Boothill Graveyard

Tombstone exploded to life around 1879 when rich silver was struck in the surrounding hills, and thousands of miners, gamblers, merchants, and drifters poured into the raw desert town. This hillside cemetery served as the town's main burial ground through those roaring early years, roughly from 1879 into the mid-1880s, before a new cemetery took over on the other side of town.

In those few years around three hundred people were laid to rest here, and the manner of their deaths reads like a catalog of the frontier: gunfights and stabbings, mining accidents and cave-ins, disease and suicide, and conflict on a dangerous border. Only later, when the town leaned into its Wild West fame in the 1920s, was the neglected graveyard cleaned up and fenced and turned into the landmark visitors know today.

The best-known graves belong to Billy Clanton and Tom and Frank McLaury, the three cowboys shot down in the famous thirty-second gunfight near the O.K. Corral in 1881, when the Earps and Doc Holliday faced the Clanton and McLaury faction. Nearby lies Fred White, Tombstone's first town marshal, accidentally shot while trying to disarm a man in the street. Their markers turn the legend into something you can stand beside.

Then there are the epitaphs, blunt and often blackly funny, which have become as famous as the graves. The most quoted belongs to Lester Moore: Here lies Lester Moore, four slugs from a forty-four, no Les no more. Another simply reads that its occupant was killed cheating at cards. The cemetery also holds a Chinese section and a small Jewish burial ground, reminders that Tombstone's boom drew people from across the world, not just gunfighters.

Boothill sits right on the highway at the north edge of Tombstone, an easy stop as you come into or leave town. Give yourself time to walk the rows slowly and read the markers, because that is where the real history lives, one plain sentence at a time. Many of the wooden signs are reconstructions of ones long since lost to weather, but the people beneath them and the stories they carry are genuine.

Come prepared for the desert: this is an exposed, sunny hillside with little shade, so wear a hat, use sunscreen, and carry water, especially in the hot months. Above all, treat it as what it is, a real cemetery, and stay on the marked paths. Paired with the rest of historic Tombstone, from the old main street to the mine and courthouse, Boothill anchors one of the most vivid Old West days you can spend anywhere in the country.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.