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A brightening lilac bruise scrapes across the sky, forming a backdrop for an abandoned relic of a vanished Arizona civilization: two concrete Doric columns, the last remnants of a school that served the copper miners' children of Gleeson generations back. Slowly but unremittingly, the desert is reclaiming the architecture. A 1980 photo shows an arch spanning the columns, but there's no trace of it now. An ironwood tree is muscling its way through the front steps, crumbling them without ceremony or regret. Over another hundred years, the ruin will lose its last traces of pride and defiance and go gently into the good night of ancient history. Waiting for the sunset developing over the ruin, I contemplate the transitory nature of human intervention in the desert. People come, kick up some dust, then go. The land may take a few dozen years or a few thousand to repair the scars and smooth over the evidence, but in the end it will win. It always does.

This southeastern slice of the state, Cochise County, is a good place to think such thoughts. Unlike the Anasazi lands to the north, history here is close to the surface. There are several settlements like Gleeson, mostly born in the late 19th century and mostly left to the ghosts by the mid20th. There are ghost mines, ghost signs, a ghost fort, and even a life-size toy ghost town. Together they document a "web of dreams" like my friend Charles Bowden described in Blue Desert the frenzied settlement of a quiet land that will always know how to get rid of us.

Prowling ruins, sadly, isn't what it used to be. Most sites are on private property and off-limits, bristling with no trespassing signs and intimations of grim-reaping. Abandoned mines are marked with skull-and-crossbones signs labeling them as "death traps." Willcox Playa, an eerie ghost lake just south of Interstate 10 near Willcox, is a military reservation littered, says the Army, with leftover ammunition. There are many temptations that we can't fulfill.

The county's official "Ghost Town Trail" is 28 miles of well-graded dirt road from Tombstone northeast to Sunsites. It arrows through active cattle ranches, curls around desert hillsides furrowed with abandoned mining roads, and passes the eroding memories of Gleeson, Courtland, and Pearce. There are hardly enough ruins among all three towns to assemble one respectable movie set, but the transient dreams can nevertheless be read in the walls.

VANISHED Arizona Searching for the Ghosts of the Past

VANISHED Arizona

The Territory of Arizona was only 13 years old in 1876, but prospectors had already staked 11,605 mineral claims. In 1877 came the first tentative discoveries in the Mule Mountains around present-day Bisbee. In the next year followed Ed Schieffelin's dramatic silver strike at Tombstone, and by the 1880s prospectors were beetling over the surrounding hills and gulches, desperately hoping to find more riches.

Some, like an Irishman named John Gleeson, did. Poking around the site of an old Indian turquoise mine, Gleeson uncovered a vein of copper. The town that wore his name opened for business in 1900, burned in 1912, and boomed again with the copper demands of World War I. The post office closed in 1939, and Gleeson dozed into eclipse. I recall stopping for a beer at the dark, cool saloon in 1978, but it's now locked and shuttered. NO TRESPASSING. The adobe hospital, school, and jail are slouching toward oblivion. A handful of scattered homes are still occupied, but it's obvious Gleeson has no interest in making a living as a ghost town. Fine by me; the metamorphosis into tourist trap would rob the ruins of their honest dignity.

Three crumbling buildings and no inhabitants are left at Courtland, whose post office opened in 1909 and closed in 1942. This boomtown once supported such luxuries as an ice-cream parlor, a car dealership, a movie theater, and two newspapers. The spare remnants of Courtland today might as well be an Anasazi pueblo for the evidence of any of this. The most substantial ruin is the town jail, a fact that will probably lead archaeologists of the distant future to conclude that discipline was a major concern during the mining boom. They'll be right, of course. Whatever romantic notions one might have about prospecting and pioneering are quickly dispelled with a dip into Cochise County history. Life in the territory was lived on the serrated edge.

"Cochise County has a reputation for being tough, plain mean-and-ornery tough," wrote Richard Shelton in Going Back to Bisbee. It could hardly be otherwise, given the transient character of life in the boomtowns. The discovery of silver and gold in Sulphur Springs Valley in 1895, leading to the founding of the town of Pearce, practically emptied Tombstone overnight. Although family life wasn't unknown, the 1900 U.S. census counted 489 residents of Pearce, of which 66 percent were men. Among the adult women, almost half were single. The inference is obvious, and probably correct; one source cites 12 saloons and 14 brothels during the town's brief heyday.

The memoir of one Charles Monmonier, who came to Pearce as a child in 1896, offers a colorful glimpse of life in the town. Describing the Bucket of Blood Saloon, Monmonier wrote, "A more fitting [sic] name would have been, 'The drop in and crawl out,' for there were more fights in this joint to the square inch than any booze [sic] dispensing [sic] joint in town."

For a time, Pearce enjoyed a modestly colorful life as a ghost town, thanks to the Soto Bros. & Renaud general store which survived as a living museum of frontier artifacts. A few years ago, it closed, and its merchandise was auctioned off. The cast-iron facade with its French fleurs-de-lis tacked onto the original adobe store remains a poignant effort to apply a veneer of civilization, Potemkin villagelike, to the frontier.

Dos Cabezas was never of much account as a mining center Tombstone historian Ben Traywick found that just $182,000 in gold was extracted nearby but today it's the most engaging of the Cochise County ghosts, thanks entirely to the efforts of a retired mechanic named Orville Mickens, whose hobby got out of hand.

Mickens, 77, has the posture of a flint-lock and a living random-access memory equivalent to a medium-size library. He has been prospecting for history since he moved to Cochise County in 1950 and exhibiting the results in his private Frontier Relics Museum since 1983. It's a little-known and thoroughly informal place; visitors are advised to pull up and honk to summon him from his house for a personally guided tour.

