Five Cowboys were killed during an attack that occurred on August 13, 1881. The incident is known as the Guadalupe Canyon Massacre.

The victims:
Richard "Dick / Dixie Lee" Gray #132912087

William "Billy" Lang #132912869

James "Jim" Crane #132912980
Crane was a prime suspect in the killing of Bud Philpott: # 17936826 during the attempted robbery of the Benson stagecoach in March 1881

Newman Haynes "Old Man" Clanton #33593215

Charles "Charlie / Bud" Snow #132913441

Two other men were wounded during the incident but survived and gave their account of what happened:

William W. "Billy" Byers #57372408

Harry Earnshaw #133055677


The older brother of Richard Gray: John Plesent Gray, in his memoirs (When All Roads Led to Tombstone) gave this information:


"Often a trifling incident or change of plan leads to success or disaster. The day before brother Dick was to start, we heard that Lang's ranch, about ten miles south east of us, was starting a hundred head of beef cattle for the Tombstone market and would camp in Guadalupe Canyon the following night.

It occurred to us that it would be best for Dick to go that route and camp that night with Lang's outfit as they would have five or six men which was a big enough force, it seemed, to scare off any bunch of Mexicans who might be out to avenge the smuggler train disaster.

If this had not come up, Dick would have gone the more direct route I had followed through Skeleton. But fate ruled otherwise, and Dick rode into a trap without a chance in the world to escape alive.

I saw him ride gaily off on a Friday and on the following Sunday, August 12, 1881, I saw his dead body in Guadalupe Canyon with a bullet hole over his heart.(1)

Our first news of the tragedy came to the ranch on Saturday evening. A man by the name of Harry Earnshaw staggered into our camp in an exhausted condition, and it was some little time before he could tell the story.

He said he was with Lang's outfit, had come out from Tombstone with the object of buying some milk cows, but not finding what he wanted, was returning with Lang's beef herd to Tombstone.

They had driven the herd of one hundred steers into Guadalupe Canyon on Friday, the day before, and made camp in the first clear spot they found, which was near the rock-built monument that marks the four corners of Arizona, New Mexico, Sonora, and Chihuahua. It seems that during the night the herd stampeded and ran back up the canyon, and then rounding up the scattered herd some of the cowboys ran across my brother Dick, who had evidently been detained and had made camp alone.

On learning of the trouble with the herd, Dick had saddled up and helped them drive the beeves [sic] back to camp. It seemed that a chain of circumstances was leading him blindly on to his fate. Just before daylight Charlie Snow a cowboy who was on herd, rode into camp and Earnshaw heard him tell the cook, Old Man Clanton who was starting breakfast, that he felt sure a bear had frightened the cattle and he was going to circle around in the brush in the hope of getting a shot at it. This move of Snow's evidently started the trouble.

The Mexicans must have been concealed in the surrounding brush and Snow probably rode right into them, for almost at once a volley of shots rang out, coming from all sides.

Earnshaw had no gun and like most any tenderfoot in that position would have done, he just got up and ran. He did not know the direction he took but just kept going with his boots in his hand.

He did not see what happened to the others, except Old Man Clanton whom he saw fall face forward into the fire he had started for breakfast.

Our ranch was about fifteen miles from the place, and when Earnshaw staggered in about dusk, he must've gone many miles out of his way as he said he had never paused in his flight except to stop a minute to pull on his boots. How he happened to find us must have been pure luck for he had never been there before.

There were only two of us at the ranch, as the house had been finished and the builders had returned some time before to Tombstone. So our only recourse for help was to go to a new mining camp on the east slope of the Animas Mountains called Gillespie, twenty miles away.

I rode horseback there that night, finding twenty-five miners at the camp. They, to the last Man nobly responded to my appeal for help. All had horses or mules to ride, and in scarcely no time all were mounted and on the way back with me. We stopped at the ranch to get a wagon and team, loaded on the needed supplies and pulled out for Guadalupe Canyon.

This was the rainy season and the ground was muddy in places, therefore it was just at sunrise when we got there. I will always remember what a quiet spot it seemed.

