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SADDLEBAG DISPATCHES
WILD WOMEN Chris Enss
ADVERTISING MANAGER
Sarah Herring Soren An Attorney and Teacher on the Frontier.
A
mong the many short news articles included in the October 5, 1886, edition of the Daily Tombstone was the announcement of a new teacher to the well-known Arizona town. Miss Sarah Herring, her four siblings, and mother, Mary, arrived in Tombstone in 1882 to join her father, mine owner and lawyer Colonel William Herring. Born on January 15, 1861, in New York, Sarah acquired her father’s desire to teach. The colonel was employed as a public schoolteacher for many years prior to moving his family west. She believed teaching children reading, writing, and arithmetic was crucial to providing stability and opportunity to their lives and by extension bringing respectability to wild frontier communities. A year prior to Sarah riding into Tombstone, the boomtown witnessed its most notorious event, the shootout near the O.K. Corral. She was convinced Tombstone’s rough and rugged reputation would improve by educating the youngsters who lived there. Sarah was among several aspiring teachers summoned by the Board of School Examiners in December 1885 to take a test to determine their qualifications. She was one of four teachers that
Sarah Herring became a schoolteacher in Tombstone, Arizona, in 1882.
day who obtained a territorial certificate necessary to work at the school. Sarah began her career at the Tombstone school teaching first grade. The February 21, 1886, edition of the Tombstone Daily Epitaph included a note about her accomplishment. “Miss Herring is an excellent teacher, who has been tried in this city, and in her selection the Board of Trustees have acted wisely, and their appointment will be approved by every parent in this city.”
The Tombstone school board provided Sarah with the books she was to use in her classroom. Among the limited materials supplied were Appletons’ School Readers, the Elementary Spelling Book by Noah Webster, and Ray’s New Primary Arithmetic. Tombstone residents were urged to financially support the local school so educators could purchase additional books for students and upgrades could be made on the school building itself. Sarah wasn’t shy about sharing with residents how crucial it was to fund such efforts, but not everyone agreed. Articles in the Tombstone Epitaph focused on residents against the venture. One letter to the editor of the paper on the matter outraged not only the teachers and the Board of School Trustees but students, as well. I have read an article in the Tombstone Epitaph of January 19th a letter to the paper which reads “We are called upon to vote a special tax of $8,000 to beautify our schoolhouse in the Tombstone school district and for the young ones who care nothing for it,” a schoolgirl wrote the editor of the Epitaph on February 22, 1886. “Why expend money upon such a lot of thoughtless monkeys?” The author went on to ask why there was a necessity of building fences, etc., that the children do not live or feed on lumber and ends by insulting our teachers. Now what is his meaning? He pretends to be opposed to the tax in question. Yet he seeks to criticize us children and our teacher in
