Boothill Graveyard

Boothill Graveyard filled up in six years. Tombstone's city cemetery opened in 1878 on the hill facing the Dragoons and closed in 1884 — the silver rush's dead packed in too fast, long rows of stone-piled graves under the desert, the famous and the nameless laid in together. Cowboys who died with their boots on next to housewives and gamblers, the Chinese section apart, the Jewish cemetery isolated in its own walled corner — the town's whole social order reproduced in its burial ground.

The catalog of violent death is the file's spine — Billy Clanton and Frank and Tom McLaury from the O.K. Corral; Marshal Fred White, shot by Curly Bill; Red River Tom; Dutch Annie and China Mary; the unmarked and unknown. The epitaphs became the West's literature: 'Here lies Lester Moore, four slugs from a .44, no Les no more,' and George Johnson, 'hanged by mistake — he was right, we was wrong, but we strung him up and now he's gone.' Johnny Cash sang the graveyard into a ballad.

By the 1920s the markers were unreadable and the graves anonymous; the town spent years researching burial records to restore the names. The file keeps what Boothill actually is — not a legend but the silver rush's mortality made visible, the six years of a boomtown's dying preserved under stone piles on the hill where the town still brings its visitors to read the epitaphs.

Boothill Graveyard is the archive's boot-hill file — Tombstone's six-year cemetery where the O.K. Corral's dead and the silver rush's mortality lie under stone-piled graves, the West's most famous boneyard.