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 robber baron in the blue flannel shirt and white sombrero of a cowboy. He rode at times with thirty or forty tall fellows at his back, and it was said he could gather a hundred men-at-arms within a day if needful occasion arose. All the outlaws of southeastern Arizona owned some sort of allegiance to him. He lived boldly and jovially. After the dangers and hardships of a cattle-stealing raid or an attack upon a Mexican smuggler train in some mountain defile, he took his ease in his strongholds, with wassail and high revel and his merry men around him.

He was, to the eye, a good-natured, rollicking chap, heavyset, black-eyed, with a shock of curly black hair. But for all his roly-poly look and the dimples that showed in his round, swarthy face when he laughed, he was a powerful fellow and as quick and tricky and dangerous as a panther. Though his career is a tale of romance, he was strictly a business man with no romance in him. He planned shrewdly, and murder was a routine detail in his trade of adventure. Some might tell you that John Ringo was his brains. This is not true. Curly Bill had brains of his own, and sharp, resourceful brains they were, amply sufficient for all the generalship necessary in the life he led. Moreover, Curly Bill had the decisiveness in action that Ringo lacked. Curly Bill led, Ringo followed.

Curly Bill, in his earlier days, was the scourge of the Arizona ranges. He stole cattle from the scattered ranchers. He ran off horses from army posts and frequently had the soldiers on his trail. He soon found a more lucrative field in Mexico. Millions of longhorn cattle pastured half-wild on the vast ranges of Sonora and Chihuahua. Some of the wealthy hacendados of these two states just over the international line owned so many cattle they could not estimate the number within a hundred thousand head. Rich quarry were these countless herds for Curly Bill and his buccaneers who, stealing across the border, rounded up cattle from plains and foothills and brought them back in rushing stampedes, sometimes a thousand head at a single eagle swoop. But these forays were not without danger. The border Mexicans were hardy fellows, seasoned in warfare against Yaqui and Apache, and not infrequently the rustlers had stiff brushes and running fights with rurales or vaqueros and had to battle for their lives before they won to safety on American soil.

Markets for his stolen cattle were plentiful. Curly Bill did a thriving trade, it is said, with contractors who supplied San Carlos and other Indian reservations with beef. Other buyers, equally unscrupulous, shipped the pilfered steers East or sold them to frontier slaughter houses. And, it may be whispered confidentially as a deep, dark secret known only to everybody in Arizona, wealthy stockmen newly established in the country swelled their foundation herds with cattle that Curly Bill had stolen below the line.

So it will be seen Curly Bill was no cheap horse thief, but a robber operating on a scale of wholesale magnificence never known before along the international border. He rose in time to prestige as an international menace, and his depredations became a subject of discussion in Congress and of diplomatic correspondence with Mexico.

Curly Bill’s first recorded exploit in Tombstone’s history was not impressive. Frederick White, Tombstone’s first town marshal, a two-fisted fighting man, kept sleepless vigil over the town and was fearless in his efforts to preserve order. He had taken counsel with Wyatt Earp who, out of the wisdom of Dodge City experience, cautioned the marshal against permitting any shooting off of firearms within the city limits.

“The fellow who finds himself safe in shooting holes in the atmosphere,” said Wyatt Earp, “will, the first thing you know, be shooting holes in citizens.”

So Marshal White issued a ukase that anyone who against the peace and dignity of Tombstone presumed to fire a gun in town would suffer the full penalty of the law, which meant a fine and the calaboose.

Curly Bill, new to Arizona, was just beginning to be heard of as an outlaw. Mere reputation for lawless deeds out in the mesquite jungles was not regarded as just cause for arrest in the silver camp, and Curly Bill came and went at his sweet will, and was a familiar figure in saloons and gambling places. Wherever he got it, he had money in plenty and spent it with a free hand. Saloon loungers were sure of free drinks as long as Curly Bill was in town, and when Curly Bill sat down at a faro table, the dealer dropped his customary air of languorous indifference and straightened up for swift, stiff play.

