Old Charleston:

The Brief Bloody

Tombstone had grown too tame for the Wild Bunch. A gang of hired killers, the Earps and their allies, had recently taken over the town and now ran it for the benefit of gamblers, Wells Fargo agents, and others who needed rudimentary social order to conduct their business. It had gotten so a man couldn't ride a horse into a saloon without incurring a night in jail.

So the malcontents moved their headquarters to Charleston, nine miles downhill from Tombstone, on the shady banks of the San Pedro River. To Charleston flocked those boisterous spirits who craved more freedom than Tombstone allowed under Earp rule.

In Charleston, custom guaranteed every man a fighting chance, but nothing more. Any amount of killing was tolerable so long as the dead were armed and shot from the front. Personal safety was an individual responsibility, order was a matter of definition, and self-reliance was the basis of authority. If one man's law was another's robbery, well, that's what shootouts were for. After hearing evidence in one shooting, Charleston's first justice of the peace, Judge James Burnett, concluded, "It served the victim right for getting in front of the gun."

At its height, the Charleston Wild Bunch included such criminal luminaries as the Clantons Ike, Billy, Phin, and the Old Man-Johnny Ringo, Curly Bill Brocius, the McLowrey brothers, Pony Deal, and Russian Bill (a cousin of the czar), who was destined to be lynched in Deming, New Mexico. The roster of hangers-on was long, and outlaw chiefs sometimes rode with a hundred men behind them.

When Mexican smugglers ambushed Old Man Clanton in 1881, leadership of the Wild Bunch fell to Curly Bill and Johnny Ringo. College educated and morose, Ringo supplied brains for the outfit while Curly led their raids. These two quickly became men of substance, for in the early days of Cochise County, the chief bankers, the chief gamblers, the chief lawmen, and the chief outlaws enjoyed similar status. They were all about equally likely to rob an honest man.

Curly Bill was six feet tall, freckled, and well-built. His hair was black, thick, and, of course, curly. He affected a flaming-red tie and a manner to match. Like many of his peers, he disdained water, much preferring whiskey. Cochise County Sheriff's Deputy William Breakenridge once watched Curly shoot a cup of water out of a thirsty man's hand. "Don't drink that, Shorty," Curly advised the erstwhile imbiber. "It's piezen."

Illustrations by Bill Ahrendt Life of Charleston

At the beginning of his career, Deputy Breakenridge was assigned the job of collecting taxes from the rustlers. Evidencing the canniness that eventually steered him to a ripe old age, he hired Curly as his assistant. "Yes," said a laughing Curly, "and we will make every one of them . . . cow thieves pay his taxes." Together, they rode a season across Cochise County - dodging Indians, shooting rattlesnakes, and sticking up cowboy/rustlers where they found them. Later Breakenridge, who spent his life on the trail of bad men, called Curly Bill the best partner he ever had.

In the winter of 1878-79, Amos W. Stowe laid Charleston out on the west bank of the San Pedro River, across from the silver mills of the Corbin Brothers and the Tombstone Mining and Milling Company. Silver mills require water in bulk, and because Tombstone itself was dry, the mining companies were forced to haul their ore down to the river. At their peak, from 1880 to 1882, Charleston mills pounded day and night, reducing 45 tons of ore to a few pounds of silver bullion every day.

Early on, an Irishman named Durkee won the contract to freight the raw ore from Tombstone to Charleston. Durkee was generous, perhaps to a fault, so, at the end of his highly profitable first year, he hired a hall in Charleston and threw a party to honor the laboring men of the district. Liquor was free and unlimited. An orchestra was engaged. Only working men, disarmed at the door, could enter. Working women also were encouraged to attend, but no tinhorn gamblers or gunfighters, no lawyers, bookkeepers, or bosses were invited.

Lord, rescue me from these evil men, save me from these murderers!'

The night was large, even by Charleston's lavish standards. Local manners obliged every decent man to get drunk; the entire crowd aspired to decency. As they careened through the evening, the teamsters, homesick for Texas, argued the merits of their native land with the miners and mill men. The teamsters revered Texas. The others reviled it.

Once violence between the factions became inevitable, the women fled, the barkeep closed the bar, and the orchestra chose sides. Then the party erupted into a brave and famous brawl, a fight that destroyed the hall and parts of the surrounding block. Next morning, Durkee, game to the end, paid the considerable damages while his colleagues of the night before limped to the river to soak their heads and explore their wounds.

Charleston was much more than a likely spot for a mill or a fight. It was ideal for a holdup. Loaded with bullion, Wells Fargo wagons left the mills regularly, bound for a distant railhead by way of a dirt track through a wasteland.

Getaways were a formality since tracking was nearly impossible. After a holdup, bandits could enter the San Pedro, head up or down the stream, and emerge at any rocky place that suited their purposes. Sanctuary was everywhere. South was Mexico. West and north, the Apache lived. Only desperadoes willingly departed from established routes.

Lines between law and outlawry were often vague. “At times we had some fine law officers,” recalled pioneering rancher James Wolf, “but you acquired a funny feeling toward the law when you knew that some of the deputies had a different name last year and were 'wanted' in some other state.” Sheriff's Deputy Frank Stilwell was said to have held up the stage so often that veteran horses of the line responded faster to his commands than to their drivers'.

