Life, 1928-03-22 · page 24 of 34
Life — March 22, 1928 — page 24: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This is a humorous tall tale by Garrett Price satirizing the American Old West's lawless reputation. The poem describes Tombstone, Arizona before "Sheriff Brown" arrived—presenting an exaggerated, anarchic frontier town where criminality is institutionalized: horse thieves serve as police, bank robbers as judges, the courthouse functions as a gambling den. The satire works through absurdist escalation: children learn to shoot before walking, the wind is so violent it strips animals of their hides, even rain becomes cartoonishly oversized. The accompanying illustrations show chaotic scenes matching these descriptions—gunfights, gambling, mayhem. The joke targets both romanticized Wild West mythology and actual historical disorder in frontier towns. By making lawlessness comically extreme and complete, Price mocks both the real violence and popular fictional glamorization of that era. The poem implies that only external authority ("Sheriff Brown") could impose civilization on such chaos.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
960 Tombstone Town HIS is the story of Tombstone Town Before the comin’ of Sheriff Brown. A grizzly-batin’, order-hatin’, sizzlin’ hell-hole it; The powder-spittin'est, God-fergittin’est place you ever hit. In Tombstone a man wouldn’t trust his mother, Thieves were so thick they robbed each other, Human life wasn’t worth a dime. Riot was lawful and peace was crime, A man could be shot for combing his hair. Horse thieves outnumbered the horses there. They made a horse thief Chief of Police; They elected a bank robber Justice-of-Peace. y) They used the Courthouse to gamble in; It was down with law and up with sin. The Post Office didn’t last overnight, For no one in Tombstone could read or write. The schoolteacher left town on the run, When he learned every schoolboy toted a gun. Babies could chew before they could talk; They knew how to shoot before they could walt The weather here was just like the town: The wind was so strong it blew mountains down. It blew the hair off all the dogs; It blew the hams right off the hogs. Raindrops looked like goldfish bowls, And hailstones plugged up coyote holes. This was the state of Tombstone Town Before the comin’ of Sheriff Brown. A riot-infested, religion-divested sink of iniquity it; The jailhouse-breakin'est, God-fersakin'est place you ever hit. Garrett Price. comicbooks.com