of adobe, sun-dried mud blocks. Next to the bunkhouse were the freight office and a tack and harness repair shop. Those rooms, and the men who slept on the property, were the ordinary work of a livery: feed, harness, and a night watch.

The exhibit in the bunkhouse is cowboy gear from that work, and a fancy 1880s Phaeton. A Phaeton is a light, open, four-wheeled carriage. Other buggies and wagons from the 1880s are shown with the stables. The bunkhouse is the living quarters that belonged with that yard.

On the way into this part of the grounds is an 1879 Cunningham hearse of the type that carried Billy Clanton and the McLaury brothers to Boothill. The corral owned one of Tombstone’s finest hearses and kept it ready to go. Undertaker Ritter advertised that a body could be left at the corral at night, when the funeral parlor was closed. Camillus Fly photographed the three dead cowboys in their coffins in front of Ritter’s parlor.

On October 26, 1881, this corral was one of seven liveries in Tombstone. The gunfight that afternoon did not happen in the bunkhouse, or inside the corral. It happened in a vacant lot beside C.S. Fly’s boarding house, on the Fremont Street side of the property. The corral’s alley ran through from Allen Street to Fremont Street, and the cowboys who fought that day used the alley to reach the lot. The men who lived on the corral grounds were here to tend horses.

The corral was destroyed in the Tombstone fire of May 25, 1882, along with much of the town’s western business district. Montgomery rebuilt it. That same year Benson sold his interest to Montgomery, who kept the business until his death in 1917. The bunkhouse exhibit is the museum’s picture of the men who slept on the property: cowboy equipment, and the Phaeton, where the caretaker watched the horses.

This stop is marked on the O.K. Corral Guide Map. The other stops are listed on the Exhibits page.