The name tells you everything you need to know about how most residents arrived here. "Boot Hill" refers to men who died violently, their boots still on, never afforded the dignity of a peaceful death in bed. Established in the 1870s during Tombstone's silver boom, this small cemetery accepted at least 250 souls before a new city cemetery rendered it obsolete around 1883. For decades afterward, the graveyard fell into disrepair, its wooden markers rotting, its stories fading into the desert scrub. It wasn't until the 1940s that the city recognized what it had: not just a burial ground, but a tourist attraction where the Wild West's violent past could be packaged and sold.

Among the authentic graves lie men whose deaths shaped the mythology of the American frontier. Tom McLaury, Frank McLaury, and Billy Clanton rest here, killed on October 26, 1881, in the famous O.K. Corral shootout. The five perpetrators of the Bisbee massacre hang in eternal proximity, legally executed on March 28, 1884, for a robbery that left four people dead. China Mary, whose grave tells a gentler story, ran a prosperous general store dealing in American and Chinese goods. When she died of heart failure in 1906, the entire town turned out for her funeral, one of the last genuine burials here. John Slaughter Swain, born into slavery and freed to become a respected cowboy, represents one of the final interments, his grave marking the end of an era.

Boothill's operators understood that tourists want stories, and if history doesn't provide enough of them, invention will suffice. Lester Moore's famous grave marker tells of a Wells Fargo agent killed in a shootout over a mangled package, yet no evidence proves he was ever buried here. John Heath, accused of masterminding the Bisbee massacre and lynched by a mob on February 22, 1884, has a marker near his alleged accomplices, but his body was actually shipped to his estranged wife in Terrell, Texas. Thomas Harper's grave commemorates a friend of the notorious Curly Bill Brocius, but Harper was hanged and buried in Tucson, never in Tombstone. Federico Duran's marker misspells his name and fabricates his death; he was actually executed by firing squad in Guaymas, Mexico. The cemetery became a gallery of creative history.

Walking among the weathered markers today, visitors confront a peculiar American phenomenon: the Old West as performance, as product, as collective memory shaped more by what we want to believe than what actually happened. The fake graves are not really lies in the traditional sense. They are stories we tell ourselves about who we were, about a time when justice came from the barrel of a gun and death waited around every dusty corner. Tombstone has always understood this. The town's slogan is "The Town Too Tough to Die," and its cemetery proves the point. Even the dead here refuse to stay entirely dead, or entirely factual. They live on in epitaphs, in tourist photos, in the strange American appetite for frontier violence made safe by time.