Skeleton Canyon

Skeleton Canyon earned its name honestly — the Peloncillo pass between the Animas and San Simon valleys was a smugglers' route for decades, and for years the bones of men and cattle lay in it unburied. The first massacre came in 1879: Curly Bill Brocius, Johnny Ringo, the Clantons, and their crew ambushed a posse of Mexican rurales who'd crossed the border chasing cattle thieves — Captain Alfredo Carillo and all but three of his men died in the rocks.

The massacre that made the canyon famous came in July 1881. The Estrada gang — Mexican smugglers hauling silver north — were hit in the narrows by the usual suspects: Brocius, Ringo, the Clantons, the McLaurys. Nineteen men and twenty-six mules were shot where they stood. The legend that grew from it says the pack train carried the loot of a Monterrey cathedral and the Chihuahua mint — gold bars, a cigar box of diamonds, buckets of coin — and that the gang, having killed the mules with the drivers, buried what they couldn't carry.

Then the canyon kept killing. In 1883 Apache raiders hit Troop D of the Fourth Cavalry inside it — three troopers dead, forty horses run off. And the treasure story got its final turn: Zwing Hunt and Billy Grounds allegedly double-crossed the gang, moved the loot with a hired teamster, killed the teamster to keep the hiding place quiet, and were both dead themselves within a year — Hunt shot by Apaches, Grounds killed by a Tombstone officer. If the treasure existed, the only men who knew where it was died without saying.

The canyon is still remote — the Bootheel road, the Devil's Kitchen rock formation, the narrows where the ambushes happened. Whether the Monterrey treasure was ever real is the part nobody's settled; the bones were.