Guadalupe Canyon Massacre - Ambush

Ambush

In August, 1881, Mexican Commandant Felipe Neri dispatched troops to the border. Some researchers theorize that Mexican Rurales led by Captain Alfredo Carrillo, who had survived the Skeleton Canyon Massacre in 1879, led the ambush of the Cowboys. The Mexicans found "Old Man" Clanton and six others bedded down for the night in Guadalupe Canyon with a herd of cattle. The Mexicans waited until dawn and killed five of the Cowboys.

The dead included Old Man Clanton; Charley Snow, a ranch hand who thought he had heard a bear and was the first killed; Jim Crane, who was wanted for a March, 1881 stagecoach robbery near Tombstone during which two men had been murdered; Dick Gray, son of Col. Mike Gray; and Billy Lang, a cattle rancher. Clanton, Crane, and Gray were either still in their bedrolls or in the act of getting dressed when killed. Lang was the only one who had a chance to fight back. Harry Ernshaw, a milk farmer, was grazed by a bullet on the nose; Billy Byers feigned death until the perpetrators left.

Ernshaw found his way to the ranch of John Pleasant Gray (Dick's brother), who enlisted help from a mining camp 20 miles (32 km) away. At Guadalupe Canyon they found the dead men stripped naked and a dazed Billy Byers five miles away. Snow was buried where he fell due to decomposition. The others were taken back by wagon and buried about ten miles east of Cloverdale, New Mexico. In 1882 Ike and Phin Clanton exhumed their father's body and moved it to the Boot Hill cemetery in Tombstone, where he was re-interred alongside his son Billy Clanton, who had been killed two months after his father's death, in the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral.