Curly Bill: "Drinks are on me."

That's fairly common in Old Western movies and TV shows. For a highly paid miner, that would be about 40% of a year's pay. For a common cowhand, it would take a year and a half to earn that much.

I think the people who write these things assume an average person wouldn't be impressed by someone betting $25, which would still be a miner's pay for a week. On one bet!

Curly Bill probably made a good living through cattle rustling, but $500 would still have been a huge amount of money.


I intend to live forever.
So far, so good.

It's true that 500 was a fortune back then, but I don't think that the scene was meant to inform the audience of dollar values for the time but rather to underscore the behavior of these guys.

While 500 might be an exaggerated amount, it was very common for cow-boys, whether in Dodge or Tombstone, or places in between, to come into town and throw money around as though it was in liquid form. The idea is that what money they had (earned working or at the tables) was immediately thrown right back at the community, and this was a huge reason why they were tolerated way more than they probably should have been. If a cow-boy rustled cattle, worked a herd, or got lucky gaming, the money almost always found it's way right back into the hands of the local merchants. They weren't a group known for burying their fortunes in a tin box by the big oak tree. So I would treat this scene as character development for the tone of the community and the connections between the different factions. It (the whole scene) essentially shows the town of Tombstone in microcosm



"Oh, good,...we've got a mexican."