With some roistering cowboy companions, Curly Bill emerged from a saloon on Allen Street one midnight, and it seemed fitting to the company to wind up the evening’s entertainment with a salvo from their six-shooters, the same being an amusement dear to the cowboy heart. So everyone took a random shot at the moon, except Curly Bill, who refrained from wasting lead, having theories of his own on the advisability of keeping a six-shooter constantly loaded against all emergencies. When Marshal White came running to investigate this breach of the peace, the cowboys scattered, and Curly Bill, dodging across the street, stood in the shadow of a building in an open lot. Spying him out, Marshal White rushed over and demanded his gun.

“I didn’t do none o’ that shootin’,” snarled Curly Bill.

“Gimme that gun o’ yours,” ordered the marshal.

Curly Bill slid his weapon from its holster and was in the act of handing it over when Wyatt Earp ran up behind and threw his arms about him. Marshal White at the same instant seized the gun, but, as he was wresting it from Curly Bill’s grasp, the weapon was discharged and the marshal fell with a mortal wound. As the gun flamed, Wyatt Earp bent his six-shooter, as they say, over Curly Bill’s head and, knocking him down, hustled him off to jail, where the outlaw nursed his split scalp and flamed into bitterness against Wyatt Earp for this abrupt manhandling⁠—a bitterness that grew bitterer through the years and never died until Curly Bill himself died.

Marshal White was dead within a few hours, and when the news of his death spread through the town, a crowd gathered at the jail and threatened to lynch Curly Bill, but was persuaded to disperse by Wyatt Earp who thus saved the life of the man who was to become one of his relentless enemies.

After a preliminary hearing before Justice Gray, Curly Bill, who gave his name as William Brocius, as appears by the official records, though old-timers who knew him say it was William Graham, was removed to Tucson where he stood trial before Justice Neugass. Curly Bill testified that Marshal White had caused his own death by the violence with which he had seized the outlaw’s six-shooter. This view of the fatality was sustained by Wyatt Earp on the witness stand and by a dying statement made under oath by Marshal White and submitted in court. Thus exonerated by the two officers concerned in the affair, Curly Bill was acquitted, Justice Neugass holding the tragedy “a misadventure.”

Curly Bill afterward boasted that he had killed Marshal White intentionally. The outlaw declared that he had presented his six-shooter butt foremost but, slipping a forefinger inside the trigger guard, had trickily whirled the weapon around end for end and fired as Marshal White seized it. This story may possibly have been true, though the details of the tragedy as they came out in court seemed to discredit it. If Curly Bill fired with malice aforethought, the trick was so deftly performed that it deceived not only such a six-shooter expert as Wyatt Earp but also the man who died from the bullet.

The tragedy that deprived Tombstone of its first town marshal was effective, it may be mentioned in passing, in advancing materially the fortunes of the Earps. Marshal White was killed October 27, 1880, and at a general election a few days later, Virgil Earp was chosen without opposition to fill the vacancy. With Virgil Earp at the helm of police affairs and Wyatt Earp in an important Federal position, the Earps were in a way to become politically powerful.

Much more characteristic of Curly Bill than this early Tombstone adventure was a later one in which the principal role was enacted by the only man who ever played a joke on the outlaw chief. Dick Lloyd was an old cowboy as seriously stupid as a range steer and perfectly harmless until he came to town and got drunk enough to imagine himself a bad man. When he rode into Fort Thomas one hot dusty day from Bear Springs Valley over in the Grahams, he was dry with a five-months’ thirst. Tying his paint pony to a mesquite tree, he clanked into E. Mann’s saloon, where, as it happened, Curly Bill was playing poker. Around the table with the outlaw leader were such convivial spirits as John Ringo, Joe Hill, Tom and Frank McLowery, Ike Clanton, and Jim Hughes, and the game had been roaring for two days and nights without interruption. After a few rounds of raw whisky with the genial E. Mann, Dick Lloyd wandered with a sunrise smile to the poker table. These rustlers were old friends of his. As a cowboy in off the range to spend his money, he had had many a social glass with them in Charleston and Galeyville, and he greeted them with boisterous goodfellowship. “Hello, Curly.⁠ ⁠… Howdy, Ringo.⁠ ⁠… Put her there, Hill⁠ ⁠… How’s all the boys?”

“I’ve knowed old Dick ever sence he worked for the Diamond A over in the Animas,” remarked Curly Bill when Lloyd had gone back to the bar, “and a better hand never punched cows.”

