“Once, my father, driving home late at night, saw a white figure moving near the live oak. ‘That’s Ringo, sure,’ he thought to himself, and his hair stood on end. But the ghost turned out to be a teamster called Curly looking for his bell horse that had pulled up its picket pin and run off from camp. Curly was dressed in his white cotton drawers and undershirt.”
Coyote Smith once kept a saloon across West Turkey Creek from his ranch house. Following the trail over the Chiricahuas from Galeyville, Curly Bill and his outlaws used to stop there on their way to Tombstone and Charleston.
“When I was a boy,” said Henry Smith, “I knew Curly Bill and Ringo, Joe Hill, Bill Leonard, Jim Crane, the Clantons, McLowerys, and all the rest. They used to drink and gamble in my father’s place for two or three weeks at a time. I’ve seen Frank Leslie with them more times than I can tell. As jolly a fellow as I ever saw was Buckskin Frank, forever singing songs and keeping everybody laughing with his funny stories. Shooting at flies on the wall to show their marksmanship was a favourite pastime with these fellows, and the lizard that sunned itself on a window sill or the mouse that stuck its nose out of a hole was taking long chances. The walls looked like sieves, they were peppered so full of bullet holes. A rough bunch but good-hearted, and they spent their money free as water. Many a wild carouse John Ringo had within a hundred yards of where he sleeps today.”
John Ringo’s grave is within the circle of the deep noonday shadow of the dark-leafed, giant live oak in whose five-stemmed forks he died. Few travellers ever see it now. Few people beyond a radius of a dozen miles know where it is. The canyon trail, once crowded with wagon trains creaking beneath loads of lumber, is almost obliterated. Morse’s sawmill is gone. Only a chance horseman rides over the mountains from the San Simon on the old road the outlaws used to take from Galeyville. Far across the shimmering, sunny reaches of Sulphur Springs Valley the Dragoons are like a ribbon of amethyst in the west. Against the eastern sky loom the blue and shadowy Chiricahuas. The wide mouth of West Turkey Creek Canyon is like a wooded grass-green park. The air holds the sweetness of juniper and pine. A woodpecker tapping on a dead sycamore by the creek makes a hollow, booming sound in the deep silence. Lonely and still and peaceful is the spot where the outlaw lies.
The flat-topped mound of large, loose rocks that marks Ringo’s grave is twelve feet long, four feet wide, and as high as a man’s thigh. The stones, obtained from the creek that flows with a soft, plashing murmur at the foot of the embankment, are water-worn and smooth and in colour, brown and gray. No earth or cement holds them in place; the least among them is of a weight of four or five pounds, and a huge boulder unmarked by inscription of any sort is built into the head of the mound. Deeply impressive is this crude, lonely tomb without name or epitaph. It suggests, in its immense size, the cairn of some old giant of a lost, heroic age. After all, that may be what he was, this strong man who flung away his life but, through pillage and maraudings and robber adventures, preserved something of the honour of his youth; this outlaw fighter with the courage and chivalry of a knight of old, who here in his sepulchre of iron rocks sleeps forgotten in the morning shadows of the Chiricahuas.
Billy Claibourne was a Texas cowboy who had come to the Tombstone country with John Slaughter when that pioneer cattleman drove his first herd from the Panhandle into the San Pedro Valley. In his early days in Arizona, Billy was a rollicking, good-natured fellow but a steady, hardworking, dependable ranch hand. Unfortunately for him, John Slaughter’s ranch was only a short distance from Charleston, and Billy was soon snared in the whirlpool of that wild town’s fascinations. Every pay day found him drinking and gambling in Charleston saloons. There he fell in with the Clantons and McLowerys, who were John Slaughter’s neighbours, and was soon hobnobbing with Curly Bill and all the outlaws who rode with that redoubtable leader. One of these—it may have been Curly Bill himself—began to call him Billy the Kid. To be known by the name of the famous New Mexican desperado was unction to Billy Claibourne’s soul, and he became ambitious to justify the pseudonym and develop into a full-fledged bad man. When he killed a man in Charleston over a card game, he seemed on the high road to all the sinister glories of a desperado’s career. He had won a reputation as a killer. He was looked upon thereafter as dangerous and quick on the trigger and fraternized on terms of equality with all the bad men of the country. Though, as far as was known, he took no part in Curly Bill’s raids and robberies, he was a familiar figure in all the outlaw haunts. John Ringo early won his admiration and became his particular friend.
After Ringo’s death, Claibourne went to Globe and found work in a smelter.
“While knocking about Globe with some companions,” said William Lutley, now one of Tombstone’s leading citizens,
