To My Wife...

Bound volumes of old files of the Tombstone Epitaph, Tombstone Nugget, and Tucson Star fill certain shelves in the rooms of the Arizona Pioneers Historical Society in Tucson. In these old newspapers, ...

Geronimo and his warriors were out of their stronghold in the Dragoons. Through all the southeastern part of Arizona from the San Simon to the Huachucas and from the Gila to the Mexican line, the Apac...

Tombstone was unique among the frontier towns that have achieved lurid distinction in the history of the American West. It had, according to its legend, its man for breakfast every morning, but it was...

Wyatt Earp, who was to achieve sinister eminence as the six-shooter boss of Tombstone, and whose name, for good or bad, was to be bruited more widely, perhaps, than that of any other man in Tombstone’...

Mr. Henry Schneider sat at a pine-board table in the Chinaman’s in Charleston and ate his breakfast in silence. Mr. Schneider was the chief engineer at the stamp mill of the Tombstone Mining and Milli...

Curly Bill, most famous outlaw in Arizona’s history, came from Texas, but when or how or why is one of several mysteries in his life, his end being as enigmatic as his beginning. He was a medieval rob...

Ghosts? Well, why not? But you don’t believe in them? Then you are unfortunate and may miss some delicious thrills. If you believe in ghosts, Skeleton Canyon is haunted; if you don’t, it’s not. That’s...

William M. Breakenridge had come to Tombstone half tenderfoot. When Sheriff Behan appointed him a deputy, folks in Tombstone had misgivings. Everybody liked Billy Breakenridge. He was a dapper, smilin...

Since the red day in Skeleton Canyon when Curly Bill and his outlaws had sent to death all the Mexicans of a smuggler train except one stripling youth, the cry for vengeance had run along the border. ...

John Ringo stalks through the stories of old Tombstone days like a Hamlet among outlaws, an introspective, tragic figure, darkly handsome, splendidly brave, a man born for better things, who, having t...

Russian Bill materialized out of blue space and swaggered for a time among Tombstone’s saloons, attracting much curious attention. He was a mystery. Nobody knew him or had ever heard of him. Nor did h...

Bud Philpot gathered up his lines. “Come on, boys,” he said to his four horses. The leaders pranced and curvetted, the wheelers leaned soberly in their collars. The Benson stage went at an easy trot o...

The Earp-Clanton feud has passed into the melting pot of tradition in which so much frontier history has been changed into myth. The Southwest has a nebulous idea that in some way or other it grew out...

Dark and high the war clouds were piling. Forked hatreds snaked flamingly across the blind gloom, and vengeance threatened in rumbling thunder growls. The red deluge was about to burst. Nothing now co...

Play was slow that night at the Oriental. Too soon after Christmas, perhaps. Holiday gifts had told on purses. Only thin groups were at the faro and roulette tables, and only stragglers at the bar. Wy...

Ramon Acosta was tired and hot. He sat down to rest on a log and, getting out a sack of tobacco, rolled a yellow-paper cigarette. Near the ramshackle log cabin, Ted Judah was busy stacking firewood to...

John Ringo was drunk. For ten days he had been morosely, broodingly, tragically drunk. As straight as an Indian, he stalked about Tombstone streets, a tall, silent, sombre figure, looking a little mor...

Ho, for buried treasure! Throw the saddles on the ponies. Slap the blanket rolls and the grub and the old camp kit on the pack mule. Be sure of plenty of bacon and frijoles. And don’t forget the picks...

John Slaughter’s pearl-handled six-shooter shines out in opalescent beauty in Tombstone’s history. But it is remembered not so much for its gleaming handle as for its flaming other end. Slaughter’s fo...

Deep in the shaft of the Sulphuret mine a miner swung his pick. A loosened fragment of rock rolled against his boots. From the cavity oozed a few drops of water. They trickled down a stone slab in lit...

Dawn in the Sierra Madres. Purple darkness in the glens and twisting canyons. Ripples of faint daylight breaking in rose against the tallest peaks. Over the shadowy chaos of mountains, unutterable sil...

Bisbee is a city, you might say, of only one dimension⁠—length. It lies like a piece of string along the bottom of a narrow canyon in the Mule Mountains. Its main street in the bed of the winding slit...

Tombstone, that in its days of glory as the metropolis of Arizona had 15,000 people, had dwindled to a ghost town in 1900, when only 646 inhabitants stood between it and utter extinction. But the old ...