The Wild West revisited

Here lies Lester Moore,

Four slugs fro m a .44,

No Les, no more.

* * *

Here lies George Johnson

Hanged by mistake

1882

He was right,

We was wrong,

But we strung him up

And now he’s gone.

—Epitaphs from Tombstone’s Boothill Graveyard

Despite the flippant wit of these epitaphs, Lester Moore was a real person killed in a brawl and George Johnson was wrongly accused and hangedfor horse stealing in Tombstone, a silver boomtown in the Arizona Territory that came to epitomize the Wild West. The 1881 gunfight at...