Boothill Graveyard

John Clum could no longer find his first wife's grave. In a letter printed in the Tombstone Epitaph in March 1925, the town's former mayor described returning years after Mary's death and failing to locate her resting place, even with help from old friends. The cemetery now famous as Boothill had nearly disappeared from view and memory.

It had served a community whose losses were much broader than gunfights. People died in mining accidents and from diseases including diphtheria, pneumonia and consumption. Children, workers, businesspeople and women from the town's red-light district were buried alongside people killed in violent encounters. Billy Clanton and brothers Tom and Frank McLaury, killed on October 26, 1881, became its best-known occupants.

The cemetery's physical arrangement survives imperfectly in records. City historian Don Taylor describes a town map by surveyor Kelleher showing lettered sections and roads. Official burial records for this city cemetery have not been found, he notes. Wooden markers deteriorated; an 1889 newspaper report already described many as unreadable or gone. Some families later moved their dead to Tombstone's newer cemetery.