WHEN BURNHAM REACHED Tombstone in 1881, the town was two years old and notorious. “Six thousand population,” noted James B. Hume, chief detective for Wells Fargo, a job that often took him to Tombstone. “Five thousand of them are bad—one thousand of them known outlaws.” An exaggeration, but Tombstone certainly was swarming with gunmen, gamblers, smugglers, outlaws, con men, and “soiled doves” who roistered in the town’s 110 saloons, fourteen gambling parlors, numerous dance halls, and brothels catering to all budgets.
Yet by 1881 it also was home to merchants, doctors, lawyers, and ministers who could spend leisure hours at the ice cream parlor, the bowling alley, the opera house, several dramatic societies, some fine restaurants, or four churches. Visitors or newly rich prospectors could luxuriate at the Grand Hotel, which featured thick carpets, elegant chandeliers, oil paintings, and walnut furniture with silk cushions. Guests ate from delicate china, or perhaps walked to the Maison Doree for quail on toast. From the hotel’s roof they could look down into the shafts of several mines, which gaped throughout the town.
In short, Tombstone reflected the yin and yang of Western boomtowns. Allen Street, the main thoroughfare, neatly divided the upright from the red-light. Everybody in Tombstone had been lured there by the silver streaming from the richest strike in Arizona.
It had started with a scruffy dreamer named Ed Schieffelin. As a prospector he had a perfect record—absolute failure. His flops mapped the West: Oregon, Idaho’s Salmon River, Nevada, up and down California, Great Salt Lake, southern Nevada, then Idaho again. He tried his luck in the Grand Canyon but lost his boat, equipment, and a companion, who drowned. He tried again in Nevada, went back to Oregon, then had a go in San Bernardino. He took another crack at the Grand Canyon. Same result. Everywhere, zilch. None of it tarnished his faith that a big strike was just ahead. Between failures he worked as a mule skinner to grubstake his next bust.
In 1876 an acquaintance in Arizona described him in words that applied to many dream-haunted men roaming the West with a burro and a pickaxe. Schieffelin, said the man, was
about the queerest specimen of human flesh I ever saw. He was 6 feet 2 inches and had black hair that hung several inches below his shoulder and a beard that had not been trimmed or combed for so long a time that it was a mass of unkempt knots and mats. He wore clothing pieced and patched from deerskins, corduroy and flannel, and his hat was originally a slouch hat that had been pieced with rabbit skin until very little of the original felt remained. I have never known a prospector more confident of finding a big mining proposition than he was, yet he told me that he has prospected a good part of eleven years with no results, while he had a frightfully tough time of it. He was then 27 [actually 29] but looked like 40.
The following year Schieffelin drifted down to Fort Huachuca, about seventy-five miles south of Tucson near the Mexican border. The region was remote and empty. Most people avoided it because Apaches often killed those who didn’t. In previous years, about seventeen miners with more hope than fear had been slain. Nevertheless, Schieffelin decided to prospect in the Huachuca Mountains. Soldiers at the fort reportedly warned him that the only thing he would find in that desert was his tombstone.
He had his usual luck, which brought his usual response: he decided to try again, a bit to the northeast. He moved into an isolated, abandoned hut called Brunckow’s cabin, notorious because most of its occupants seemed to end up murdered.
In August 1877 his luck started to change. In a dry wash on a high mesa called Goose Flats, he found what prospectors call “float”—loose rocks containing precious minerals. Float occurs when geological forces such as wind, rain, and flood break rocks from a mineral vein and carry them off. Float is evidence of ore somewhere in the vicinity. It indicates that erosion has exposed part of a vein. Schieffelin’s float showed hints of silver. In Tucson he filed a claim and wryly named it Tombstone.
He had the float assayed to see whether the silver content made mining worthwhile. It did. In fact the assayer was so enthusiastic he became Schieffelin’s partner, along with Schieffelin’s brother Al. They returned to the claim on Goose Flats in February 1878. First they had to backtrack the float to its source, which could be miles away. A miner might dig dozens of worthless holes looking for the vein. Even if he found it, it might be negligible or quickly peter out.
The partners’ first efforts were disappointing. Schieffelin, of course, remained optimistic. For once he was right. They tapped a strong vein, then others. They didn’t yet know it, but they had found the richest lode of silver in Arizona. Estimates of the value of the silver bullion mined near Tombstone during its boomtown decade vary from $40 million to $85 million, equivalent today to somewhere between one and two billion dollars.
