“Actually a miner needed little excuse to come to the new camp, for many of them were vagabonds at heart. He went to see each new “elephant” (an expression of the day which had originated with P. T. Barnum’s introduction of the circus elephant; “to see the elephant” meant to satisfy one’s curiosity). He might take a job for a day, a week, a month, or longer, and then he would leave for no better reason than finding a lump in his morning oatmeal or because the morning’s hotcakes were “out-of-round.””

—Odie B. Faulk, on working conditions in Tombstone in the 1880s. from Tombstone: Myth and Reality, 1972.