After Dick had had a few more drinks with E. Mann, the two men walked to the front door. There the cowboy, with no apparent reason, pulled his six-shooter and hauled up and threw down, as they say, on the genial E. Mann. The bullet creased the saloon-keeper’s neck as he dodged behind the bar, leaving a scar that became a lifelong mystery, E. Mann being too drunk ever to remember why he was shot, and Dick Lloyd being past the point of explanations. This was the beginning of the affair.

Reeling across the street, Dick climbed on his pinto pony. Drawing his Winchester from its saddle scabbard and sticking the muzzle high over his head, he fired a shot by way of advertising the show, securing Fort Thomas’s instant and undivided attention.

“Whee‑e‑e‑e‑e!”

Raising a war whoop, he went charging through the street, shooting up the town with fine abandon, his devastating course marked by crashing windows and splintered store fronts and citizens running madly for cover. When he chanced to spy the fine-looking horses of the Curly Bill outfit hitched in a corral, he abandoned his sorry pinto and mounted a rangy bay. This animal belonged to Joe Hill, now sitting in the poker game in E. Mann’s saloon, as dangerous an hombre as rode with Curly Bill, and incidentally the black sheep of one of the best-known families in Arizona, Joe Hill not being his name.

Mounted now in style, Dick came curving out of the corral on the dead run and again went careering up and down the street, yelling and pumping lead at everything in view. But all the citizens having ducked out of sight, Dick, as an actor giving a high-class performance, felt the loss of his audience. Tearing up and down an empty street with nobody to shoot at wasn’t much fun. A brilliant inspiration flashed upon him. He would ride into the bar and break up the poker game. That would be a great joke on Curly Bill. His stupid drunken face twitched in a gargoyle grin as he drew rein in front of the saloon. Guiding his stumbling horse up on the board sidewalk, he bent low in the saddle as he rode through the door.

For an instant there was profound silence. Then the saloon seemed to explode with a roar of six-shooters. Out of the door the horse lunged, snorting and wild-eyed, saddle empty, pommel shot away. Blue smoke drifted out into the street. The old cowboy’s joke had been a riot. Laughing with huge enjoyment, Curly Bill and the rustlers settled back to their card game. The humorist lay sprawled in the middle of the floor, shot all to pieces.

“Old Dick,” remarked Curly Bill, “was a good feller. Gimme three kyards.”

“But what gits me,” drawled Joe Hill, “is why that bughouse reptile⁠—two to me⁠—as soon as he gits his war paint on⁠ ⁠…”

“Bet you ten,” said Curly Bill, shoving in a stack.

“I shorely never would have suspicioned nohow that that locoed tarantler, with me a-settin’ here playin’ poker and him knowin’ it⁠—I call.”

“Aces up,” said Curly Bill.

“Good hand. But what I can’t figure out is how in the hell that simple-minded pifflicated centipede ever had the cold guts to come ridin’ in here on my own hoss.”

“Old Dick never meant no harm,” said Curly Bill, skinning down his cards and reaching for the pot. “He was jest drunk and havin’ a little fun.”

They dressed old Dick in a brand-new suit of black clothes with white shirt, white collar, and black bow tie, Curly Bill contributing the money and insisting on such mortuary regalia.

“Them old duds of Dick’s,” he said, “wuz good enough fer ridin’ range, but now he’s dead, he oughter look stylish like a regular corpse.”

The spring wagon hearse went at a gallop out of town, the outlaws clattering behind and firing at every jump. At the grave in the cactus on the hill, Curly Bill tucked a pint of whisky beneath the dead man’s folded hands.

“You might, maybe, need a swig along the trail, Dick,” he said.

Beer bottles popped as the body was lowered to its rest on rawhide riatas.

“Here’s how, old cowboy,” said John Ringo, holding up his bottle. “You went out crazy drunk, but you’ll have a hell of a long time to sleep it off.”

They set the empty beer bottles around the mound and placed a quart whisky bottle at the head. Then, with a last six-shooter volley over the grave, the outlaws swung into their saddles and galloped back to their poker game in E. Mann’s saloon. The man who played a joke on Curly Bill had passed into history.

