Tales Behind the Tombstones Read online

  In 1868 Charley registered to vote and in November of that year became the first woman to cast a ballot. The historic event was recognized eleven years later after Parkhurst had died.

  If not for the coming of the railroad, Charley would have continued driving a stage for the rest of her life. The new mode of transportation forced her to retire in 1874. In her early sixties and living on her ranch in Santa Cruz, Charley struggled with rheumatism and cancer of the throat and mouth. She died of cancer on December 29, 1879. She was sixty-seven.

  Charley’s true gender was not realized until her body was being prepared by a physician for burial. The news that he was a she spread quickly among local residents, but the information about her true sex did not reach beyond the area for several days.

  The initial response from newspapers across the country to Charley’s demise was one of remorse and reverence, but after the news that Parkhurst had been masquerading as a man for many years, additional reference to the teamster was less compassionate. The press called her a “hermaphrodite.” Editors at the Rhode Island Gazette were so outraged by the revelation they wrote a scathing article about her passing. “Charley Parkhurst died of a malignant disease,” the article read. “She could act and talk like a man, but when it came to imitating a man’s reticence, nature herself revolted, and the lifelong effort to keep from speaking, except when she had something to say, resulted at last in death from cancer of the tongue.”

  Some of Charley’s friends were equally appalled when they learned the truth about her. One associate expressed concern over the gender of his other acquaintances. “I don’t trust anyone anymore,” he told a reporter for the Yreka Union newspaper.

  A number of people who remembered Charley for the gracious, loyal person she was attended her funeral. There is no information as to whether or not her real gender was mentioned at the service. An article in the San Francisco Chronicle suggested that “it is useless to waste time in conjectures as to what led the dead to take up the cross of a man’s laboring life.”

  Charley was laid to rest at the Pioneer Cemetery in Watsonville, Santa Cruz County, California. The tombstone reads CHARLEY DARKEY PARKHURST.

  John Sutter d. 1880

  “The country swarmed with lawless men. I was alone and there was no law.”

  — JOHN A. SUTTER, JUNE 1848

  The life of Captain John Augustus Sutter, the German-Swiss pioneer, dramatically changed when gold was discovered on his property on January 24, 1848, and the West was transformed into a land teeming with eager prospectors. When Sutter emigrated from Switzerland hoping to make his fortune in America, he scarcely could have imagined the impact the glittering lumps of gold found near his sawmill in Coloma, California, would have on his future and that of the emerging nation.

  Sutter was born February 15, 1803, in Kandern Baden, Germany, a few miles from the Swiss border. He received his formal education in the village of Neuchatel, Switzerland. At age thirteen he became an apprentice to a firm of printers and booksellers, and although he was a diligent worker, the trade did not suit him. He ventured into business, owning and operating a dry goods store. In addition to managing his store, he served as a lieutenant in the Swedish Army Reserve Corps.

  Due in part to his expensive way of living, Sutter eventually ran into trouble with his debtors and lost the store. In May 1834 he fled the area and his creditors and headed for America, leaving behind a wife and five children.

  Shortly after arriving in New York, Sutter was able to reestablish himself in the business world. His spending habits had not changed, however, and he fell into the same desperate financial situation as before. Again he ran, and this time he ended up in St. Louis, Missouri, where he worked as an innkeeper and merchant. Then four years after his arrival in the States, and with a goal of building an agricultural empire, he joined the American Fur Company and headed west.

  After taking a brief detour to the Hawaiian Islands, Sutter made it to Monterey, California. He was driven to see his dream realized and met with the leader of the territory, Governor Alvarado, to discuss the possibility of establishing a business. As soon as the initial permission was granted, Sutter secured two schooners filled with supplies and sent them down the Sacramento River. Two weeks later the vessels landed at the location where the American River meets the Sacramento.

  The native peoples around the area where Sutter had disem-barked did not like the foreign control of their land. They harassed him because of his association with the government in power. But Sutter made treaties with the Indians and dealt fairly with them in all matters. He gained their trust and friendship, and later they actually worked for him.

