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 is miles long with handsome business blocks near the middle of the thread and good-looking residences out at the ends. Of course, if one wishes to be precise, there is a little width and a little height to the town, and the height up the canyon walls is about as great as the width across the canyon. The residences hang on the steeps as if glued there. A business man going home to lunch journeys straight up by a series of ladderlike steps that bear street names. If you enjoy mountain climbing, Bisbee will appeal to you as an ideal place of residence. If you happen to be fat, you will fall into a panic at mere sight of the town.

Under the main street is a giant subway to drain off the water when it rains. After a storm, the water roars through the subterranean sluice like an express train and flows out in a spreading flood on the plains at the south end of the canyon. It is surprising what a seething torrent the tiny drops of a light rain will form when they trickle down the mountainsides and merge at the bottom of the canyon. If it were not for this subway, a light shower might wash the town away.

Right in town at the edge of the business centre is the Copper Queen mine. It seems, in a way, to merge with the stores. You pass a soda fountain and a haberdashery shop with windows full of shirts and come to one of the richest copper mines in the world. Crushed in between its mountain walls, this bizarre little city of 22,000 people is the metropolis of southeastern Arizona. Twenty-six miles north is Tombstone. An equal distance south are Douglas and the Mexican border.

Bisbee, with its schools and churches and wealth and culture, has travelled a long road since its boom days as a mining camp in the early ’eighties when copper was struck in the Mules. Then it was a rough town full of boozing kens and brothels and dance halls, and Brewery Gulch was famous as a rendezvous for hard characters from the four corners of the frontier. But it was a busy, moneymaking place, too, and from the first it grew steadily and solidly. It was like a piece of string in that yesterday of long ago, as it is today, and its one-story frame business houses and shanty saloons were strung out up and down the canyon in twin rows along its single winding street, while the mountainsides were plastered with the precariously clinging pine shacks of miners. Among the merchandising establishments of that pioneer time, none did a more flourishing business than the general store of Goldwater & Casteñeda.

Dan Dowd and Red Sample, rough-looking customers in their cowboy paraphernalia, stood in front of Goldwater & Casteñeda’s store at half past seven o’clock on the night of December 8, 1883. The Christmas shopping season was in full swing and Bisbee’s main street was bright with street lamps and the light shining from store windows.

“All set?” asked Dan Dowd out of the corner of his mouth.

“Yep,” replied Red Sample.

“Then let her rip.”

Whereupon these two hard-looking customers slid six-shooters from the scabbards at their sides and one shot up the street and the other shot down.

The street a moment before had been, in a manner of speaking, full. A moment afterward, the street, as you might say, was empty. Shoppers on the sidewalk ran into the stores. Shoppers in the stores, though curious, stayed there. Dan Dowd kept on firing up the street, and Red Sample kept on firing down.

As their bullets were singing Christmas carols on the sidewalk, three friends and business associates, Tex Howard, Bill Delaney, and Dan Kelly, were inside the store doing their Christmas shopping with six-shooters. While proprietors, clerks, and customers stood lined along the walls with hands in the air, the trio rifled the cash drawers, ransacked the safe, looted the show cases of watches and jewellery, and scooping everything into a sack, rejoined their companions in the street.

Meanwhile, Dan Dowd and Red Sample had been having a busy time. When their first shots had sent the street crowds scurrying, John Tapiner had been a little slow in getting inside a saloon, and a bullet knocked him over dead in the barroom door. Mrs. Anna Roberts, a restaurant keeper, was slain accidentally, it was said, with a bullet meant for a fugitive man. J. A. Nolly was wounded and lay crumpled on the sidewalk, dying later. Deputy Sheriff D. Tom Smith and James Kriegbaum, indignant that five bandits should overawe an entire town of able-bodied citizens, stepped out in the street and for a while turned the one-sided affair into a battle. Smith was quickly killed. Kriegbaum wounded Red Sample in the arm. With three citizens dead and one dying, the five robbers swung on their horses and went galloping down the canyon, terrorizing the lower town with revolver shots. When they rode out of the mountains at the south end of the canyon, they turned east and headed across Sulphur Springs Valley for the Chiricahuas.

