Hayden Winthrop Yarnell burst into Arizona history on an April day in 1889, the year my grandmother was born. That day, at a desolate one-shack siding on the Southern Pacific Railroad grandly called Gila City, a gang of robbers attacked a train as it took on water. They wanted the express car, which they heard was carrying payroll strongboxes bound for the mines at Bisbee. The gold was there, all right, but so was Hayden Yarnell with two Colt Peacemaker revolvers.
A photo of him taken two months later shows a clean-shaven man with delicate lips and a long, strong nose, looking uncomfortable and stern in a high collar, string tie and suit coat. But something behind his eyes burned with the obstinate clarity of the pioneer-that’s the way I’ve always pictured him at Gila City.
The leader of the outlaws, a murderer and rustler named Three-Fingers McMackin, shot a deputy in the face and strode to the door of the express car. When Three-Fingers slid the door open, Yarnell put a.45 caliber bullet between his eyes. Another desperado nearly severed Yarnell’s left arm with a rifle shot, but the young guard managed to get back in the express car and close the door. For the next half-hour, the outlaws emptied their pistols and rifles into the car as Yarnell clung to the floor by the payroll boxes. But they didn’t have the guts to try to open the door again, so they rode away empty handed.
This wasn’t the last Arizona would hear of Hayden Yarnell. With reward money from the train robbery, he talked his way into becoming a partner in the Copper Queen mine, the legendary dig that for a time made Bisbee, Arizona, the most important city between St. Louis and San Francisco. Five years later, Yarnell cashed out a rich man, not yet thirty years old. By that time he also owned three saloons in Brewery Gulch, Bisbee’s notorious pleasure district, and was a director of the town’s biggest bank. Every history of Bisbee in the 1890s had a Hayden Yarnell story or two: about the day he faced down a gang of outlaws trying to rob the Goldwater-Castenada Department Store, his marathon poker games that would go for days, the orphanage he quietly bankrolled.
With the Apache subdued and the coming of the railroad, a young Anglo with vision and money could build many an empire. Yarnell chose cattle, one of the touchstones of the West. His first ranch, Rancho del Cielo, spread two thousand acres across the high southern Arizona grasslands around Tombstone. Eventually, he had more than a hundred thousand head of cattle scattered across ranches and pastureland from the Mexican border into the Arizona high country two hundred miles north. And every one of them bore the distinctive brand of his initials-the large Y, the small h-looking just as we found them engraved on the pocket watch beside two small skeletons.