In those first days their method was simple: one man descended into the shaft to break rock, another man hauled up the bucket. The mine was far from anywhere, so they agreed that if Apaches raided, whoever was above ground should run for his life; the man in the shaft could be buried later. They named the first mines Lucky Cuss and Toughnut, followed by Good Enough, Contention Ledge, and Owl’s Last Hoot. (The names of Western mining claims are irresistible. A few examples: Murderer’s Bar, Squabbletown, Poor Man’s Creek, Henpeck Flat, Gouge Eye, Liars Flat, Git Up and Git, Last Chance, Whisky Gulch, Grab-All, Humbug Creek, Bloody Bend, Mad Mule Gulch, Devil’s Retreat, Hoodoo Bar, Cut Throat, Bloody Run.)
The Schieffelins’ Tombstone claims became so bountiful they had to hire men to mine them. They built a stamp mill to crush ore and a cache dam to wash it. Before long they were making tens of thousands of dollars every month.
Schieffelin was quickly bored by the dull routines of processing ore and piling up money. His passion, like Burnham’s, was for the prospect, the alluring possibility, not the drab reality of the steady thing. Besides, to a man accustomed to solitude, booming Tombstone was starting to feel crowded. In November 1879, after a year and a half there, he left to search for gold and silver in Colorado and New Mexico. When he returned in February 1880, he and his brother Al sold their two-thirds of the Tombstone mines for $600,000.
In two years Schieffelin had traded a lifetime of failure for a fortune. Al used part of his pile to build the Schieffelin Hall opera house, which opened in June 1881 and seated 450. Ed Schieffelin, financially set for life, left to go prospecting. He died of a heart attack at age fifty in 1897 while panning for gold in Oregon. His will requested that he be buried near Tombstone, where his faith had been rewarded, “in the dress of a prospector, my old pick and canteen with me.” This was done, and tourists can visit his grave.
Within months of the Schieffelins’ strike, word got out and miners poured in, followed by all the professions eager to profit from the sudden wealth circulating in a boomtown. Goose Flats, once an empty stretch of arid mesa populated mostly by mesquite and jackrabbits, sprouted tents and shacks, then homes and adobe buildings.
The population kept jumping: 100 in March 1879; 2,000 in February 1880; 7,000 in 1881; double that in 1885. Many inhabitants were miners, often immigrants from Cornwall, Ireland, and Germany. Riffraff and ruffians from Dodge City, Abilene, and Deadwood drained into Tombstone. Gamblers, prostitutes, con men, and whiskey peddlers arrived to siphon off the miners’ money. Rustlers, smugglers, and stagecoach robbers turned up, drawn by opportunity. The certainty of trouble attracted gunmen such as the Earp brothers and Bat Masterson, who had worked as peace officers in those other wild places and now offered their pacifying services to Tombstone, when they weren’t gambling. Disputes flared up not only with rustlers and bandits such as the Clantons, Johnny Ringo, and Curly Bill Brocius, but also with part of the town’s establishment, including the sheriff, John H. Behan, who had a soft spot for outlaws.
In any case, law enforcement was relaxed. As one writer put it, “Shooting from behind or shooting an unarmed man in theory brought legal vengeance, and frequently did so. Anybody else who got into serious trouble for killing a man just didn’t have any friends. There was apparently no limit to tolerance, as long as the slain man was armed and received his bullets in front.” The population also grew steadily on Boot Hill, the cemetery outside of town.
With all the shooting and fighting, doctors did thriving business in Tombstone. Dr. George E. Goodfellow—the coroner who watched John Heith get lynched and then pronounced him dead from emphysema—had so much opportunity to treat gunshot wounds that he became the country’s foremost specialist in them and published many papers about techniques he developed.
A droll reporter named William H. Bishop visited Tombstone for Harper’s magazine in late 1881, soon after Burnham arrived. The town’s “leading diseases,” wrote Bishop, were “whiskey and cold lead.” The two were linked, he noted: “What with the leisure that seems to prevail, the constant drinking and gambling at the saloons, and the universal practice of carrying deadly weapons.” Depending on the venue, the liquor served varied from imported wines to tonsil-scorching potions laced with soap, chemicals, red chilis, and other alarming additives. Fluids sold as whiskey might be grain alcohol cut with water and dyed with tobacco or burnt sugar. Slang terms for these firewaters suggest their effects—tangle-leg, churn-brain, tarantula juice, Taos lightning, white mule (for the kick), and forty-rod (for its power to kill at that distance). Some Tombstone saloons offered a new keg beer brewed in Colorado by a Prussian immigrant who had Americanized his name from Kuhrs to Coors.
