Boothill Graveyard

Boot Hill was a common name for frontier cemeteries, supposedly because so many of the people buried in them died with their boots on, and Tombstone's is among the best known. The graveyard's own website says it was used from 1879 to 1884, when a new cemetery was built on west Allen Street. Wikipedia counts at least 250 interments: lawmen, outlaws, ranchers, gamblers, husbands, wives and children.

The most visited graves are those of Tom McLaury, Frank McLaury and Billy Clanton, killed in the gunfight near the O.K. Corral on October 26, 1881. Marshal Fred White, shot by Curly Bill Brocius on October 30, 1880, is here too. So are five men legally hanged on March 28, 1884 for the robbery and killings known as the Bisbee massacre, and China Mary, a Tombstone storekeeper and money lender who died in 1906. One of the last people buried here was John Slaughter Swain, born enslaved, who became a cowboy and lived in Tombstone for decades. Johnny Cash's song "The Ballad of Boot Hill" is about this cemetery.

Not every marker tells the truth. After burials largely stopped, the cemetery fell into disrepair until the city began restoring it in the 1940s, and over the years some graves were falsely marked and fictitious burials claimed to attract tourists. John Heath, lynched in 1884 for organizing the Bisbee robbery, has a marker here, but his body was sent home to Texas. The famous epitaph for Lester Moore ("Four slugs from a .44, no Les no more") is attached to a man whose very existence some sources doubt. Read the markers as part history, part folklore.

A separate Jewish cemetery lies nearby. The entrance is through the Boothill Graveyard Gift Shop on Highway 80, where you pay admission. The website is copyrighted by the City of Tombstone, and the city lists the graveyard on its own site.