Curly Bill, it was said, never forgot a kindness or an injury and never failed to repay either when opportunity offered. Sandy King, one of his rustlers, having been shot in a brush with officers, Curly Bill was nursing him in the hills near Fort Bowie. A lieutenant at the fort, out one day chasing jackrabbits with greyhounds, rode into the outlaw camp and explained the accident of his presence under cover of Curly’s gun. When the officer learned of King’s wound, he offered to ride back to the post and fetch an ambulance.

“What then?” asked Curly suspiciously.

“The man will be given proper surgical attention,” replied the lieutenant.

“That all?”

“That’s all.”

The lieutenant brought out an ambulance and took King to Fort Bowie, where, in the post hospital, the outlaw recovered from his injury and went his way in peace.

Several months later, Curly Bill raided the army corrals at Fort Bowie and ran off a number of horses. The same lieutenant was placed in charge of a squad of soldiers that took the trail. He found the stolen horses at Hughes’s ranch in a corral surrounded by a high adobe wall behind which stood Curly Bill’s outlaws with rifles.

“What do you want?” challenged the outlaw.

“I’ve come for those stolen horses,” replied the lieutenant.

“Try to take ’em,” shouted the outlaw, and the rustlers cocked their guns.

Curly Bill took a second look at the lieutenant.

“Hold on, boys,” commanded Curly. “That’s the man who saved Sandy King’s life.”

Curly Bill threw open the corral gate and helped the soldiers cut out the stolen army horses. He shook hands with the lieutenant.

“You can have anything you want from Curly Bill any time you want it,” he said in parting.

Curly Bill’s outlaw kingdom had two capitals. The first was Charleston on the San Pedro. The second was Galeyville in the San Simon. When it seemed to King Curly that Charleston was a little too close to Tombstone and the reign of law and order Wyatt Earp had set up, he moved his headquarters eastward across the Chiricahuas to Galeyville.

Charleston was a town of five hundred people, under the shade of great cottonwood trees on the west bank of the San Pedro and half-encircled by that pellucid stream. To get drunk and shoot up this quaint village now and then was only to show one’s self a public-spirited citizen. When one drew near Charleston at night, one estimated the distance by the definiteness of the revolver shots of inebriated revellers. C. A. Cummings, who now owns half of Tombstone and who was then ditch tender for the Charleston stamp mill, had to do sentry duty without a light along the mill flume because so many shots were fired from the town at his lantern. An ordinary form of salutation was, “Well, how many dead ones have they got on ice this morning?”

Jack Swartz, a Charleston saloon-keeper, buried his Mexican wife in the morning, killed a Mexican man at noon, and married another Mexican woman before sundown. Jim Wolf, catching a tramp robbing his house, resolved himself into a one-man lynching party and hanged the thief to an apple tree, relenting and cutting him down just before his life was extinct. Jerry Barton, a saloon man noted for his strength, was said to have killed seventeen men, three in handkerchief duels and two with his fist. When Jim Wolf inquired how many men Jerry had in his private graveyard, the giant pursed his brows reflectively. “Do Mexicans count?” he asked.

Justice of the Peace Jim Burnett, erratic czar of the town, having trouble with the Board of Supervisors over his fees, announced that in the future “this court will take care of itself,” and thereafter remained in rebellion against the county authorities and put all fees in his own pocket. A coroner’s jury, under instructions from the justice, brought in a verdict that “it served the Mexican right for getting in front of the gun.” Justice Burnett issued his own warrants and served them with a shotgun. No matter where he arrested a prisoner, in street or saloon, he at once declared court open, assessed the fine, and usually collected it then and there. When Jack Haarer, a ranchman, was drunk and shooting up the town, the justice dragged him from his horse and fined him twenty head of three-year-old steers. Having fined Jaw Bone Clark, who ran a dance hall, fifty dollars for being drunk, Justice Burnett lost the money in a poker game. Then the Court left the table long enough to arrest Jaw Bone again on the additional charge of disturbing the peace, and having fined him another fifty, bought a fresh stack of chips.

The Rev. Tuttle came over from Tombstone and held religious services one evening in the schoolhouse, Charleston being shy on churches. Curly Bill, having some curiosity to see what church was like, rounded up Ike Clanton, and the two outlaws went to the meeting. As these noted robbers and desperadoes stalked up the aisle with their six-shooters on and took front seats, the congregation became panic-stricken. One slipped out and then another until the minister was left with Curly Bill and Ike Clanton. Preacher Tuttle, sharing in the general consternation, was edging toward the back door when Curly Bill drew a bead on him.