The quantity and duration of boozing in places like Tombstone was prodigious. It often started with a pick-me-up before breakfast and proceeded steadily into the night. According to Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday drank two to three quarts of whiskey a day. The diary of George Hand, a Tucson saloon owner during this period, brims with entries like this one for July 5, 1875: “Got tight again today. Pearson and I had a fight. Davis hit him in the head with a bar pitcher and he ran out in the street hollering ‘murder.’ Lawyer Clark is tight. Everyone is tight.” Hand’s diary also details the consequences of nonstop drinking: fights, shootings, wife-beatings, murders, horrible delirium tremens, madness, suicide. Men like Burnham who didn’t drink were considered abnormal.
Tombstone also was famous for its “houses of joy.” The town licensed them for a fee. At the top were fancy parlor houses such as those managed by the beautiful Frenchwomen Blonde Marie and Madame Moustache. Their courtesans wore ball gowns amid gilt mirrors and oil paintings; gentlemanly decorum was required. At the bottom were the squalid cribs of doorway doxies. The large territory in between was filled by “hog ranches” run by hard-shell women such as Rowdy Kate or Crazy Horse Lil, and hurdy-gurdy houses where the molls charged a dollar a dance and extra for extra.
Some of these women, like some of the men they solicited, were degraded and doomed. Others were tough risk-takers and dreamers who braved the trip to Tombstone and serviced the filthy half-civilized men there in hopes of making a better life. Some succeeded, saving money until they could open a restaurant, boardinghouse, or some other business. But for most, as for most of the men, their dreams turned to ash.
Tombstone’s most popular emporium, famous all over the West, was the Bird Cage Theatre. It opened in December 1881, and for the next eight years it never closed. The Bird Cage was an all-in-one entertainment center. It offered liquor, gambling, an orchestra, song-and-dance girls in skimpy attire, touring singers and comics, bawdy skits, and risqué “theatricals” featuring female thespians lightly constrained by clothing. The downstairs poker game, with a thousand-dollar buy-in, ran for years without stopping. The emporium took its name from fourteen “cages” upstairs—curtained rooms with beds—where the saloon’s celebrated lovelies withdrew with their customers.
This was the “wild and romantic camp” that Burnham rode into in late summer or early fall of 1881, sometime before the gunfight at the O.K. Corral on October 26 (“The Earp Clanton feud was in full swing,” wrote Burnham, though he never mentions the famous gunfight). He was carrying a letter of introduction from the editor in Globe to a man who turned out to be a gambler, not an occupation commonly held up as an exemplar for wayward youth.
But the old editor knew what he was doing. The gambler, wrote Burnham, was “of the old type,” a solid professional who relied on skill and preferred a clean game, and thus despised people who tried to rig outcomes or take shortcuts, including “all stage robbers, rustlers, claim jumpers, smugglers, feudists, and criminals in general” (a sizable portion of Tombstone’s population). This upright gamester tried to convince Burnham that decent hardworking people, not just criminals, could prosper. He also channeled Burnham’s skill with firearms toward law and order by getting him a job as a night guard at one of the Schieffelin mines. “The owners needed quick and nervy men to keep off claim jumpers,” wrote Burnham, “and I could make worthy use of the unusual strength and endurance inherited from my ancestors.”
But his old friends in the Tonto Basin pulled at him. He disregarded the old editor’s advice and wrote to the Gordons for news of the feud. Back came a teary plea from one of the daughters to come quickly; her sweetheart was in a jam. After riding 200 miles, Burnham found that the sweetheart had been replaced by another and the crisis was over. When he stopped in on the editor in Globe, the old man berated him as weak and silly for reentering harm’s way. He ordered him back to Tombstone, a safe place by comparison. Burnham, embarrassed by his lingering foolishness, turned back south.
While riding through the saguaros and mesquite of the desert above Tucson, he caught up to a slow buckboard. Its owner was walking, a sign of jaded horses. As Burnham began to overtake the wagon, the man moved to put it between them, then casually picked up a rifle. Burnham stayed parallel 200 yards off and decided to forgo the usual greeting between travelers in a lonesome place. The man, after studying him a bit, waved him over.
