imon 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