“Come back here,” shouted Curly. “We’ve took out chips in this game and we aim to see the deal through to the last turn.”

The reverend gentleman, keeping a dubious eye on Curly’s gun, came back.

“Me and Ike was feelin’ low-spirited,” Curly explained, “and we ’lowed we’d come in and hear you preach, thinkin’ maybe yo’ sermon might cheer us up. Yo’ congregation’s done sneaked out on you fer no speshul reason clear to us, but we’d admire to have you open up yo’ game regular and,” Curly added with an offhand gesture with his six-shooter, “ef this here sermon don’t come off on the square, it’ll come off in the smoke.”

Whereupon the minister launched into a pulpit oration of regulation length. But he took occasion as he went along to give his congregation of two outlaws some pretty hard digs, and did not fail to paint a telling picture of the hell of fire and brimstone that awaited all robbers and murderers who perished in their sins.

“Now,” said the preacher with a sly smile at the conclusion of his discourse. “If the congregation will rise, I will pronounce the parting benediction.”

“None whatever,” declared Curly Bill. “This here roundup ain’t over by no means. Yo’ sermon’s done got me and Ike millin’ round and pintin’ the right way but we ain’t saved yit. However, in the present excited state of our feelin’s, we allow a hymn might shove us on into the gospel corral.”

Preacher Tuttle, who had a sonorous baritone voice, sang a hymn. He sang it so well that Curly Bill suddenly developed a great taste for religious music and, casually fingering his six-shooter, demanded more. And for an hour the preacher sang hymn after hymn loudly and with great fervour before Curly’s new passion for psalmody was appeased.

“You’ve done give us a good show,” said Curly Bill finally. “Ef me and Ike ain’t got enough religion now to git us through the pearly gates, it shore ain’t no fault o’ your’n. Seein’ as how yo’ throat must be tolerable dry, we’d be plumb pleased ef you’d step down to Schwartz’s bar with us. The drinks will be on me.”

Dozing in a chair next morning under the alamosas in front of Charlie Tarbell’s Eagle Hotel, Curly Bill opened his eyes to see Justice Burnett pointing a double-barrel shotgun at his head.

“Curly Bill, hear ye, hear ye,” intoned the justice solemnly, “this honourable court is now in session and you are hereby tried and convicted on the charge of illegally, unlawfully, and without warrant of law breaking up the church services in the schoolhouse last night. And it is the judgment of this here court, to wit: that you be fined twenty-five dollars, and that you pay this here fine forthwith, immediately and at once.”

“All right, Jim,” said Curly good-naturedly, getting out a roll and peeling off several bills. “Here’s your money, and the fun was cheap at the price.”

Curly Bill used to tell this story on himself with great glee. “And that low-down ornery old robber,” he would say, “who didn’t know no more ’bout law than a range bull, kept them two barrels of his’n p’inted right between my eyes till I paid him that fine.”

Charleston’s famous justice of the peace met a tragic death years afterward. He had gone to ranching near Hereford, a few miles up the San Pedro Valley from Charleston, and his land adjoined that of W. C. Greene, principal owner of the Cananea copper mines in old Mexico, and a multimillionaire. A dam Greene had built across the river for irrigation purposes was blown up, and in the flood that followed, Greene’s little girl was drowned. Greene became convinced that Burnett had wrecked his dam and, encountering the former justice at the Allen Street entrance of the O.K. corral in Tombstone, shot him to death. Some of the most distinguished lawyers of the Arizona bar were engaged in Greene’s defense at his trial in Tombstone, and he was acquitted. Greene, dead now many years, was popularly supposed to have been the original of the Old Cattleman of Alfred Henry Lewis’s Wolfville tales. Burnett, who was unarmed at the time of his death, always denied blowing up the dam, and the evidence seemed to establish his innocence. “It is singular,” remarks Historian McClintock, “that his killing was for one crime that in all probability he did not commit.”