This affair was known in the chronicles of the period as the Bisbee massacre.

While the rattle of shots in the lower canyon was still in his ears, Kriegbaum leaped on his horse and in a mad Paul Revere ride across the mountains, reached Tombstone in an hour and a half. Automobilists who travel the up-and-down road today think they are doing pretty well if they cover the distance in fifty minutes. Kriegbaum’s news threw Tombstone into a furore. Deputy Sheriff William Daniels and a posse were soon riding hard for Bisbee. They found the mining town wild with excitement, its streets swarming with armed men. Several posses were already out scouring the country. A number of citizens joined Daniels. Among them John Heath.

Heath had been stirred to the depths of his soul by the red-handed atrocity. Among all the voices lifted against the perpetrators, his was the loudest.

“Damnable outrage,” he declared. “Them fellers deserve no mercy. Track ’em down. Hang ’em to the nearest tree. Them’s my sentiments.”

Where the trail of the robbers turned east at the south end of the canyon, Heath led the posse south.

“Here’s the trail, boys,” he shouted. “They’re headin’ for Mexico.”

The posse clattered after this lynx-eyed fellow who could read a trail in the dark.

Close to the Mexican line, Heath turned west.

“This way, boys,” he called out. “The trail’s gittin’ hot. We’ll ketch them fellers before noon. You bet.”

When morning came, Heath was spurring hard on a trail no one else could see. But no criticism of John Heath, mind you. This honest lad was plainly doing the best he knew how. The posse thought he was wrong⁠—that was all⁠—and back it rode to the mouth of the canyon. Now that it was daylight, the trail of the robbers was plain. It led east.

Somewhere around Soldier Holes in Sulphur Springs Valley, Heath announced that the trail turned north. The others saw that it still ran east. Again Heath was overruled. But merely with deprecatory smiles. He meant well. His mistake was evidently due to his over-anxiety “to ketch them robbers and string ’em up.”

Before the posse reached the Chiricahuas, Heath attempted to lead it off on several other false scents. Vague suspicion gradually took form. It began to look as if a pretty crafty gambler was overplaying his hand.

In the Chiricahuas the five horses the robbers had ridden were found dead at the bottom of a chasm. When the animals had given out from hard riding, the bandits had driven them over a precipice after stealing fresh mounts from a ranch. The tragedy of the five horses was a heartless piece of deviltry. The animals could have been turned loose with no danger to the robbers. A little deeper in the mountains, the pursuit ended. The fugitives had scattered.

When Heath had returned to Bisbee, he was still vociferous in anathema.

“Them bandits didn’t have no call to kill citizens the way they done,” he said. “Ef I’d run on to ’em, I’d shot ’em down like dogs.”

After one of these tirades, Frank Buckles measured Heath with cold eyes.

“Those five fellows,” said Buckles, “stopped at my ranch in Pole Bridge Canyon two nights before the robbery. And, Mr. Heath,” he added, “you were with them.”

Heath was arrested and placed in jail at Tombstone. It was established later that he had planned the robbery. Just a shade too much of enthusiasm had landed Heath in the shadow of the gallows.

Deputy Sheriff Daniels traced Dan Dowd into Chihuahua. The two men met one day on the street of Corralitos, a little mining town in the Sierra Madre Mountains.

“Hello, Dan,” said Daniels.

“Hello, Bill,” said Dowd.

But Daniels spoke over the barrel of a forty-four and Dowd returned the greeting with his hands in the air. Extraditing a criminal from Mexico was slow work in those days. So Daniels smuggled his prisoner across the line, and Dowd was soon in a cell in Tombstone. Delaney was arrested in Minas Prietas in Sonora by a Mexican officer. Without extradition papers, Daniels brought the prisoner over the border in a box car. Kelly was arrested in Deming in a barber’s chair while his face was covered with lather. The barber had identified him by a photograph.

Red Sample and Tex Howard arrived in Clifton with plenty of money and cut a splurge in underworld resorts. Howard, in princely fashion, bestowed a gold watch upon a woman. Vain of the gift, the siren exhibited it to an admirer who examined it with eyes green with jealousy but not too green to identify the timepiece, by description sent broadcast, as having been part of the loot of the Bisbee massacre. So the enamoured Howard did not bask long in beauty’s smiles. The jealous lover betrayed him, and Howard and Red Sample, shackled hand and foot, took the trail for Tombstone.

