Tombstone's old pioneer cemetery, now a roadside memorial
Boothill Graveyard, a small cemetery beside State Route 80 in Tombstone, Arizona, holds roughly 250 burials dating from 1878, including an infant believed to be its first, lawmen and outlaws from the town's silver-boom years, and the men killed in the 1881 gunfight near the O. K. Corral a few blocks away.
A boom town filled its cemetery with gunfight victims
Boothill Graveyard is a small cemetery on the edge of Tombstone, Arizona, now kept as a historic site and tourist stop. Roughly 250 people lie here, under simple markers set in rows of stone and gravel. A three-month-old baby named Eva Waters, who died of scarlet fever, is believed to be the first person buried here in 1878.
Most who followed her did not die quietly. The cemetery filled fast in a boom town built on silver and short tempers. Frederick H. White, Tombstone's first town marshal, was shot by the outlaw Curly Bill Brocius in October 1880 and buried here. A year later came the burial that made this ground famous.
On October 26, 1881, Billy Clanton and two other men were killed in a thirty-second gunfight on Fremont Street, a few blocks from where they now lie. Wyatt Earp, his brothers, and Doc Holliday fired the shots. Hundreds of townspeople turned out for the funeral that followed.
Three years later, in 1884, five men convicted in the Bisbee Massacre were hanged together and buried in a row here. Their accused ringleader, John T. Heath, has a marker nearby too, though a lynch mob killed him first and his body went home to Texas instead. A Chinese merchant known as China Mary, who ran a general store and lent money around town, was buried here in 1906 after one of the largest funerals Tombstone had seen.
By then the cemetery had already closed to new burials, replaced by a newer one up the road. It sat neglected for decades, headboards rotting, until townspeople restored it in the 1940s and gave it the name it carries now: Boothill, after the old frontier phrase for men who died with their boots on.
Visitors walk gravel rows beside the gunfight's own street
Boothill Graveyard is open now as a historic site just off State Route 80, the road that runs through Tombstone. Visitors walk the gravel rows reading names many of them already know from the gunfight story told a few blocks away, on the street where it happened.
The graves sit in plain rows of stone and gravel, marked with steel plates bearing names, dates, and sometimes how the person died.
Every person, building and event in this story opens into its own dig in the app — and Strata will dig the ground under your feet instead, wherever that is, in about a minute, with every source shown.