It was a clear, bright morning that dawned on that little valley in the hills of Guadalupe, but we knew at once that death was ruler there. The ghoulish-looking buzzards were in the tops of every tree with their wings outspread, probably to feel the warmth of the morning sun, and waiting for that sun to prepare their feast.

Since then I never see a buzzard but that scene is recalled; such a fiendish-looking bird, depressing - but probably has the keenest eye of anyone that can discover death's victim almost immediately, and a bird that is the world's most vigilant undertaker.

Out of the clear sky a black speck appears and soon other black specs coming nearer and nearer. Soon they are high overhead beginning to circle slowly, all following the same course in their circling round and round-and you know that somewhere within that circle on the earth below lies a corpse, be it man or animal. It cannot escape this detective.

And in that grassy glade, now so still and peaceful-looking lay four human bodies, probably just at the spots they had been sleeping when the first fire of the attacking Mexicans had caught them.

All were perfectly nude, having evidently been stripped of their clothing by the Mexicans. The only thing left of the camp outfit was the buckboard standing near the ashes of the campfire. It was probably left because it would have been almost impossible to take it over the mountain trail which the Mexicans had to travel in order to reach their homes.

The dead lying there were Billy Lang, cattle rancher; Jim Crane, the outlaw (Crane being on his way in to surrender to the sheriff as we had talked him into doing); Old Man Clanton, the cook mentioned before; and my brother Dick just turned nineteen.

There were still two of Lang's outfit missing and we spread out in search of them. We found the dead body of Charlie Snow, the man who had told the cook he was going to look for the supposed bear. Evidently he had made a gallant fight as his body was riddled. He lay about a half-mile from the camp.

The other cowboy, Billy Byers, we found alive some five miles away. He was shot through the front of the abdomen and the ball had gone clear through his body, but evidently not deep enough to penetrate a vital part, as he was walking along in a dazed condition, completely out of his head.

His wound was in a frightful condition from the heat and the flies, but some of our miner friends new what to do, and they cleaned and dressed the wound. Billy soon revived enough to tell us something of what had happened.

He said the first shots woke him up from a sound sleep and he raised up in his bed to see what was up, just then realizing he had been shot and fell back in a daze.

He then remembered a dark man on horseback who was almost over him, and saw that this man was firing down at him with a pistol. How the man missed him Billy felt was a miracle, but evidently the site of Billy's bloody clothes was convincing proof to the man that he was already dead, and too it was perhaps that blood-stained clothing which kept the Mexicans from stripping his body-this latter fact keeping them from discovering that he was still alive.

With this wounded boy, all were present or accounted for. we had to bury Charlie snow where we found his body, as it was too far gone to be moved. the other four bodies and the wounded boy were placed in the wagon.

That quiet gathering of the dead cast a feeling of sadness over the bunch of hardy miners. They were accustomed to seeing many tragedies suffered in the lives of pioneers, but this seemed such an unjustifiable sacrifice. It was undoubtedly the work of escaped smugglers from the Skeleton Canyon fight taking revenge on the first Americans they found, and this, after all, was but one of the many tragedies that have occurred on the Mexican border.

We took our dead back to the ranch and in coffins constructed of lumber for which we tore up flooring, with the aid of our miner friends we buried the four bodies in a little square plot on the top of the nearby knoll, rendering an equal and honorable reverence to all. Jim Crane, the outlaw had gone before a higher court and we were no more his judges.

This little Campo Santo on the lonely hilltop marked the end of our hopes for the Animas Valley Ranch prospect. My father and I felt conditions were too hard at the time to fight against. We knew the valley would be a place exposed to Mexican raids and felt that it would be impossible to protect ourselves against them. We had the place surveyed, filed preemption claims on the land, and abandoned it for a time to the antelope, the coyote and to those weird spirits supposed to be the cause for the name Animas given to that valley by the Mexicans.

Lang's cattle had been driven away and sold to close up his estate, and for the following year, I made a trip out from Tombstone every month to sleep one night at the ranch in order to comply with the preemption law. Even the rustlers kept out of the valley for fear of meeting the Mexicans."

When All Roads Led To Tombstone
A Memoir by John Plesent Gray
Edited and Annotated by W. Lane Rogers

(1) The actual date was Sunday, August 14, 1881. Richard Gray, left for the Lang ranch on Friday, August 12, 1881.