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 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 . 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