  By becoming an official Mexican citizen on August 29, 1840, Sutter successfully acquired a land grant. The following year he began construction on a fort that would become the headquarters for all newcomers to California. Miwok and Nisenam Indians, Mexicans, and Hawaiians were hired to work and guard the fort and the forty-eight acres of land surrounding the site. The fort housed a distillery, a flour mill, a bakery, and a blacksmith and carpentry shop. Several head of cattle and numerous horses grazed on the fields around the property, as well as sheep, chickens, and pigs. The fort grew to become a necessary stop for emigrants who traveled west.

  In 1847 Sutter contracted to build a sawmill on the South Fork of the American River, fifty miles east of Sutter’s Fort, with the carpenter and pioneer James Marshall. Marshall had the sawmill partially completed when he discovered gold while walking along the clear banks of the water.

  At the time of the find that started the gold rush, Sutter’s assets were at their height. After several years of growth, the fort was self-contained. But the gold find brought him harm, not fortune, as his land was suddenly overrun with squatters. They slaughtered his cattle at will and helped themselves to the rest of his livestock. His wheat fields were trampled, his lumber and grist-mills were deserted and dismantled, and hides were left to rot in his tannery. His workers, even the Native Americans, abandoned him for the goldfields.

  Broke and desperate, Sutter fled with his newly arrived family to a farm near Yuba City, California. By 1865, having seen his fort reduced to one building and his farm burned to the ground, Sutter moved to Lititz, Pennsylvania. He lived out the remainder of his days near poverty. From 1865 to 1880 Sutter lobbied Congress for compensation for the loss of land for which he had paid thousands of dollars in taxes. Year after year political leaders told him that the matter would be addressed and settled, but it was never fully resolved.

  On June 20, 1880, John Sutter, California’s oldest and most notable pioneer, died of heart failure. He was seventy-seven years old. His funeral was attended by several well-known individuals he had befriended during his extraordinary life, including General Phil Sheridan and Mark Twain.

  Sutter’s eulogy was delivered by Western Expedition leader General John Charles Fremont. Sutter was laid to rest in the Moravian Brotherhood’s Cemetery in Lititz, Pennsylvania.

  Billy the Kid d. 1881

  “He was the only kid who ever worked here who never stole anything.”

  — BILLY THE KID’S EMPLOYER AT THE

  SILVER CITY HOTEL IN NEW MEXICO

  William H. Bonney, better known as Billy the Kid, drifted through New Mexico in the mid-1870s, defying the law and becoming famous in the process. By the time he turned age sixteen, he had killed one man and been jailed twice. Desperate circumstances and a misplaced sense of justice was what spurred Billy on toward his life of crime.

  Born in New York on November 23, 1859, Billy was the younger of two boys. His father died in 1864, leaving Billy’s mom alone to look after the children. In 1873 she moved her sons to Indiana, where she met and married a man named William Antrim. Antrim took his new wife and her family to Silver City, New Mexico. A gold and silver strike there made the town rich with possibilities. The four no sooner arrived than William Antrim abandoned his new family to prospect. Billy’s mother managed a hotel to support her boys, and Bi
lly worked with her. In 1874 she was diagnosed with tuberculosis and died shortly thereafter. Billy was fourteen years old.

  Not long after his mother’s death, Billy had his first run-in with the law. The clothes he stole from a Chinese launderer’s business were meant to be a teenage prank, but the act was perceived as malicious theft to the local authorities. Wanting to teach Billy a lesson, the sheriff decided to lock him up. After spending two days in jail, Billy escaped and made his way to Arizona.

  In 1877 Billy was hired on at a sawmill at the Camp Grant Army Post. The blacksmith who worked at the military post was a bully of sorts and took an instant dislike to Billy. He frequently made fun of him, taunting him until the teenager snapped and called the blacksmith a name. That was the cue he was waiting for and he attacked Billy, and Billy shot him. He was arrested for the killing the following day and subsequently escaped.