Galeyville, Curly Bill’s last capital, sprang up in the fall of 1880 as a boom silver camp in Turkey Creek Canyon on the east side of the Chiricahuas. It was named for John H. Galey, a Pennsylvania oil man, who owned the discovery mine and established a small smelter there. The town was totally deserted by the latter part of 1882. Nothing of it remains. Few people in Arizona know where it was.

The site of the famous old place is a mile from Paradise, which itself was a boom camp that went up like a rocket and came down like the stick in the early years of the present century, and is now only a huddle of dilapidated houses deep in the wilds of Silver Creek Canyon. From Paradise you pass to Turkey Creek and come to a point where the mountains open out into an amphitheatre. Here you climb to a stony mesa sparsely covered with juniper and live oak. You see a number of rectangular mounds that suggest unconvincingly the foundations of old buildings. But you stumble on a whisky bottle clotted with dirt, empty probably for nearly half a century, drained possibly by Curly Bill himself, and you know you stand on the site of Galeyville. The main range of the Chiricahuas towers to the west. Down in the lowland by the creek is a tangle of ash and sycamore timber. Through the mouth of the canyon, a few miles away, you catch a glimpse of the San Simon Valley. Where once stood the drunken, roaring outlaw stronghold, the romantic beauty of the lonely mountain bowl is steeped in peace and deep silence.

“I lived in Galeyville two years,” said James C. Hancock, now postmaster of Paradise. “The main street ran along the edge of the mesa, and all the saloons and stores stood on one side of it facing Turkey Creek bottoms. All except Nick Babcock’s saloon, which had the opposite side of the street all to itself. Curly Bill used to sit in a chair under a live oak in front of Babcock’s with a bottle of beer in one hand and a six-shooter in the other and, between drinks, shoot at lizards, chipmunks, and tin cans.⁠ ⁠… Larry Garcia didn’t stop when Jim Johnson called to him but walked on behind a coal dump down by the smelter. Johnson saw a hat bobbing behind the coal and, supposing it was Garcia’s, sent the hat flying through the air with a bullet. When the face of a stranger, greatly astonished, rose above the coal, Johnson apologized. ‘Excuse me, mister,’ he shouted. ‘I evidently made a mistake.’⁠ ⁠… I remember how the bullets whistled up the hill when Al George shot at a butcher who had waved a paper at George’s pony. Little things like that were always happening in Galeyville. Every five minutes or so, day and night, somebody was firing off a gun. Galeyville was one of the most healthful spots in Arizona, but three doctors did a fine practice patching people together.⁠ ⁠… While showing what an expert he was at whirling a six-shooter, Jim Johnson shot himself in the leg. Blood poisoning set in, and the doctor said amputation was necessary. But Jim wouldn’t have it. ‘I ain’t worth more’n a dollar and a half with two legs,’ he said. ‘With one leg, I wouldn’t be worth a drink of Nick Babcock’s booze.’ So Johnson saved his leg and lost his life.⁠ ⁠… Galeyville put on metropolitan airs when a weekly paper started up. But there weren’t but three issues. A pony, tied to the ridgepole of the shanty, ran away and wrecked the printing plant.”

When Cherokee Jack Rogers rode into Galeyville one day, leading a mule by a rope, Curly Bill addressed him in tabasco language.

“You ten-cent pickpocket,” said Curly Bill, “you stole that there mule from a widow woman in Pinery, and you take that there animal straight back to her. Head west mighty quick and burn the wind, or I’ll fill your cheap carcass full of lead.”

And Cherokee Jack did what Curly Bill told him and did it pronto. Cherokee had been four-flushing about Galeyville for some time pretending to be a hard hombre, and being called by Curly Bill in this way stung his sensitive spirit. The first time he got drunk he started in to convince a skeptical community that he was bad.

He ran into Bob Williams in Jack Dall’s saloon and made him get down on his knees and say a prayer. Then he wandered into Shotwell’s store, and poking a six-shooter into Pat O’Day’s ribs, ordered him to dance. Though a genial soul, Pat had conscientious scruples against doing a hornpipe under threat and, grabbing a sledge hammer, he stretched Cherokee out senseless on the floor. He was about to take another swing but Shotwell stopped him.

“Don’t mess up the place, Pat,” said Shotwell. “Take him outside and kill him.”

