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March 28, 2003/Adar2 24 5763, Vol. 55, No. 31
Boot Hill's Jewish corner rediscovered
MORT ALPER
Special to Jewish News
A Jewish memorial at the Boot Hill graveyard in Tombstone commemorates Jewish pioneers who helped settle the West.
Photo by Mort Alper
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Most people know that Boot Hill graveyard in Tombstone, Ariz., is the final resting place of some of the West's most notorious characters. Among them are Billy Clanton, and Frank and Tom McLaury, who, with the Earps and Doc Holliday, were participants in the famous shootout at the O.K. Corral. Other notables buried there include Billy Claiborne, China Mary, Dutch Annie and Red River Tom. All lie under rocky graves.
Carved wooden crosses, sun-bleached under the cloudless sky, bear the names and causes of death of the buried. There are 250 graves of those who died in bed as well as plots of 180 desperados. Many of the latter were killed in gun battles, some committed suicide, others were hanged. One unlucky man's grave bears an apologetic inscription: "Hanged by Mistake."
What isn't known is that beyond the main burial area, at the bottom of a gravel hill covered with desert scrub and cactus, a section of the cemetery had been set aside for Jews. Another distant section was planned for the Chinese dead.
Boot Hill was established in 1879. During the hectic silver rush in the 1880s, Tombstone reached a population of 6,000. The cemetery was closed in 1884, not due to a shortage of bullets, but because it had filled up. Though thousands of tourists have visited the site, few were aware that an abandoned Jewish cemetery existed in the far northeast corner.
In 1982 a local historian, Al Turner, invited Israel Rubin and his family, Turner's Jewish friends from Maryland, to see the site. Accompanying them was Judge C. Lawrence Huerta, a Yaqui Indian from Tucson who had served as a member of the Arizona Industrial Commission.
At the time, the only visible remains of the 2,500-square-foot burial grounds was a four-foot high, crumbling adobe wall. For more than a hundred years the section had generally gone unnoticed. No gravestones remained.
The group stood quietly while Rubin recited the traditional Kaddish prayer for the dead at the abandoned site. Huerta was so moved by this moment of remembrance that he made plans to restore the graveyard in honor of those who lay there.
"I'm an American Indian," he said later, "who spent years in Washington working on behalf of my people. There, the Rubin family made me part of them.
"A burial place is sacred to my people," added Huerta, "and I wanted this place to be treated with the respect it once had. In honoring my Jewish brothers I feel I am also honoring the lost and forgotten bones of my people who lay where they fell when the West was being settled."
In March of 1982, after the Tombstone City Council approved Huerta's restoration efforts, the Jewish Friendship Club of Green Valley formed a nonprofit corporation to carry out the work involved. They felt that it was important to recognize that there had been a Jewish community in Tombstone.
The site was cleaned, a wrought iron fence built to protect the remaining wall, and a simple monument erected to commemorate the Jewish pioneers who helped settle the West before 1900. The site was officially dedicated in February of 1984. The monument, made of rock from local silver mines, stands on the site.
A business directory from Tombstone's heyday shows that Jews wore a variety of hats: miner, merchant, banker, grocer, gunsmith and restaurant owner. A Jewish mine superintendent, Abraham Hyman Emanuel, even served as the town's mayor from 1896 to 1900. It is also said that Josephine Marcus Earp, Wyatt's third wife, was Jewish.
While the gunfight at the O.K. Corral still grips the visitor's imagination, the simple monument in the corner of Boot Hill recalls the Jewish pioneers who lived in Tombstone during those turbulent years.
Alper is a Pennsylvania-based freelance writer.
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