Up close the stranger resembled Abraham Lincoln. In the buckboard lay another man, gunshot. They were brothers. Burnham offered to hitch his horse to their wagon to help pull it up hills and through stretches of sand. En route Burnham heard their story. The wounded brother was wanted in Nevada for killing a man over a woman. There was a bounty on his head and lawmen were in pursuit. The walking man, Burnham learned later, was “the most noted and successful smuggler along the Arizona frontier”—no small distinction in a region crawling with such hustlers.
His name was Neil McLeod. He lived on the outskirts of Tombstone. Behind his house, a corral with high adobe walls opened onto a deep arroyo. Mule trains from Sonora came up the arroyo at night and filled the corral with goods lacking a customs stamp. The Mexican government charged heavy tariffs on certain products in great demand across the border—liquor, tobacco, blankets, jewelry. By dodging the tariffs, smugglers such as McLeod could sell the goods for a high profit in Arizona. To satisfy Mexican wants, he also smuggled merchandise in the opposite direction.
McLeod differed from the ruck of Arizona’s two-bit smugglers. His operation stretched from Mexico City to San Francisco. He protected himself by keeping layers of secrecy between him and the men he directed, and he never accompanied his pack trains. He bought silent partnerships in stores throughout the territory so he could unload his illegal goods with no questions. He also washed his profits by diversifying into legitimate businesses such as mines, livery stables, and stagecoach services. In his spare time he liked to enter prizefights.
McLeod became another of Burnham’s mentors. The smuggler had developed ingenious tactics to communicate with his network and to baffle pursuit by lawmen in two countries, skills that soon saved Burnham’s life.
When he and McLeod reached Tombstone, someone warned Burnham that two men from Globe were in town to kill him. One of them hoped to avoid prison by stopping Burnham from testifying in a matter “concerning the sale of a certain stolen brand,” probably a crime stemming from the feud. The other man was motivated by “insane jealousy.” Burnham is silent on why, but Gordon’s five daughters come to mind. He decided to take refuge in the Dripping Springs Mountains, about 150 miles north of Tombstone. Both of his enemies, Burnham knew, were able trackers, “hard-riding and relentless.” He wasn’t sure he could reach the mountains before they caught him.
McLeod devised a scheme. First, to get a few hours head start, McLeod told Burnham to make open inquiries around town about the route he intended to make, and furtive inquiries about a different route. Burnham’s enemies would hear about both, and would assume that Burnham was too young and inexperienced to use misdirection as a tactic. McLeod told him to leave at night so that when his pursuers heard he was gone, they would take the wrong route and wouldn’t be able to double back and pick up his track until daylight.
McLeod furnished Burnham with an excellent horse to ride and a poor unshod one to lead. He said that the unshod one, if turned loose, would head for its home corral in Tucson. Lastly, he gave Burnham detailed instructions to be followed exactly.
Burnham rode north through the Dragoon Mountains until daybreak. Then, as instructed, he found a gravelly ridge where he could feed and rest the horses for a couple of hours. During this break he removed the shoes from the good horse and put them on the poor one. Then he filled a piece of canvas with hunks of cactus, tied this bundle to the poor horse’s tail, and whacked its rump. Pricked, the horse leaped about and then took off in the direction of Tucson. Eventually it would slow to a walk until it reached its corral.
Next, still following McLeod’s instructions, Burnham mounted the newly unshod horse and spurred it over the ridge into a sandy wash. He galloped for a mile, farther than his enemies would bother to track the seemingly abandoned unshod horse. From his pack Burnham took another set of horseshoes supplied by McLeod, distinctly different from the first set, and shod his horse to keep it from going lame on the journey ahead.
“Do all this,” McLeod had told him, “so it will look as if you had been surprised by Indians just as you saddled up after resting and your barefoot horse had bolted while you had barely been able to head your own horse, plunging with fear, toward Tucson. Be sure to pick a gravelly point so there will not be left a discernible change in the shape of the barefoot tracks, and yet a clear tale of all that happens to the shod horse.”
Burnham later learned that his pursuers followed the bait all the way to Tucson. Meanwhile, he made his way to Dripping Springs and then on to Globe, where he again visited the old editor and told him about the men hoping to kill him. The editor, disgusted as always by the senselessness of the feud, wanted to broker a truce that would release Burnham from the vendetta. “This was not easy to accomplish,” wrote Burnham, “for I was bullheaded and vengeful. I had been hunted to the point where fear was dead and the lust to meet and finish my foes grew stronger every hour.” Nevertheless, the editor managed the truce. Burnham could exhale, but he didn’t fully trust his enemies or himself to keep the peace. “The settlement finally effected gave me a still deeper view of the pit around whose crumbling edge I daily walked.”
