After the departure of these bold men outlawry took on a new lease of life in southeastern Arizona. Cattle-rustling, stage-robbery, and murder went on throughout Cochise County. And at last the people found a strong man, to whom the law stood for something more than a means of personal power. They chose for sheriff John Slaughter, who had been waging war for years on his own account against Apaches and bad men. But the story of how he brought the enforcement of the statutes into Tombstone is too long to tell here, although it is a stirring tale and colorful.
Tombstone to-day stands just as it was back in those wild days of the early eighties; just as it was--the buildings are unchanged. You may see them all, and see the streets as they looked when pistols flamed and men died hard out in the roadway.
But other crowds walk those streets now. And sometimes on an evening you will see automobiles going down the block with family parties on their way for a spin along the Benson road where the Clanton boys, Frank Stilwell, John Bingo, and the other bad men used to rob the stages in daytime.
On such an evening, should you travel down that highway, you may see the leaping light of a bonfire by which a group of young people are toasting marshmallows on the summit of the knoll where Ed Schiefflin hid from the passing Apaches.
Tombstone is peaceable enough to-day for any man; so peaceable that one finds it hard to believe there was a time when the town had a man--or more--for breakfast every morning.
In the early days of Tombstone when miners and merchants and cow-men and faro-dealers and outlaws were drifting into Cochise County from all over the West, a young fellow by the name of William C. Breckenbridge came down from Colorado to the new camp. He was, so the old-timers say, one of those smallish men who can wear a flannel shirt and broad-brimmed hat so jauntily that, although their breeches be tucked into their boot-tops, they still look marvelously neat; but while he could come through a hard day's ride still suggesting a bandbox, there was nothing of the dandy about him.
His people had staked him to go out West and at their suggestion he had hunted up an older brother in Colorado. But two years in the wide reaches of the Platte country, where the monotony of teaming was varied by occasional brushes with the Indians, failed to satisfy his spirit. And so he came riding down into the flaring valleys of the Southwestern border along with the first influx of adventurers.