Dowd, Sample, Howard, Kelly, and Delaney were tried together before Judge D. H. Pinney in Tombstone and sentenced to hang. Their execution was set for March 28th. Heath, tried separately, was convicted of murder in the second degree, and on February 21st, sentenced to life imprisonment. Bisbee had viewed the hanging verdict for the five robbers with deep-seated satisfaction, but it burst into a storm of rage when it learned that Heath had escaped the gallows. A mass meeting was held. Citizens thundered indignation. Resolutions were passed. And next morning, while the dawn of Washington’s Birthday was red over the Mule summits, a committee of fifty Bisbee men, mounted and armed, rode over the divide on the road to Tombstone.

Tombstone had hardly rubbed the sleep out of its eyes when the Bisbee horsemen rode into town. The streets were empty. Only a few stores had opened. A few housewives cooking breakfast caught a glimpse of the cavalcade. A few drowsy citizens drawing on their trousers stared out the windows wonderingly as it passed. The Bisbee men dismounted at the courthouse. A knock sounded on the iron portal of the jail. Swinging open the door, Sheriff Ward looked into the barrels of several six-shooters.

“Well,” he gasped in astonishment, “I thought it was the Chinaman bringing breakfast for the prisoners.”

Sheriff Ward surrendered the keys, expecting a wholesale lynching. But Heath alone was taken from his cell. The five robbers under sentence of death were in adjoining cells. They were relieved when the committee paid no attention to them. They were justly doomed. These men of Bisbee had come to do justice in the single case in which they were convinced the Court had erred. Heath, in their opinion, was as guilty as the others. He, too, deserved to die.

Heath was led to a telegraph pole north of the courthouse in Tough Nut Street. He stood there in the early morning sunlight as cool and unperturbed as if being lynched were habitual before-breakfast routine, like lemon in hot water or orange juice.

“Got anything to say before you go, Heath?”

“I wish,” replied Heath, “you’d promise not to shoot my body full of holes after you swing me up.”

“All right. We’ll promise you that.”

Heath drew a red bandanna from his pocket and bound it around his head so that it hid his face. A hanging had certain punctilios of etiquette to be observed. It was the correct thing for men who went into the other world at a rope’s end to depart with their faces covered. His handkerchief took the place of the official black mask. When the noose had been slipped about his neck, he sensed a certain ineptness. He was fastidious in this matter of dying.

“Shove the knot around under my left ear,” he said through his handkerchief.

“Thank you,” he acknowledged politely when his request had been complied with.

The Bisbee horsemen rode out of town as quietly as they had come. Perhaps not fifty people in Tombstone knew that anything unusual had taken place. Citizens going to their work saw with surprise a dead man hanging twenty feet in air against the telegraph pole in Tough Nut Street. They noticed curiously a placard fastened just below his feet. It read:

John Heath
Was hanged to this Pole
By the
Citizens of Cochise County
For Participation as a Known Accessory in the Bisbee Massacre
At 8:20 a.m. February 22, 1884
Washington’s Birthday

The Heath lynching resulted in a famous coroner’s verdict. The jury was confronted with a delicate problem. The usual verdict of “death at the hands of parties unknown” was impracticable. All the lynchers were known. But the jury had no intention of naming the parties at whose hands death had occurred; Tombstone heartily approved the hanging bee. Dr. George Goodfellow in his testimony hinted at a way out of the dilemma. He declared death had been caused by emphysema. The jurors had not the slightest idea what emphysema meant, but they caught at the learned word as drowning men at a straw. Dr. Goodfellow explained that emphysema was swelling caused by air in the cellular tissues and was sometimes due to strangulation and sometimes to the effects of high altitude. What more could any honest jury want? The verdict read:

We, the jury of inquest impanelled and sworn by the coroner of Cochise County, after viewing the body and hearing the testimony, find that the name of the deceased was John Heath, 32 years old, a native of Texas, and that he came to his death from emphysema of the lungs, which might have been, and probably was, caused by strangulation, self-inflicted or otherwise, as in accordance with the medical evidence.