He turned back toward Tombstone.
While the gambler and the old editor were prodding Burnham toward law and order, McLeod began paying him to flout them. Burnham started carrying coded messages into Mexico to McLeod’s network of smugglers and crooked officials, in the region encompassing Nogales, Guaymas, and the Sierra Madre. Burnham did so without question, on missions he usually didn’t understand, to serve a man he admired. It was a pattern he would later follow as a military scout. “He did not ask me to do anything that would get me in wrong with the law,” wrote Burnham, “but eventually it would have tied me to a group of smugglers and gunrunners operating between El Paso and Los Angeles.”
The risks from soldiers and lawmen in both countries were considerable, but these foes were far less frightening than the Apaches who haunted the region. Bands led by Chatto, Juh, Geronimo, and Cochise’s son Naiche had fled the San Carlos reservation in October 1881 and joined the old warrior Nana in the Sierra Madre region of Mexico.
McLeod no doubt paid well, and the clandestine adventure appealed to young Burnham. So did the skills McLeod could teach him about undetectable methods of communication. Letters, he told Burnham, were a poor way to send delicate information. “I never write anything that couldn’t be published in the Tombstone Epitaph the next morning,” he said. “And quite a lot of news is sent out by way of that funny paper every day”—in coded messages.
McLeod also sent dispatches via shotgun shells, each one carrying different-sized shot and a few inconspicuous marks that “conveyed a whole chapter of instructions to ships at Guaymas.” Several crude, seemingly haphazard pencil strokes on a certain tankhouse or post office box were instructions for McLeod’s partners. Paper dollars or pesos came and went with imperceptible perforations made by needles. Some domestic animals, such as that cactus-pricked horse, were homing devices carrying correspondence. McLeod never gave Burnham the keys to these ciphers, which protected both the messenger and the secrets.
One day McLeod told Burnham to show up at dusk for a ten-day ride. McLeod’s provisions for him were characteristically odd, his instructions typically cryptic. He again furnished Burnham with a dubious horse, bony and nondescript. Its saddle was shabby but comfortable, with reins made of rope. Take no visible firearms, McLeod told Burnham, then handed him a sawed-off Colt revolver to hide in his boot or under his arm. “You must not have an outfit worth following,” said McLeod, “but in spite of looks, your horse is grain-fed and very tough.”
He also gave Burnham a matchbox made from two empty cartridges of different calibers fitted snugly together. Inside were common wooden sulphur matches. But don’t use them, said McLeod. Ride into Sonora and camp on the hill called Cabeza Borago. Dig a hole six inches deep and bury the matchbox. At sundown build a fire on top of it using long-burning mesquite. Leave the fire but position yourself so that you can watch it and the surrounding hills. Do this each night, for up to five nights, until you see an answering fire on another peak.
Two nights passed without a signal. On the third, a fire blazed from an adjacent mountain. “My message had been delivered,” wrote Burnham, “and I knew that each little match would be taken from the shell—by whom I knew not—and put under a strong magnifying glass, and every needle-point and mark on it interpreted in a code of which I knew nothing.”
He left for Tombstone that night and rode until after daylight. Before resting he followed his usual precautions. He hid his horse in a thicket that had grama grass for forage, then concealed his saddle, boots, and food nearby so that if his horse got stolen, he wouldn’t be completely stranded. He put on light knee-high moccasins like those worn by Apaches. Carrying his gun, canteen, binoculars, and some dried food, he climbed half a mile to the top of a stony ridge. He found a flat ledge with enough brush to screen him, where he could also overlook the mesquite plain—a safe place for sleeping.
When he woke, he scanned the landscape with his binoculars, ate some jerky, slept again. He woke around noon with a vague sense of unease. He was reassured by the small lizards panting on the rocks next to him, motionless and serene. He scanned the plain again for the dust of movement, but saw none. Relieved, he drank from his canteen, then froze. Something had faintly scraped farther along the rock ledge. His first thought: Apache. The Indian probably had seen his trail and was about to fire. Burnham fought the urge to run. Minutes passed.
