Big Nose Kate's Saloon

The long bar at Big Nose Kate's is the real thing — pulled from the Grand Hotel after it burned on May 25, 1882, leaving only seven arches and the bar itself standing. The Grand Hotel had opened less than two years earlier, September 9, 1880, one of the finest in the territory: sixteen walnut-furnished rooms, three chandeliers in the lobby, a kitchen built to serve five hundred. Wyatt and Virgil Earp stayed there. So did Doc Holliday and the Clantons. Then the fire took it.

The saloon trades on the Holliday connection — it's named for his common-law wife, Mary Katherine Horony, a Hungarian immigrant who ran away from foster care in Iowa at sixteen, worked as a prostitute because it gave her independence, and met Holliday in 1877 at a card table in Fort Griffin, Texas. She broke him out of a hotel room in that same town after he killed a man in self-defense, setting a shed on fire to pull the lynch mob away from the door. They fought constantly — once she signed an affidavit implicating him in a stagecoach robbery, then recanted when he was released. She outlived him by fifty-three years, died in 1940 at the Arizona Pioneers' Home in Prescott.

The basement, they say, was Tombstone's morgue after the hotel burned. Local tradition holds that the Grand Hotel's janitor — the Swamper — dug a tunnel from his basement room into the silver mines beneath Allen Street and worked the seam ounce by ounce. The mine entrance is still visible down there. Staff report a presence on the stairs and in the halls, said to be the Swamper guarding what he never spent. The basement is the epicenter; the folklore is strong and specific and still alive.