A gallows built for five stood back of the Tombstone courthouse. The high board fence about the yard shut it off from the view of the public. A thrifty citizen erected a grand stand from which the hanging might be witnessed. There seemed prospect of his making considerable money. One morning, when he went to put the finishing touches on the structure, he found it a mass of wreckage. Tombstone did not approve of turning the tragedy into a box-office attraction.

Two miners sat on the dump of the Lucky Cuss mine on the hill back of town. Far below, they could see the courthouse yard, the yellow pine gallows, the strong crossbar above it, the five dangling hempen nooses. The door of the jail opened. Dowd, Sample, Howard, Kelly, and Delaney walked out, herded by deputies, Sheriff Ward at their head. The little procession crossed the yard and mounted the gallows stairs. The five condemned men took their places in line on the trap.

“I’ve knowed all them boys well,” said one of the miners on the Lucky Cuss dump. “Fine fellers as you’d want to meet.”

“Hard to understan’,” remarked the other. “Five husky young fellers. Full of life this minute. Dead as this chunk o’ rock five minutes from now.”

“Had many a drink with them boys. Been to the Bird Cage with ’em. Set in poker games with ’em. Shore wuz nice boys.”

“Look like soldiers standin’ up thar. Heads up. Shoulders back. Game, all right.”

“Yes, sir, knowed ’em well. Set and talked with ’em many’s the time jest like I’m settin’ here talkin’ to you. Dan Dowd played as purty a game o’ bank as you ever seen. Shore knowed how to handle chips.”

“What’re them deputies doin’?”

“Stroppin’ their hands behind their backs and stroppin’ their ankles together. That’s the way they do. Old pals o’ mine, all them fellers. Spent their money free. Many’s the⁠—”

“That’s the black caps, ain’t it? They’re slippin’ on the nooses. The sheriff’s shootin’ them knots tight agin their necks. What’s that deputy steppin’ back to the rail fer?”

“He’s goin’ to cut the string. Good night. Thar she goes.”

“God!”

“Done dropped ’em through. Well, I’ll be damned. And jest to think I knowed all them boys well. Yes, sir, knowed ’em well.”

“Can’t see ’em. Can’t see nothin’ but a black slit in the floor of the gallows.”

“Jest a black slit. That’s all. And black as hell.”

Into the blackness, five men had dropped to death. The Bisbee massacre had been expiated.

Train robberies came into vogue among Arizona outlaws in the ’nineties. Lonely deserts, convenient mountains, and trains bearing fortunes in their safes made the crime attractive. Train robberies at Canyon Diablo, Maricopa, Rock Cut, Willcox, and Stein’s Pass were pioneer successes for daring spirits to emulate. Black Jack Ketchum was one of the most famous of these early-day robbers. After robbing a bank at Nogales, he killed a man of Sheriff Fly’s pursuing posse at Skeleton Canyon, adding one more tragedy to the many tragedies of that famous pass in the Peloncillos. Black Jack, it was supposed, buried much of his loot in a cave in Wild Cat Canyon at the south end of the Chiricahuas near William Lutley’s ranch. He called this cave Room Forty-Four. Captured after a train robbery, Black Jack imparted to Leonard Alvorsen full directions as to how to lift this treasure. But, unfortunately, Alvorsen had no opportunity to go on a treasure hunt, being detained behind bars at Yuma. Falling heir to Alvorsen’s information, Bert and Harry Macia of Tombstone ransacked Room Forty-Four, but no doubloons or pieces-of-eight rewarded them. Black Jack, a Falstaffian robber much given in prosperous days to fat capon and flagons of sack, was sentenced to hang at high noon in Clayton, New Mexico. On the gallows he appeared anxious. “What time is it?” he asked. He was told it lacked one minute of twelve. “Well, hurry up,” urged Black Jack. “I’m due to eat dinner in hell at twelve sharp.” The drop, it is said, severed the giant’s head from his body.

