Insider American

At 4:00 AM on July 12, 1917, approximately 2,000 armed men fanned out through the residential neighborhoods of Bisbee, Arizona, and the nearby suburb of Warren. They carried rifles and shotguns. They wore white armbands for identification. They had deputization papers signed by Cochise County Sheriff Harry Wheeler. And over the next several hours, they systematically rounded up 1,286...

In 1877, a cavalry scout named Jack Dunn was chasing Apache raiders through the Mule Mountains of southeastern Arizona Territory when he noticed something glinting in the rock. He reported the discovery to his commanding officer, whose contact list happened to include a San Francisco attorney named DeWitt Bisbee. Within months, the land was claimed, a company formed, and...

Arizona has more ghost towns per square mile than almost any state in the American West. The combination of mineral wealth, remote terrain, boom-bust mining economics, and a late-19th-century settlement rush created hundreds of communities that flourished briefly and then emptied with almost equal speed when the ore ran out, the railroad bypassed them, or the water supply failed. What...

Tombstone, Arizona has a marketing problem that is also, in a backwards way, its greatest asset. Every visitor arrives knowing at least one thing: the gunfight at the OK Corral, October 26, 1881, 30 seconds of violence that produced three dead cowboys and the most documented gunfight in American frontier history. That singular event, endlessly retold in film, television, and...

Southern Arizona gets flattened by its own famous landmarks. The Grand Canyon is five hours north. Sedona gets its own category. Tucson is the major city. Tombstone earns its famous name. Everything in between, the wine country, the sky island mountain ranges, the birding preserves, the border towns with extraordinary history, the art colonies older than Scottsdale's gallery district,...