Finally he heard a muffled clink. This clarified several things. The sound came from a cloth-covered metal canteen bumping a rock—a military canteen. The man was probably one of the Apaches who had left the reservation with Geronimo. He likely had a military rifle to go with his canteen.
When nothing happened for several more minutes, Burnham realized that the man was probably a scout who had picked this ridge for reasons similar to his own. Burnham knew the man would patiently watch the plain all day. If the scout didn’t move, all Burnham had to do was sit motionless until dark and wait for him to leave.
The desert sun was baking the ridge. After a while Burnham heard another sound—light footsteps on gravel. The heat was pushing the Apache down the ledge toward Burnham’s brushy shade. Burnham decided to climb up the rock and loop back toward the Apache’s former position. The scout might see Burnham’s sign on the ledge, but by then Burnham planned to be well down the other side of the ridge.
It worked—except that as he came over the ridge, he saw a group of resting Apaches. Worse, one of them saw him. As everyone including Burnham began yelling and shooting, he sprinted down the hill, through brush and boulders, and jumped off a drop into some mesquite bushes. The yelling had stopped, which was bad news. Silence meant that the Apaches were spreading out for the chase, trackers behind him, flankers on each side to prevent escape. As he scurried down the ridge, Burnham considered his poor options. If he tried to stay invisible in the brush on the ridge, the Apaches eventually would track him down. If he ran onto the plain, he would be visible, and if the Apaches had horses, they would run him down.
A slender possibility of escape appeared in front of him: a stock trail threading through a ravine clogged with cholla. “Many varieties of cactus can be endured, though painful,” wrote Burnham, “but the cholla is impossible.” Even for Apaches. They would have to drop their flankers and thread the cholla single file behind Burnham.
To most Westerners pursued by Apaches, this would not be much comfort. Unlike the Plains Indians, the mountain Apaches were just as happy on foot as mounted, and were even more lethal that way. Westerners were awed by the Apaches’ endurance as runners—they could cover seventy miles a day and jog next to a horse until it collapsed. Braves had the deep chest that marks long-distance athletes. They trained by running up and down rugged hills with a mouthful of water that they did not swallow, to discipline their breath and themselves. Soldiers who chased them into box canyons were astonished by their ability to scamper straight up cliffs that looked insurmountable. General George Crook, who fought many campaigns against the Apaches and admired them, said, “the adult Apache is the embodiment of physical endurance—lean, well proportioned, medium-sized, with sinews like steel; insensible to hunger, fatigue, or physical pains.” John Gregory Bourke, who served as Crook’s officer in many Apache campaigns, wrote that there was “not one of them who was not able to travel forty or fifty miles a day over these gloomy precipices and along these gloomy canyons. In muscular development, lung and heart power, they were, without exception, the finest body of human beings I had ever looked upon.”
These were the warriors chasing Burnham. He wrote of this moment, in a sentence as close as he ever came to boasting in print, “Again my legs took command—and no Apache could compete.” Burnham, too, had trained himself to be an endurance runner. He had the same deep chest and lung capacity as the mountain Apaches. Once, in Globe, he had entered a 36-mile race over mountainous terrain. When several reservation Apaches entered, most contestants dropped out. Burnham won the race.
Today’s contest had different stakes. Aside from the cholla, he had another advantage: “fear is a wonderful accelerator if it does not hold sway entirely or last too long.” He ran all afternoon and into the darkness, “the godsend of the scout.”
He outlasted his pursuers—or maybe they decided that killing one white man with nothing to plunder wasn’t worth the extended effort. Apaches were the most pragmatic of warriors.
The walk from Fronteras to Tombstone was 100 miles. Sunburnt, in rags, Burnham reported to McLeod that the message had been delivered on Cabeza Borago. McLeod told him that Geronimo’s band had been raiding in that area and several ranchers were dead.
In January 1882 word drifted north from Mexico that a raiding party of Apaches led by Geronimo, Naiche, and Chatto had left Sonora for Arizona. They were headed for the San Carlos reservation to recruit more Apaches and spread greater mayhem. The U.S. Cavalry tried to intercept them at the Mexican border, but failed. Apaches loose in Arizona always meant bloodshed. The army needed extra scouts to track and fight them. Burnham had gotten a taste of it in 1881 during the hostilities sparked by the death of the Apache medicine man on Cibecue Creek, and he was eager for more. He had been training for years to become a scout, and had closely studied his ideal, the Apaches. He was ready.