Gleeson

The ground was Apache long before it was anybody's claim — Chiricahua territory, where Navajo miners negotiated rights to dig the turquoise that gave the first camp its name. After Geronimo's removal in 1886, prospectors moved in; Tiffany & Company ran a turquoise mine here for a few years. The Turquoise post office lasted 1890 to 1894, and then an Irishman from Tipperary named John Gleeson registered a copper claim south of the old camp, opened the Copper Belle Mine, and gave the new town his name in October 1900.

Copper carried it: Silver Bill, Pejon, Defiance and others pulled lead, silver and zinc along with the copper, and Gleeson swelled past a thousand people — a school, a hospital, a theater, a dozen restaurants and bars, and a large Mexican workforce permitted to work underground. Twenty-eight buildings burned in a 1912 fire that started in the B.A. Taylor warehouse, and the town rebuilt. The mines boomed through World War I, played out by the 1930s, and the post office closed on March 31, 1939.

Gleeson's best-preserved building is its smallest public one. Constable Wesley Wooten Cates — a Texas Ranger at sixteen under Captain Bill McDonald, and in 1894 the youngest city marshal Amarillo ever had — took the Gleeson job in 1904 and talked the county out of the oak tree. The wooden replacement lost its credibility when inmates tried to lift off the tin roof, so in 1910 the county poured a reinforced-concrete jail for $1,778: two cells joined by a cage, same plan as the Courtland jail up the road. The wooden one was auctioned off for $25.

Jail records show two to eight inmates on a typical day — petty theft, public drunkenness, assault. The Gleeson Cemetery, still maintained, holds the town's last residents and its best anecdote: the man who stumbled out of the Bono Saloon blind drunk, penned his horse for the night in what he took for a little corral, and woke to find it inside a fenced grave plot.

The haunting claims concentrate where you'd expect: the jail, now privately owned and opened for ghost tours since a 2008 restoration, files cold spots, voices and the feeling of occupancy in a building that held two cells' worth of men at a time. The Bono Saloon keeps its 1982 mural of the town as residents remembered it; the school keeps two Doric columns and an ironwood tree muscling through the steps.

The wider claim is atmospheric — Cochise County's ghost-town corridor through Gleeson, Courtland and Pearce draws the standard reports of figures and sounds in buildings that have been empty since 1939. The archive files these as eyewitness accounts of a landscape that is itself doing most of the work.

Gleeson's ruins are eroding, as Arizona Highways put it, without ceremony or regret — but slowly, and on a maintained walking tour. The record keeps a turquoise camp, a copper boom, a $1,778 jail and one famous horse in a cemetery. The legend keeps whatever still answers to Gleeson after the post office left.