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Skin, Gristle & Bone: Forgotten Frontier Lives in the Shadow of Tombstone
Paperback
Biographies General19th Century United States History
Publisher: Rene Larro
Published: Apr 28 2026
Pages: 244
Weight: 0.73
Height: 0.51 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
In 1832, a twenty-one-year-old Irishman named Nicholas McCormick crossed the Atlantic in steerage, walked across the Canadian border into the United States at a crossing so casual no record of it exists, and arrived in Albany with nothing but a name and enough money for his next ticket.
Over the next half century, as America rapidly expanded, he became part of the wave of men who went west chasing gold, silver, and copper. He smelted lead in Wisconsin, was a commercial stage operator, raised a family and lost a child during his journey. After years in the Wisconsin mines and the gold camps of the Sierra Nevada, he finally made it to the Arizona Territory, just as the most famous town in the American West was being settled.His sons Patrick and Robert had fought through four years of the Civil War's bloodiest campaigns and followed him to Tombstone in 1878. Robert built a house three blocks from the Earps, and his eight-year-old daughter heard the gunshots from the O.K. Corral walking home from school. The mine claims the McCormick family built over two decades and sold for $350 eventually made other men rich.
Built on forty years of genealogical research by Michael Larro, Skin, Gristle & Bone follows the McCormick family from Ireland to the Arizona frontier, through the documentary record they left behind: census entries, mine deeds, a coroner's inquest, and newspaper clippings preserved by a woman who grew up in a house on Allen Street and could not have known she was saving the only copies that would survive.
None of them appear in any history of Tombstone ever written. Until now.
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