Hurled into eternity

Tombstone lives up to its name.

I am walking among the dead. The epitaphs here at Boothill Graveyard in Tombstone, Arizona, testify to a distant world of blood and gunfire, a time when violence was unremarkable and human life held cheap. No tombstones here; only weathered wooden crosses and headboards, many of which simply bear a name, date and cause of death. The most common epitaphs are chillingly abrupt: ‘murdered’, ‘shot’, ‘hanged’, ‘lynched’, ‘killed by Indians’. It was called the Wild West for a reason.

Graveyards are intended to promote a sense of peace and rest, and Boothill is ideally located for the purpose, with its unspoiled view of the Arizona plains under a baking blue sky, and the Dragoon Mountains clustered on the horizon. Dusty pathways steer between the plots, occasionally interrupted by the vivid green of cactus thickets. The effect is somehow more wistful than macabre.

The vast majority of the occupants of Boothill were interred in the space of just a few years, between 1879 and 1882. Each grave is outlined by the piles of rocks set in place to prevent exhumations by coyotes and other scavengers. For those of us who are accustomed to the habitual mawkishness of epitaphs, the candour of those at Boothill are refreshing. For instance:

‘Here lies George Johnson
Hanged by mistake
1882
He was right
We was wrong
But we strung him up
And now he’s GONE’

And how about this?

‘Here lies Lester Moore
Four slugs from a 44
No Les no more’

Apparently, Les Moore was a clerk at Wells Fargo in Tombstone. A customer called Hank Dunston had turned up to receive a package, only to find that it was damaged. Shots were exchanged and both were killed. Here in Arizona, I have been struck by the heightened general level of politeness, and I wonder whether it might be traced back to the Wild West, where a curt and careless word could result in death at the hands of a disgruntled gunslinger?

So many of the epitaphs cry out for further detail. The Kansas Kid was ‘killed in stampede’. Was this an accident or the result of a blundered horse rustle? Will de Loge was ‘killed playing cards’. Surely a paper cut cannot be fatal? Why was ‘Rook shot by a Chinaman’? Why was ‘Margarita stabbed by Gold Dollar’? And who was ‘Stinging Lizard’ and why was he ‘shot by Cherokee Hall’? So often the names of the murderers are commemorated along with their victims, which adds to the general sense that sentimentality is being robustly eschewed.

The shooting of Marshal Fred White in October 1880 was a key moment in the history of Tombstone, because it was a major factor in Virgil Earp’s decision to become the town’s marshal which, of course, led to the famed gunfight at the O.K. Corral on 26 October 1881. White’s grave in Boothill notes that he was ‘shot by Curly Bill’, a man who was eventually killed by Wyatt Earp. For a powerful re-enactment of this tragic scene you could do a lot worse than watch the 1993 film Tombstone starring Kurt Russell and Val Kilmer.

Sometimes whole narratives can be traced in these little messages from the past. For instance, one epitaph tells us that the grave’s occupant, James Hickey, was shot by William Claiborne. Upon reaching this Claiborne’s resting place, we are informed that he was ‘shot by Frank Leslie’. Further along we find another of Leslie’s victims - a man called Killeen - whose widow married her husband’s murderer a week after his death (shades of Richard III there). Piecing together these stories at Boothill makes the experience rather more fun than it ought to be. Claiborne, it turns out, was present at the O.K. Corral, but was unarmed and fled the scene.

Yet for all these graves at Boothill, the gunfight at the O.K. Corral was seen as an aberration, a throwback to a more murderous time in the history of the frontier. Tombstone had become a fashionable and prosperous town thanks to its silver mines. It was founded by prospector Ed Schieffelin, whose associates had sneered at his efforts, telling him: ‘You’ll find your tombstone there and nothing else’. Schieffelin’s discovery of silver made him a millionaire, and his decision to name the town Tombstone was a sardonic nod to the scepticism of his friends.

Wyatt Earp, 1 January 1882.

The most famous of those buried at Boothill are the three cowboys who were killed at the O.K. Corral – Billy Clanton, Tom McLaury and Frank McLaury – by the three Earp brothers (Wyatt, Virgil and Morgan) and Doc Holliday. Here the memorial is sombre:

‘Billy Clanton
Tom McLaury
Frank McLaury
Murdered in the streets of Tombstone
1881’

Contrary to the Hollywood narrative, the deaths of these three men were controversial, and the subsequent procession of their bodies through the town attracted a swathe of sympathetic mourners. The shootout didn’t actually happen at the O.K. Corral, but in a nearby lot on Fremont Street between the house of William Harwood and the studio of photographer C. S. Fly. You can visit the exact location today and see mannequins of the various antagonists marking the very spots where they fought, showing just how close they were to each other. Thirty bullets were fired in thirty seconds, and yet this fleeting skirmish became the last defining milestone of the Wild West.

The site of the gunfight near the O. K. Corral. C. S. Fly’s studio is the blue building and the iron railings indicate where the Harwood house once stood.

It’s become all too Disneyfied for my liking. In the O.K. Corral itself you can see a pantomimic reenactment of the gunfight in which the audience is encouraged to boo the cowboys and cheer the lawmen (Virgil, in his role as town marshal, had deputised his bothers and Holliday before the confrontation). Tensions had been rising after Virgil prohibited the use of guns in town in an effort to curb local disorder, and the cowboys had been boasting – according to one local paper – that they would ‘clean out the Earps’. At the subsequent trial the Earps and Holliday claimed they acted in self-defence and were acquitted, but to this day the matter is contested.

Lead story in the Tombstone Epitaph, the day after the gunfight at the O.K. Corral.

Even at the time, nobody could be certain who was most to blame. The Tombstone Epitaph took the side of the lawmen; the Tombstone Daily Nugget defended the cowboys. These newspapers were Republican and Democrat, respectively, and so one might even say that the gunfight had been politicised. The headline in the Tombstone Epitaph the day after the event was suitably dramatic: ‘Three Men Hurled Into Eternity in the Duration of a Moment’. We’ll never know the truth, but I think a healthy mistrust of the popular narrative is prudent.

The experience of visiting Boothill is a corrective to our tendency to romanticise the Wild West. Its residents surely did not expect or deserve to meet such grisly ends, and their immortalisation in the movies has had the effect of making these real-life tragedies feel like fiction. So while it is forgivable to chuckle at the epitaph of ‘3-Fingered Jack Dunlap’ who was ‘shot by Jeff Milton’, we shouldn’t overlook that he was a human being with the same feelings and fears as the rest of us. The cardboard dioramas of Hollywood may be entertaining, but they never tell the whole story.

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