Back twenty years to... Sunday, April 16th, 2006. Day 8. The historic town of Bisbee, and gunfights at the OK Corral. All too typical small-town demise in ‘Mammoth’. Remnants of ‘Old Route 66’, Indian trinkets – and an exhilarating flight over the Grand Canyon.

"Bisbee. Stylish antiques shops, galleries, cafés and smart restaurants. I meet Duncan, neatly dressed and with a bushy grey beard, sitting outside the 'YWCA'. We talk about the town – and he tells me sagely that: "Most small towns have broad streets – but narrow minds. Bisbee has narrow streets – and broad minds." I spend all morning wandering around the small town, before walking back down to the campsite, past the massive but now defunct, Lavender Pit copper mine, and stop-in for brunch at the 'Bisbee Breakfast Club'. Two eggs over-easy, sausage-links, bacon, hash-browns, toast and jelly – and good coffee from the bottomless pot.

Thirty miles or-so north-west, just off from State Highway 80, is the unashamedly named, 'Tombstone Historic District’: "The Town Too Tough to Die." And the setting for the now legendary 1881 'Shootout at the OK Corral'. Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, et al. It has come to represent a period when the frontier was pretty-much an open range for gangs of outlaws, largely unopposed by lawmen who were deployed too thinly, over vast territories. It has also been portrayed – with varying degrees of accuracy, in numerous Western films, and has become an archetype for much of the popular imagery associated with the 'Old West'. And so the place is fair game for transformation into a 'Real-feel Cowboy town' – complete with unpaved streets and raised wooden sidewalks. Stage-coach rides – and actors playing-out the gunfight, on the spot where the fabled skirmish took place.

'Six-Gun-City' for kids of all ages. Several similar shops selling just the same 'wild-west' souvenirs, and a couple of acceptably realistic 'saloon bars', each liberally planted with other crews of actors – kitted-out in authentic-looking period costume. One of the more enticing touristy offers is a tour through the small, but largely all original, 'Bird Cage Theatre', with its balcony-box 'cages', bordello rooms, gaming dens and several 'real bullet-holes' in the raised stage. It does indeed evoke the essence of the era, even if the mixture of artefacts on display may appear to be historically, and geographically – just a little out of place."

In Search of Small-Town America: Volume 1 is a free-of-charge Pdf digital download – available from our shop. A table of contents, the introduction, the route-map – and featuring content on the first two States travelled: New Mexico and Arizona.

Jeremy Hammond I am a British writer and photographer, and have travelled through India, China, Southeast Asia and Australia, but most extensively in North America. In the late seventies and early eighties, I worked as lighting crew, and later designer, for many top-named British bands, on tours through Europe, Japan, and the USA. I’ve worked as a cruise-ship photographer, in office and store design, database design, visual arts book publishing and as a London-based freelance photographer, specialising in interiors and architecture.