history

The unrepentant killer looked down at Burnett's body, raised a hand to heaven, and declared: 'Vengeance is mine.'

dam site and discovered an exploded cap and a length of fuse, convincing him that the perpetrator was after his water supply. Three days later, Greene placed an announcement in The Prospector offering a $1,000 reward for "proofs of the party or parties who blew out my dam." But Greene knew who was responsible. Later he testified that he learned the truth from one of Burnett's Chinese farmhands.

"I found out by their own words that the men had been told by Burnett that if they needed any water to blow my dam out," said Greene, "and if I did anything, he would kill me."

The meeting between Greene and Burnett outside the O.K. Corral that July day was strange drama indeed. The irony for Burnett was that he'd stopped in Tombstone on his way to investigate the destruction of his own dam, undoubtedly an act of retaliation by Greene. He was charged with the crime, although the matter was later dropped.

As for Greene, he came to Tombstone to have the handle of his revolver repaired. He arrived at the O.K. Corral about 11 A.M. and left the taped-up pistol and his team and buggy with John Montgomery.

Two hours later, he returned to take his gun to a repair shop. But Montgomery stopped Greene outside the corral office and began stalling. It seemed that Burnett sat just inside the office's front door, placing these bitter enemies only a few feet from each other.

In his book Colonel Greene and the Copper Skyrocket, Sonnichsen wrote that Montgomery tried his best to keep the men separated. The nervous proprietor chatted with Greene about the weather, and even brought a chair to make him more comfortable as he waited. After about 10 minutes, Burnett exited the office by a side door, and Montgomery went inside to retrieve Greene's pistol. But the delaying tactic failed when Burnett decided to have a seat in the alley to chat with friends, a spur-of-the-moment decision that probably cost him his life.

The postscript to this bizarre encounter came when Marshal Wiser was taking Greene to jail. The unrepentant killer looked down at Burnett's body, raised a hand to heaven, and declared: "Vengeance is mine."

What seemed a clear case of murder unraveled in the face of Greene's remarkable popularity. Some said that Sheriff Scott White, who had spent the night before the killing as a guest at Greene's ranch, swore the accused would not stay imprisoned as long as he was in office.

District Attorney Allen English, also a friend, took the extraordinary step of withdrawing as prosecutor in the case and switched over to become part of the defense team headed by William Barnes of Tucson. He represented the penniless Greene for free, and other friends put up $30,000 in bail money.

In the months between the killing and the trial, it became obvious that William Herring, the Territory's hired-gun prosecutor, was going to lose. Hard fact couldn't sway overwhelming support for Greene, a sentiment captured by writer Frank King in the Border Vidette newspaper for July 17: "There is not much doubt that Greene will be cleared, as what he did was what any man under the circumstances would have done, and the man he killed was a mighty good man to be dead."

Only out-of-town papers dared breathe any ill will toward Greene. Tombstone businessman P.B. Warnekros told the San Francisco Chronicle that it appeared to him as if Greene had planned Burnett's murder, and used his grief to generate sympathy.

The trial began December 17. The widespread publicity filled to capacity the second floor of the old courthouse for each of its three days.

Robert E. Ladd, writing in the summer 1963 issue of Arizona magazine, said that the excitement was so high that Tombstone "took on the appearance of a county fair in full swing." But the spectacle was quick and probably pointless.

Greene took the stand and spoke like a man with nothing in particular weighing on his mind. He was so confident that when Herring asked for an explanation of his vengeance remark, Greene said he believed he'd been made "the instrument of Greene further testified that as Burnett was sitting outside the corral, he overheard him ask a man if he had a rifle in his wagon. The answer was no, and Burnett said: "It makes no difference. I've got a gun myself, and I'll kill that before night."

B.A. Packard, another of Greene's chums, swore that Burnett had pointedly threatened Greene's life. Packard said he relayed those threats to Greene, thus providing the necessary legal grounds for proving self-defense.

This carried great weight with a jury still imbued with the frontier notion that if a man threatened your life, you were justified in shooting him on sight.

Warnekros' testimony that he examined Burnett's body after the shooting and failed to find a weapon seemed to go unheard in the courtroom. After Barnes and Herring shook the windows with eloquent closing statements, the jury spent a total of 10 minutes in deliberation. When Greene was pronounced not guilty of second-degree murder, The Prospector reported that “a demonstration of approval immediately went up from the large number of sympathizers of the accused in the crowd, entirely ignoring court etiquette and rule.” But the most sensational part of Greene's story was yet to unfold. The man who was so broke he couldn't afford to pay for his own defense went on to become a copper and cattle baron with an estimated worth of $50 million. The exploding use of electricity spiked a demand for copper, a trend Greene was able to ride thanks to his purchase in 1900 of an abandoned mine in Cananea, Mexico. The mine was soon producing 100 million pounds of ore a year, and the suddenly wealthy Greene who, with his new stature, wished to be called Colonel - became known in newspapers as the “Buckaroo of Wall Street.” Greene was 58 when he died in 1911, a few days after being thrown from his buggy on a Cananea street. But he was never able to escape what happened outside the O.K. Corral. He was dogged by whispers that he came to town planning all along to kill Burnett. And rumors persisted that after he became wealthy, he gave sizable shares of his Cananea Consolidated stock to White and Barnes as rewards for their loyalty in his most desperate time. Historian Sonnichsen noted that in later years Greene refused to discuss the Burnett case with anyone, and he never again packed a revolver. “If you carry a gun, you might use it,” he said.