  Billy roamed about New Mexico’s Pecos Valley in Lincoln County, working odd jobs at various ranches and farms. Wealthy English cattle barren John Tunstall eventually offered the restless young man full-time employment to watch his livestock. Billy took on the job with great zeal—Tunstall was kind to him, and Billy appreciated his integrity.

  Not everyone felt that way about Tunstall. A pair of rival merchants and livestock owners who were resentful of his riches were determined to destroy the man and his holdings. The heated battle, which erupted between the established business owners and ranchers who had a monopoly on beef contracts for the army, and entrepreneurs such as John Tunstall, was referred to as the Lincoln County War.

  As an employee of John Tunstall’s, William Bonney found himself in the middle of the feud. It became a personal battle for him when the disgruntled ranchers had Tunstall gunned down. Billy first joined in with law enforcement to help bring the murderers in legally, but he ended up being jailed for interfering with the sheriff and his deputies. After his release Billy decided to take matters into his own hands and joined a posse bent on hunting down the killers. When the murderers were located, Billy and the other members of the vendetta riders, known as the Regulators, shot them dead.

  The Lincoln County War ended in a fiery blaze on July 19, 1878, and a number of men were killed. Billy kept the Regulators together, and the boys ventured into cattle rustling. More people were killed along the way and Billy the Kid, as he was now called, was a wanted man. So Billy negotiated a deal with the governor of the state. If Billy turned himself in to the proper authorities and gave them information about those who participated in the Lincoln County War, he could go free. When the deal was agreed upon, Billy laid down his weapons and submitted to the arrest.

  After Billy was incarcerated, the district attorney went against the governor’s arrangement with the Kid and promised to see him hanged. An enraged Billy the Kid escaped from jail and went on the run—managing to elude the authorities for two years.

  In 1880 Pat Garrett was sworn in as the new Lincoln County sheriff and assigned the duty of apprehending Billy the Kid. He had a reputation as a determined lawman and expert tracker, and he was persistent in his efforts to bring the Kid to justice. After laying several traps for Bonney, Garrett arrested him in April 1881. Billy the Kid was tried, found guilty, and sentenced to be hanged, but he escaped before making it to the gallows.

  Garrett again pursued the young fugitive and caught up with him after two months. Billy the Kid was hiding at a ranch near Fort Sumner, New Mexico. Under the cover of darkness, Garret waited for Billy to appear and then shot him on sight. “All this occurred in a moment,” Garrett later told journalists. “Quickly as possible I drew my revolver and fired, threw my body aside and fired again . . . the Kid fell dead. He never spoke,” Garrett explained. “A struggle or two, a little strangling sound as he gasped for breath, and the Kid was with his many victims.”

  Garrett went on to describe the scene of the outlaw’s demise as a sad occasion for those closest to him. “Within a very short time after the shooting, quite a number of native people had gathered around, some of them bewailing the death of a friend, while several women pleaded for permission to take charge of the body, which we allowed them to do. They carried it across the yard to a carpenter’s shop, where it was laid out on a workbench, the women placing lighted candles around it according to their ideas of properly conducting a ‘wake for the dead.’ ”

  On July 16, 1881, the day after Billy the Kid was shot, he was buried at the Old Fort Sumner Cemetery (a military cemetery) in DeBaca County, New Mexico. He was placed in the same grave as his friends Tom O’Folliard and Charlie Bowdre. Both boys had been shot and killed by Garrett and his men in December 1880. The single tombstone standing over the plot lists the three desperados’ names and the word PALS.

  Over the years a handful of New Mexico residents have come forward with information that Garrett supposedly shared with them about the killing. They claimed the sheriff told them the Kid got away the night of the ambush and the man at the burial site was a fellow bandit.

  A Texas man by the name of Ollie “Brushy Bill” Roberts of Hico, Texas, claimed he was the real Billy the Kid. He insisted he faked his death the night Garrett came looking for him and had been on the run ever since. Brushy Bill died in 1950.

  Several attempts have been made to exhume the Kid’s remains and that of his mother so DNA testing could be done and the controversy laid to rest. The courts have denied the requests, stating they were “unnecessary and unreasonable.”

