Mr. Jones’s Arizona memories date back only to . That isn’t so long ago. But Arizona then was almost empty. On his way overland from Kansas, when he left the steel-end of the Santa Fe Railroad at Las Animas, Colorado, in , he did not see a railroad again until when Southern Pacific trains began to run across Arizona. His wife, who was Laura Frame, born at Gila Bend in , was the second white child born in Arizona and missed being first by only a week or so—lost the honour by an eyelash, as racing people might say.
The ruins of the old Clanton home on the San Pedro, twelve miles or so from Tombstone, are still eloquent of outlawry. Roofless now and with great breaches in the crumbling walls, the old adobe house stands on a hill commanding a wide prospect of the San Pedro Valley. West are the Huachucas, southeast the Mules, north the Whetstones, and straight up the valley across the line in old Mexico the San José Mountains. The San Pedro River brawls among its cottonwoods at the foot of the hill. Charleston was five miles north. The little town of Lewis Springs is on the railroad a quarter of a mile away across a fine vega where many a stolen horse once pastured. On its commanding hilltop the house was a castle, its thick adobe walls bulletproof and pierced with portholes. With a pair of field glasses the Clantons could sweep the valley up and down for seventy-five miles and appraise every man on horseback, every bunch of cattle, every stagecoach. No enemy could approach unseen. One may be sure that every stranger who came to the Clantons’ door had undergone careful scrutiny at long distance.
Old Man Clanton turned over his San Pedro ranch to his boys, and in the latter part of moved to the Animas Valley in New Mexico. To show his contempt for any possible danger from Mexicans whom he robbed and killed, his Animas Valley home was only a mile from the Mexican border.
Old Man Clanton took part a month before his death in the Skeleton Canyon atrocity. His ranches were places of rendezvous and refuge for stage robbers, cattle thieves, and all manner of fugitives from justice. Though his white hair and beard gave him a benevolent aspect, Old Man Clanton, even to the end, was a tough, rapacious, merciless fellow, quick on the trigger and not squeamish about blood. Ike and Billy Clanton were active members of Curly Bill’s banditti and suspected of many stage robberies. They were intelligent men, pleasant to meet, rather genial, but of a geniality that smiles with the hand resting on a six-shooter. Misfortunes and tragedy have given their fame a halo of picturesque pathos, but the Clanton boys were true sons of their father, born and bred to outlawry, and in their desperate calling, as bold and unscrupulous men as ever rustled cattle across the line or murdered Mexicans from ambush in a lonely mountain pass. Finn Clanton was reputed the mildest of the lot, but he served a ten-year sentence in Yuma for cattle stealing.
Six of Curly Bill’s outlaws set out upon a cattle raid into Sonora in the summer of . They were Milt Hicks, Alex Arnett, Jack McKenzie, John McGill, Bud Snow, and Jake Gauze. A hundred miles south of the line they rounded up three hundred head. When they had rushed the herd through San Luis Pass out into the Animas Valley, they felt they were out of danger and allowed the beeves to drift and graze. At Cloverdale ranch three miles north of the boundary, where were good grass and water, Milt Hicks was left to guard the herd while the others rode to Curly Bill’s Roofless Dobe ranch only five or six miles away, where they found the outlaw chief and a dozen other members of his band.
Smoking a cigarette at the Cloverdale ranch house, Milt Hicks could see the mouth of San Luis Pass southeast across the valley. The wide low gap through the Animas range between the Playas and Animas valleys was swathed in blue mist. Magic water and verdure of mirage trembled in the heat waves over the intervening alkali flats. Gazing at the canyon’s mouth, Hicks noticed a certain movement in the misty blueness, a certain shifting of colour from delicate azure to whitish yellow of dust. A shadowy colossal figure came surging across the shimmering silver leagues of a mirage lake. Then the giant dwindled into a Mexican in a steeple hat on a pony. Other Mexicans in steeple hats on ponies materialized until there were perhaps thirty. All came careering across the valley at a run.
Milt Hicks climbed on his horse and split the wind for the Roofless Dobe.
Far down in Sonora, when the news of the gringo raid had spread, the Mexicans had quickly foregathered and taken the trail. In the distance they saw a dust cloud travelling along the horizon. That was the stolen herd. For three days the dust beaten to the sky by the stampeding hoofs was like a pillar of cloud to guide pursuit. The Mexicans had been only a few miles behind when the cattle plunged bellowing through San Luis Pass.
The Mexicans, all old vaqueros, rounded up the cattle left by the outlaws at Cloverdale ranch and, quickly lining them out into a column, rushed them close-herded across the valley. When they passed Double Dobe ranch, owned by Charlie Green and Charlie Thomas, they added to the herd two hundred more cattle belonging to these two men. The Mexicans had lost three hundred cattle; they were taking five hundred back into Mexico.
As soon as he had been informed by Milt Hicks of the coming of the