They still laugh in Arizona at the silver-rain train robbery at Willcox in 1895. Grant Wheeler and Joe George, the bandits, found $60,000 in Mexican silver dollars stacked in sacks in the express car. This money was too bulky to carry away, and they used it to weigh down the dynamite they placed against the safe. The explosion wrecked the car. The dollars went flying through the roof and on toward the stars, and fell in a silver rain over all the landscape. Telegraph poles were shot full of coins, which later were scraped off like barnacles, and a pile of crossties beside the track was turned into a silver mine. Searchers worked for days picking up the money, some of the silver pieces being found a half mile from the railroad, and, strangely enough, all but $600 was recovered. The two robbers got only $1,500 from the safe and were trailed by bills with corners singed off which they spent in saloons during their flight. Joe George was caught and sent to Yuma. Billy Breakenridge, Sheriff Behan’s famous deputy, who was now Detective William Breakenridge of the Southern Pacific Railroad, tracked Grant Wheeler to Mancos, Colorado. There, when the robber was cornered without hope of escape, he blew out his brains.

Burt Alvord, Sheriff Slaughter’s old deputy, was living during this period at Willcox. He owned a cattle ranch, took a hand in politics, and had been elected constable. But he was the same genial roistering, devil-may-care fellow as in old Tombstone days, and everybody liked him. Living in Willcox, too, was William Downing, a cattleman reputed rich and looked upon as an honest, substantial citizen. But Downing had been a member of the notorious Sam Bass band of outlaws in Texas, had served two terms in the penitentiary, and had been run out of Texas by the Rangers. Downing and Burt Alvord became friends, and this sinister friendship marked the turning point in Alvord’s career.

The Southern Pacific express, westbound, was robbed at Cochise southwest of Willcox in September, 1899. Two men flagged the train at midnight, overawed the train crew with six-shooters, dynamited the safe, and escaped with $10,000. Sheriff Scott White with a posse, of which Burt Alvord was a member, pursued the robbers into the Chiricahuas, where the trail was lost. No clue to the identity of the bandits was discovered. They had vanished into mystery, and the Cochise robbery passed into history as one of the most skilfully managed criminal enterprises that had ever occurred in Arizona. It was not until six months later that Jeff Milton turned the light of a blazing shotgun on the secret history of this interesting affair.

Jeff Milton of Fairbank, a famous fighting man of the Tombstone country, was born in Florida in 1861. He has been a part of the Southwest since his youth, as Texas Ranger, chief of police of El Paso, cattle association detective, railroad detective, and shotgun messenger, and for years immigration agent and customs inspector along the border between Arizona and Mexico. Gray of hair and moustache, the old fire-eater is still a gallant figure and, for all his years on the frontier, still retains the manners, speech, and kindly courtesy, touched with a certain courtliness, that belong to the tradition of the Old South.

The train from Nogales to Benson pulled into Fairbank at dusk on a February day in 1900. Jeff Milton, express messenger, was leaning in the doorway in the side of the express car, his shotgun in the crook of his arm. He smiled when he saw a half-dozen citizens lined up on the station platform with two cowboys behind them with drawn six-shooters. The idea of a train robbery did not occur to him. It was pretty dark, and he thought the cowboys, half-tipsy perhaps, were having fun with some tenderfeet. He chuckled aloud when one of the cowboys shouted, “Git up your hands.” But when he saw a cowboy, using the row of citizens as breastworks, point a six-shooter in his direction, he woke up. That gun looked a little like business. Maybe, after all, this was the real thing.

“Come out of that car,” yelled the cowboy.

“If there’s anything in this car you want,” Milton flung back, “come and get it.”

Flame leaped from the cowboy’s gun. The bullet shattered the bone in Milton’s arm and knocked him over on the car floor. The cowboy rushed for the door. He was climbing in the car when Milton got to his knees, one arm dangling like a rag, and raising his shotgun with one hand, fired. The robber tumbled back on the ground with a load of buckshot in his body.

“Look out, boys,” he shouted, “this fellow’s shootin’ to kill. He’s got me.”

“I slammed the door shut and locked it,” said Milton. “Then, as there was no way for those fellows to get in unless they dynamited the car, I staggered over to a piece of baggage and sat down. An orchestra began to play. Thinks I, ‘That’s the most beautiful music I ever heard in my life.’ The next thing I knew, a setter pup was licking me in the face and Baca, the engineer, was standing over me.”

