The 1882 Cochise County Courthouse is the best museum in Tombstone. The two-story brick building houses exhibits on the town's silver boom, its legal history, and the broader story of law and order in the frontier Southwest. The original courtroom is intact, and the rear of the building retains the gallows where convicted killers were hanged — a stark reminder that Tombstone's violence extended well beyond the O.K. Corral.
The courthouse provides essential context for everything else in town: who the Earps actually were, what the Clanton gang was doing, how the political battles of the era played out in court. The Arizona State Parks system runs it well, with honest interpretive panels that resist the temptation to oversimplify. Worth an hour before walking Allen Street.