Tombstone Wild West Days

At eleven on the Saturday morning of Tombstone Wild West Days, the parade starts down Allen Street. Prizes go to entries that show red, white, and blue or pay particular tribute to the Marines and the Navy. After the parade, entertainment holds the street until two in the afternoon, and on Sunday it runs again from ten to two. Those are the hours on the town’s Discover Tombstone calendar. The organizers’ own Facebook listing gives ten to three on both days. The weekend comes each March under the full title “A Salute to the Men and Women of Armed Forces.” Its host is the Wild West Detachment No. 1152 of the Marine Corps League, whose members are Marines and Navy Corpsmen from Tombstone and beyond.

A rifle, a pistol, and a Sunday drawing

The detachment raises money over the weekend by raffling two firearms, an M1 Garand rifle and a Beretta 92 pistol. The event notice says the pair “represent generations of marines who stood the line in defense of freedom for many wars since 1941.” For the 2026 drawing, tickets were $5 apiece or five for $20, sold in town at Crazy Annie’s Saloon, Tombstone Harley Davidson, and Lilly’s Tombstone Memories. The drawing was set for Sunday, March 15, at 2:00 p.m., the hour the street entertainment closed.

The 2026 weekend and a replica Liberty Bell

The 2026 edition was billed as the eighteenth. It followed a seventeenth held March 15 and 16, 2025. An October 2025 notice in The Tombstone News gave the 2026 dates as March 14 and 15. The town calendar and the Facebook listing ran the weekend from March 13 through 15, with the Friday added. The theme was America’s 250th birthday, “with special attention to the service of troops: past and present!”

On the Friday, Tombstone was a host stop for The Road to 250: Arizona Traveling Museum, part of the America250AZ celebration. The exhibit carried Arizona’s replica Liberty Bell and interactive displays on the state’s past, present, and future. It was bound for the State Capitol by way of all 15 Arizona counties. The town calendar called the stop in “the Town Too Tough To Die” a fitting part of the anniversary.

Detachment 1152

The late Bill Pakinkis chartered the Wild West Detachment in 2003 under the Department of Arizona, Marine Corps League. The national organization was founded in 1923. Its congressional charter was signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on August 4, 1937, and the League counts Major General John A. Lejeune, the 13th Commandant of the Marine Corps, among its founding members. The Tombstone detachment meets on the second Sunday of each month at 1300 hours. Honorably discharged Marines, FMF Corpsmen, and Marine chaplains are welcome.

In October 2025 the detachment elected Wendy La Bute as Commandant, the first woman to hold the post in its history. Steve Miller was elected Senior Vice Commandant, Rick Levin Junior Vice Commandant, and Anthony Wierzbowski Judge Advocate. Between public events the members keep an Adopt-a-Highway stretch of State Route 80 near town, known to include the segment between mile markers 313 and 314. Over two decades they have collected hundreds of bags of trash there. They also turn out for Memorial Day and Veterans Day observances. Each December they hold a Christmas Ball. The tenth, on Saturday, December 12, 2026, is themed “Hometown Cowboy Christmas,” and its proceeds go to W.J. Meyer Elementary School for student essentials, the school pantry, and field trips.

Pie Allen’s street and the Schieffelin claim

The ball is held at Schieffelin Hall, which Al Schieffelin built and opened in June 1881. It served as a theater, a recital hall, and a meeting place for the town’s citizens, and it is considered the largest adobe structure standing in the Southwest. Wyatt and Morgan Earp were at a performance there when Morgan was shot dead by an assassin. Civic groups and the city government still use the building.

The parade route takes its name from John Brackett “Pie” Allen. He came to Arizona in 1857 looking for gold in Yuma and failed at it. In Tucson he sold dried apple pies to the rough characters of the town. With the proceeds he bought a ranch and alfalfa farm at Maricopa Wells and built a store in Tombstone. He later served as territorial treasurer and twice as mayor of Tucson. In 1899, dying of cancer, he was given a dinner by Tucson citizens and presented with his own tombstone, already engraved. By the Chamber of Commerce’s account, he received it well.

Allen Street burned twice in two years. On June 22, 1881, a fire reportedly started by a cigar igniting a whiskey barrel at the Arcade Saloon destroyed more than 60 downtown businesses. On May 26, 1882, a second fire began in the restroom of the Tivoli Saloon, on the south side of Allen between Fourth and Fifth. Its damages were estimated at $500,000. The town rebuilt both times. On October 1, 1962, the Department of the Interior designated the Tombstone Historic District a National Historic Landmark as “one of the best preserved specimens of the rugged frontier of the 1870s and ‘80s.”

The town’s name goes back to 1877 and Ed Schieffelin. He was staying at Camp Huachuca during a scouting campaign against the Chiricahua Apaches and kept leaving camp to look for rocks. Fellow soldiers warned him that out in that country he would find only his own tombstone. Instead he found silver and named his first mine The Tombstone. In 1879 the town site laid out near the mines, at a place then called Goose Flats, took the same name.