Milton’s heroic duel saved a valuable treasure in the safe and ended the train robbery. The man he had shot was Three-fingered Jack Dunlap. The other bandits were Bravo John Yoes, Bob Brown, and Jack and Lew Owens. Three-fingered Jack was being held in the saddle when the robbers rode off in the darkness. Milton was rushed in a caboose drawn by a special engine to Tucson where surgeons removed several inches of bone from his upper arm. The wound left him a cripple for life.

Sheriff Scott’s posse found Three-fingered Jack, half dead and abandoned by his comrades, at Buckshot Springs in the Dragoons and took him to Tombstone where he was placed in the hospital. Bob Brown and the two Owens brothers were arrested a few days later. Bravo John was taken at Cananea in Mexico. Three-fingered Jack died six days after his capture. On his deathbed, he told the story of the Cochise train robbery. Burt Alvord and William Downing, he declared, had planned the crime; Billy Stiles, a constable at Pierce, and Matt Burts, a cowboy, had committed the robbery. Alvord, Downing, and Stiles were soon in jail at Tombstone, and Burts was arrested in Wyoming. For a time Willcox and Tombstone refused to believe two such respectable citizens as Alvord and Downing were implicated in a train robbery. Then Billy Stiles confessed. He and Burts, Stiles said, had turned over the $10,000 taken at the robbery to Alvord and Downing. These “master minds” of the conspiracy, according to Stiles, had made a masterful division of the spoils, giving Stiles only $480 as his share. This niggardliness had rankled with Stiles, and his confession was the outcome of the grudge he had nursed.

But having betrayed his accomplices, Stiles suffered from remorse. Permitted a certain amount of liberty as a state’s witness, he held up the Tombstone jailer, whom he shot in the leg, and getting possession of the keys, released Alvord and Bravo John. Arming themselves with guns taken from the sheriff’s office, the three men rushed from the jail. At the door they met Matt Burts, back from Wyoming in custody of a deputy sheriff. Burts joined them, and the four outlaws galloped out of town on stolen horses. Downing had refused to join in the jail break.

Stiles, Bravo John, and Burts were recaptured, and after two years of liberty spent in Sonora, Alvord surrendered to Sheriff Del Lewis, an old friend, at Naco. But, tiring of imprisonment, Alvord and Stiles escaped from the Tombstone jail a second time in 1903 by tunnelling through the walls. Both were recaptured, and at last all the men concerned in the Cochise and Fairbank robberies went to Yuma prison. Stiles was killed in Nevada in 1908 by outlaws whom, it is said, he was planning to betray. Downing was killed by Territorial Ranger Speed at Willcox the same year. Bravo John passed into oblivion in Mexico. After serving two years in the penitentiary, Alvord went to Honduras where, it was said, he married a wealthy coffee-planter’s daughter, and where, according to word that came back to Tombstone, he died in 1912.

Jeff Milton, George Scarborough, and Eugene Thacker had trailed Bronco Bill Waters, Bill Johnson, and Jack Pitkin into the White Mountains in northeastern Arizona and were in camp at McBride’s Crossing on the headwaters of Black River. The three fugitives had robbed a Santa Fe train at Belen, New Mexico, and killed three men of a sheriff’s posse that had gone out from Socorro.

“I was fishing near camp,” said Milton, “and had landed several nice trout when I heard firing. Bronco Bill and his two pals had given us a little surprise. I stuck my fishing pole in the bank and slid my Winchester off my shoulder. I saw Johnson churning his gun behind a juniper two hundred yards away. I clipped him in the hip. The bullet split against the bone, and we buried him next morning. Bronco Bill, who had been fighting from the ground, jumped on his horse. ‘Hold on, Cap,’ I called to him, ‘I’ve got a little business I want to talk over with you.’ But he didn’t stop until I knocked him out of the saddle with a bullet. Pitkin got away. After serving twenty years in the penitentiary, Bronco Bill was pardoned out only a couple of years ago. I met him in Naco. He didn’t look much like the bold, bad train robber I had once nearly killed. He was white-haired and stooped and feeble. Old age,” added Milton philosophically, “seems to treat us all alike. I felt kind o’ sorry for the old devil.”