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The long procession is waning. Now those are coming whose headboards were erected in the early eighties. A company of swarthy black-eyed riders in the flaring trousers and steep-crowned sombreros of Mexico jog along elbow to elbow with hard-eyed horsemen from the valleys of the San Simon and the Animas. Smuggler and cow-thief, there is a story in their passing which centers about a deep gorge near the place where the boundary between New Mexico and Arizona meets the international line. That story goes a long way back.

Down in the southwestern corner of the Animas valley the Guadalupe canyon trail approached the gorge from which it got its name. In the days when the American colonists were still contented with Great Britain’s rule it was a main thoroughfare between the Pinos Altos mines and old Mexico. Long trains of pack-mules, laden with treasure which the Spaniards had delved from the sun-baked mountains near where Silver City now stands, traveled this route. Apaches and bandits made many an attack on them in the canyon.

The Pinos Altos mines were abandoned. The trail fell into disuse. The years passed by. The ’49 rush brought new travelers of another breed who beat down the old track again. Passing through the gorge they too found the Apaches lurking among the rocks and more than one old argonaut laid down his eight-square rifle for the last time within the shadow of those arid cliffs.

Old Man Clanton came with one of these ’49 outfits, a typical specimen of that lean-jawed leathern-faced breed who have fought Indians, lynched Mexicans, and established themselves in hundreds of dreary outposts beyond the last settlements. He went on to California, failed to find the gold, and returned some time during the latter seventies to the upper San Pedro valley. Here he “raised his family,” as the old expression has it, and, his sons grew up, Finn, Ike, and Billy. Those were wild days, and the two last-named boys became more proficient with rope, running-iron, and forty-five revolver than they ever did with their school-books. In time they were known as rustlers and in the lawless town of Charleston by the San Pedro River they fell in with Curly Bill. When the outlaw went eastward into the valleys of the San Simon and the Animas the two young Clantons went with him. The cow-thieves of the San Simon and the Animas did not go to the trouble of altering brands or “sleepering,” as their successors have in later years, but drove entire herds and sold them, as they were, to shippers. Occasionally they rode down into Sonora to raid the ranges south of the border. One July day in 1881 a number of them embarked on such an expedition and they gathered a bunch of several hundred longhorns. They brought them up through Guadalupe canyon and came on northward to the Double Dobe Ranch. Here they left the cattle with a man to hold them, while they rode over to Curly Bill’s place, not far distant.

But the Mexicans had been suffering from this sort of depredations until patience had ceased to be a virtue and a band of thirty dusky vaqueros were following the trail of those stolen longhorns. On the afternoon of July 26 the man who was riding herd caught sight of the steep-crowned sombreros coming out through the mirage on the flats to the south. He waited only long enough to satisfy himself as to the nationality of the riders, then clapped spurs to his pony and raced to Curly Bill’s place.

It took the rustlers some time to saddle up. When they arrived at the Double Dobe they found nothing of their former prizes but a fresh trail. They made the best speed they could, but the Mexicans were “shoving those cattle hard,” as the old-timers say. They had a good lead and they held it clear to Guadalupe canyon. The running fight that followed lasted half-way through the gorge. The men from Sonora were seasoned hands at Indian warfare, and they had no mind to give up their beef. They left a small rear-guard, who fell back slowly from rock to rock while their companions urged the longhorns to a run. The shouts of “Toro! Toro! Vaca! Vaca”! mingled with the crackling of the rifles. And when the rustlers finally routed the stubborn defenders to chase the herders on through the ravine and reassemble the panic-stricken stock, they took back three dead men across their saddles. They buried the bodies at the Cloverdale ranch and so started a lonely little boot-hill whose headboards showed on the edge of the mesa for many years.