  The Clantons and McLaurys d. 1881

  “For my handling of the situation at Tombstone, I have no regrets. Were it to be done again, I would do it exactly as I did it at the time.”

  — WYATT EARP’S COMMENTS ABOUT THE

  GUNFIGHT AT THE OK CORRAL, 1901

  The legend of the thirty-second gunfight that took place outside the OK Corral in Tombstone, Arizona, made the town and the men involved famous. The feud between the Earp brothers, Doc Holliday, the Clantons, and the McLaurys reached its dramatic point on October 26, 1881. When the smoke cleared after the six-shooters and shotguns were fired, three men lay dead in the street.

  The so-called sinners in the deadly drama were Frank and Tom McLaury and Billy Clanton. The Clantons and McLaurys were ranchers who had stolen much of the livestock they owned. Their thievery kept them in constant trouble with Tombstone’s law enforcement. When Wyatt, Morgan, and Virgil Earp arrived on the scene and eventually became town sheriff and deputies, respectively, they vowed to bring order to the territory. It was just a matter of time before they would be forced to deal with the notorious cowboy lawbreakers.

  Wyatt Earp particularly disliked the Clantons and their less then legal dealings. The Clantons and McLaurys equally resented the Earps and Holliday for interfering in their business affairs. On the morning of October 26, news reached Wyatt that Ike Clanton and his cohorts were in Tombstone threatening to “shoot an Earp.” The rustlers and lawmen spent most of the afternoon antagonizing one another verbally and physically. By two o’clock a street fight seemed inevitable.

  The Earps and Holliday had heard that Ike and Billy Clanton and Tom and Frank McLaury were armed and waiting for them at the OK Corral. Virgil led the way to the cowboys with the intention of disarming the men. Wyatt, Virgil, Doc, and Morgan walked four abreast down the street. When they reached the stable, the Clanton gang was waiting for them. County Sheriff John Behan made a feeble attempt to stop the fight that was coming, but he was dismissed.

  The men stood a mere six feet apart when the bullets started flying. Wyatt shot Frank McLaury in the stomach and killed him. Ike panicked and ran off. Billy Clanton was hit in the chest and wrist. Doc unloaded his weapon into Tom McLaury’s right side. With the exception of Wyatt, the Earps and Doc sustained a few non-life-threatening injuries.

  Two days after the gun battle, friends and sympathizers of the Clantons gathered on the main street of town to join the funeral procession for the McLaury boys and Billy Clanton. After their bodies had been laid out in silver-trimmed caskets,
they were displayed in the window of the local hardware store and then transported to the cemetery in glass-sided hearses. A brass band followed a procession of mourners carrying signs that read “Murdered on the Streets of Tombstone.”

  Ike Clanton and his followers vowed revenge for the murders of Billy, Tom, and Frank. Two months after the gunfight at the OK Corral, Morgan Earp was gun downed while playing pool at a saloon on Allen Street. Virgil was permanently wounded by a buckshot blast that shattered his arm.

  Wyatt gathered a posse of supporters and rode out to avenge his brother’s killing. After shooting several cowboys who had sided with the Clantons and who had been involved in killing Morgan and injuring Virgil, Wyatt officially ended his vendetta tour.

  Billy Clanton and Frank and Tom McLaury were buried at Tombstone’s Boot Hill. Those who witnessed the gunfight at OK Corral reported that the dead men’s last words were “gut-wrenching.” Billy is reported to have said, “They have murdered me! I’ve been murdered.” Tom McLaury said, “I have got nothing.” And just before being shot to death, Frank pointed his gun at Doc Holliday and said, “I have you now.”

  Tombstone’s Boot Hill is located on State Highway 80 in Tombstone, Arizona.

  Jesse James d. 1882

  “All the world likes an outlaw. For some damn reason they remember ’em.”

  —JESSE JAMES, 1879

  Many towns, cities, farms, and plantations from Missouri to Georgia were left in ruin at the conclusion of the Civil War in 1865. Confederate guerrilla soldiers, resentful of the Union’s treatment of their families, property, and possessions, continued to lash out against them well after the battle between the states had ended.