But by all accounts, the most ponderable authority in Charleston was Judge James Burnett. Born in New York in 1832, he listed his occupation in Charleston as “butcher,” proving he was no stranger to irony, but his true vocations were the then-closely-related disciplines of jurisprudence and extortion. “He . . . could use a .45 with speed and precision,” James Wolf remembered. “Hence there was a vast amount of order and some semblance of law in his particular vicinity at all times.” As a condition of his office, Burnett was expected to turn all fines and fees over to the county commissioners, but he stopped reporting to the officials when they failed to return as much money as he thought necessary to maintain a fully functioning court and judge. The legitimacy of his court was in some doubt until Burnett decreed his was “a self-sustaining court that he had built up by his own hard efforts and that it could take care of itself without outside assistance.” Burnett held court where convenient and never let juries interfere with the inexorable progress of his version of the law.

One Sunday, Curly Bill Brocius led the outlaws to Charleston's small adobe church where they routed the good citizens, then filled the collection plate to overflowing, and demanded a sermon.

The minister quickly changed his text to an appropriate psalm: “Lord, rescue me from these evil men, save me from these murderers!” Once warmed to the theme, he preached a stirring hour of hellfire and brimstone at his unlikely congregation. After a rousing hymn, the outlaws filed out, thoroughly satisfied they had gotten their money's worth.

The next day, Judge Burnett caught Curly loitering under a tree, got the drop on him, convened court, and fined the outlaw $25 on the spot. Curly grumbled but paid up. “That's the last time I go to church,” he declared. “It's too damn expensive.” In 1880, Charleston boasted one street, two good-size adobe stores where shelves groaned under smugglers' goods, a small restaurant, two saloons, a few houses, and countless shacks. Two years later, the list had expanded to include butcher shops, Chinese restaurants, and four saloons running nonstop. The town was full of brothels. The women in them died of pneumonia and drink but were never shot, except by accident.

masked men burst into the Tombstone Mining and Milling Company. Finding the bullion vault empty, the robbers lost their nerve, killed M.R. Peel, a young clerk, and fled. It was easily established they were Zwing Hunt and Billy Grounds, a pair of notorious bandits.

The Brief Bloody Life of Charleston

The next day, a small posse led by Deputy Breakenridge cornered the outlaws at an isolated ranch house. In the fight that followed, one of the posse was killed outright, another was badly wounded, while the third, a man named E.H. Allen, ducked with Breakenridge behind a scrub oak. That tree, in Breakenridge's words, "soon proved a mite too small." A shot from the house grazed Allen's neck, knocking him unconscious. Utterly alone, Breakenridge went to work. Firing his shotgun through the open door, he mortally wounded Grounds. Then Hunt ran out the back, headed for a nearby bluff. Breakenridge coolly snatched up Allen's Winchester, calculated the distance, adjusted for the wind, and shot Hunt through the lungs as he cleared the ridge.

Peel's murder was a turning point. His father, Judge B.L. Peel, roused Cochise County with a blistering letter to The Tombstone Epitaph: "I would say to the good citizens of Cochise County there is . . . a class of cut-throats among you and you can never convict them in any court. You must combine and protect yourselves and wipe them out, or you must give up the country to them, or you will be murdered one at a time, as my son has been."

Soon the candidate of the Tombstone vigilantes was elected sheriff, and the hunt for the Wild Bunch was on. The Earps had already ambushed the Clantons and their allies near the OK Corral; next, Wyatt Earp killed Frank Stilwell for the assassination of Morgan Earp. Soon Curly Bill was gone, maybe another victim of Wyatt's. At least Wyatt claimed to have blown Curly to bits during the marshal's last murderous tour through Cochise County (a trip that left half a dozen rustlers dead). But no corpse could be produced, and many believe Curly fled to his native Montana, where he died when he was good and ready.

ambushed the Clantons and their allies near the OK Corral; next, Wyatt Earp killed Frank Stilwell for the assassination of Morgan Earp. Soon Curly Bill was gone, maybe another victim of Wyatt's. At least Wyatt claimed to have blown Curly to bits during the marshal's last murderous tour through Cochise County (a trip that left half a dozen rustlers dead). But no corpse could be produced, and many believe Curly fled to his native Montana, where he died when he was good and ready.

There is little dispute about Johnny Ringo. Strangers found him dead under a tree, boots off, brains blown out. A tinhorn gambler named Johnny-Behind-The Deuce maintained he had sneaked up on Ringo and killed the famous outlaw while he snored off a binge. But the coroner concluded Ringo had shot himself while gripped by drink, delirium, and despair.

With the ascendancy of the Law and Order party in 1882, a still vigorous Judge Burnett retired to his ranch, where he practiced some of the milder forms of rustling and feuded over water with Col. William C. Greene of Cananea and Wall Street. In 1897, Greene shot Burnett to death onthe street in Tombstone after a dynamite blast destroyed the colonel's irrigation reservoir and caused a flood that drowned one of his young daughters.

By then Charleston was deserted. The pillars of its economy had always been rustling, smuggling, robbery, and milling, and the advent of law and order had toppled the first three. The final blow came in 1886 when the Tombstone mines suddenly flooded. With the mines submerged beyond recovery, the mills, hence Charleston, became superfluous. By the fall of 1888, the post office had closed, and early in 1889 the last miners and outlaws abandoned the town. But before they left, they nailed a map of Arizona to a post, formed a squad, took aim, and, in one last salute, blew Charleston off the map.