So Pat dragged the unconscious Cherokee out into the street. A crowd of citizens assembled. Milt Hicks, one of Curly Bill’s men, spoke feelingly.

“The reputation of our town for law and order,” said Milt, “has suffered from the depredations of this here Cherokee Jack, and it’s time he was learned a lesson.”

These sentiments seemed to be unanimous and old Jim Hughes, who was also a member of Curly Bill’s gang, made a suggestion to Pat O’Day.

“Thar ain’t no use in us citizens gittin’ mixed up in this here affair,” said Jim Hughes. “We’ll withdraw down to the smelter and inspect the machinery. You’ve done started the job, Pat, and you might as well finish it. You’ll find my old long-tom rifle leaning behind the bar in Jack McConaghey’s saloon.”

So the citizens retired to the smelter, which was just off the mesa down by Turkey Creek, and devoted themselves to a careful inspection of the machinery until they heard a shot. Then they went back up town and, inviting Pat O’Day to join them, refreshed themselves with much liquor at Nick Babcock’s bar.

It was a little after this incident that Curly Bill took charge of the election in San Simon. San Simon was a railroad station twenty miles from Galeyville consisting of two or three dwellings, a saloon and general store, some stock pens, a water tank, and a section house. There weren’t more than thirty people living there, including the women and children and ten or twelve Chinese section hands. Charles Shibbell was running against Bob Paul for sheriff of Pima County, Cochise County not yet having been organized. As Paul had been a stagecoach shotgun messenger, Curly Bill and his men, who sometimes dabbled in stage robbery, were strong for Shibbell.

San Simon’s legitimate voting strength, of course, wasn’t a drop in the bucket in the returns of any general election, but as the political boss of the San Simon Valley, Curly Bill wanted to make a big showing for Shibbell and demonstrate to Paul the contemptuous estimate the San Simon placed on all shotgun messengers.

Curly brought the Chinese section hands in from their labour on the railroad and voted them. He voted the women and children. Still the ballot box looked pretty empty. Then he dropped in ballots for all the livestock, giving names to all the horses, mules, burros, goats, dogs, and poultry. The saloon-keeper’s dog became Shepherd W. Towser; Hiram J. Gander was the lordly bird belonging to the mistress of the boarding shack; and Dominick R. Crow was the section boss’s speckled rooster. San Simon piled up a rousing majority for Shibbell. The election commissioners in Tucson were startled when they counted the great number of ballots from this insignificant way station in the desert. An investigation followed, and the San Simon precinct was thrown out.

Galeyville never had more than three or four hundred people. When the mine closed down and the smelter was moved to Benson, the town emptied like a circus tent after a ring show. In two weeks the only persons left were Rube Hadden and Seward Smith, who had been a justice of the peace. For twenty years these two lived in the empty town alone, and then Smith moved away. But for five or six years longer, Rube Hadden remained as Galeyville’s last and only inhabitant. He did a little mining and assessment work in the hills, and when he sat in the evening by his front door, he could see from one end of the main street to the other. The old saloons where Curly Bill and his outlaws had once caroused were falling into decay, the bars still standing and the mirrors behind the bars reflecting only cobwebs and empty darkness. The dance hall where the rustlers used to shoot the French heels off the slippers of the girls whirling in a waltz or a quadrille was tumbling down. The store windows were black with rain-spotted dust, the rotting wooden sidewalks were caving in, and grass and weeds were growing in the street. But Rube Hadden didn’t seem to mind the silence and loneliness. He grew old and gray as Galeyville’s entire population, and he might be there yet if it hadn’t been for the new silver strike in Silver Creek Canyon. Then he moved a little closer to Paradise, and you’ll find him there today living alone in a log cabin under the pines and edging along toward ninety. What was left of Galeyville was finally torn down, and the lumber used for buildings in Paradise.

Charleston, like Galeyville, passed into oblivion in the full tide of its iniquities. When the stamp mill was closed, the town was abandoned. The place that knew Charleston in its glory is now a haunted desolation. The tall cottonwoods that shaded the village still stand by the San Pedro, but buried in thick underbrush beneath them are only a few crumbling adobe walls. Stark and ghostly in the mesquite tangles, the old ruins stand like grim skeletons in lonely vigil above a scene of crime.