Mickens carries a mental catalog of facts about every one of the 20,000 artifacts in his museum. And he is delighted when anyone shows an interest in anything. Why is this Spanish stirrup made of heavy bronze? "It kept the cactus from getting in their boots." Where did the Apaches get steel arrowheads? "They made them out of the bands around whiskey barrels." I ask a few questions as primers, and two hours later Mickens is still lecturing about the things he's been given, traded for, or found with his metal detector. He is a random hopscotch of history, but it confirms the resourcefulness of the waves of dreamers who've passed through Cochise County: the Spaniards, the miners, the ranchers, and Cochise, himself.

VANISHED Arizona

Of course, Cochise, the legendary leader of the Chiricahua Apaches. There are no substantial Indian ruins in this corner of Arizona, since the Apaches were nomadic, never building anything more substantial than thatched wickiups. But the story of the bloody collision between the Chiricahuas and the American newcomers is laid bare at the ghost garrison, Fort Bowie National Historic Site.

You can't ride in a vehicle to Fort Bowie (unless you're handicapped). The National Park Service requires an instructive and stroll-like 1.5-mile hike in through a forest of scrub oak, juniper, and mesquite. Only about 10,000 visitors a year make the trek, but those who do leave with an enhanced appreciation of life at Apache Pass in the latter half of the 19th century. The trees, six to eight feet high and remarkably dense, could be concealing half a dozen enemies or friends crouched within 50 feet, and I would never know it. Small wonder, as University of Arizona historian R.A. Mulligan wrote, that some stage passengers rattling through here around 1860 "not only lost contact with reality, but actually became raving maniacs," their minds unhinged by fright and fatigue.

The fort was founded in 1862 in response to the eruption of full-scale war the previous year. The struggle of the next two decades was much the same as elsewhere in the Southwest: Force ultimately overwhelmed the Indians. One soldier's account of the Battle of Apache Pass in 1862 seems to summarize the whole war: "The howitzers were got into position . . . and shell after shell was hurled upon the hills. . . . The hillsides were covered with fleeing Apaches who seemed imbued with supernatural powers of locomotion.... In peace and quiet we partook of the precious fountain [Apache Spring]."

The war ended in 1886, and Fort Bowie slouched into a lazy retirement. For eight more years, the soldiers amused themselves with baseball, tennis, and hunting. When the Army finally abandoned the fort in 1894, nearby settlers pirated woodwork, doors, windows every architectural artifact that could be carted off and recycled.

What's left today is amorphous lumps of adobe, encased in plaster shells to stave off their final erosion. I study an 1886 picture of the commanding officer's house-a 13room French Second Empire mansion condemned by the resident major himself as "useless and unnecessary ornamentation" and decide, somehow, that the lump makes the better story. A nicely preserved Victorian mansion on the site would be a lie, suggesting that human endeavors enjoy more endurance in Cochise County than they actually do. The best-preserved ghost town in the county is literally a lie. Jay Gammons, a movie-set supplier (and, not coincidentally, the son of a former Tombstone chief of police), has been building Gammons Gulch for almost 30 years, scrounging old lumber, windows, furniture, antique tools, and even litter from old buildings around Arizona.

But it's remarkably authentic, if you overlook the plastic flowers beside the firehouse, the photo-copied "Wanted" posters, and the discreet wheelchair-access ramp to the general store. I spend an hour walking around the "town" alone and am totally convinced by the desolation. There is nothing but the natural noises of the desert - flies, bees, cicadas and the wooden storefronts bleaching in the sun, being repossessed by the land almost as fast as Gammons can put them up. Gammons, the town father, tells me that although his buildings aren't real artifacts of history, ghosts reside in them nevertheless. "I call 'em spirits," he says. "Nails and timbers and boardwalks that actually come from old places." People like the effect, he says, because it's a way to project into a fantasy to live, if just for a few moments, back in the tentative thrust of civilization into the desert Southwest.

It's also an opportunity to ponder what we are to become.

WHEN YOU GO

To take the “Ghost Town Trail,” drive east through Tombstone on State Route 80, turn left onto Gleeson Road, and follow the signs. Dos Cabezas is 14 miles east of Willcox on State Route 186. The Frontier Relics Museum is usually open from 9 A.M. to 5 P.M. Monday through Saturday, but call first for confirmation. (520) 384-3481. Admission by donation.

To find Gammons Gulch, drive 46 miles east from Tucson on Interstate 10. Take Exit 306 and continue north 12 miles on Pomerene Road. Watch for a sign on the left. Admission is $5. Overnight accommodations available. (520) 212-2831.

The three-mile (round-trip) foot trail to Fort Bowie National Historic Site is open every day from sunrise to sunset. The park headquarters is open 8 A.M. to 5 P.M., and water is available there. For handicapped access and other information, phone the park headquarters at (520) 847-2500. Admission is free.

Motels and bed and breakfast inns are available in most Cochise County towns; each local chamber of commerce has information. The Willcox Chamber of Commerce and Agriculture staff provides information on the entire county. Contact them at 150 N. Circle I Road, Willcox, AZ; (520) 384-2272. There also are several guest ranches in the county and public campgrounds in Chiricahua National Monument, (520) 824-3560, and the San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area (BLM), (520) 458-3559.

All dirt roads mentioned in this article are graded and normally passable in passenger cars. Always carry extra drinking water and watch for deer and cattle on the roads.

For a comprehensive guide to ghost towns statewide, see Arizona Highways' 136-page book Arizona Ghost Towns and Mining Camps, written by Philip Varney.