If you've walked the ruins on the rim of Canyon Diablo, on old 66 between Flagstaff and Winslow, you've heard it. In 1878 a band of Apache raided Navajo camps, then hid in a cave here. The Navajo found a vent in the ground, felt the heat, heard voices, and lit fires over it. Anyone who crawled out was shot. Forty-two died.
Today it's one of the most photographed stops on the road: the gas station shell, the rows of chicken-wire animal cages, the cave you can still climb down into.
Here's the problem. The story turns up in no newspaper, no military record, no archive before the 1960s, as far as anyone has been able to trace. Its first appearance in print is a 1967 magazine article and a small book from 1968 called Two Guns, Arizona. Different bylines. One author: Gladwell Richardson, who ran the Two Guns trading post after his father bought the place in 1950.
Richardson made his living inventing the West. Hundreds of novels and stories under dozens of pen names, Maurice Kildare his best known. He also gave us the famous version of nearby Canyon Diablo, the lawless railroad town with fourteen saloons and six marshals killed in a single year. Arizona's state historian, Marshall Trimble, went looking for that town. So did George Shaw, an archivist at the Arizona State Railroad Museum. Shaw's verdict on it: "Nearly everything you've read is fiction."
Richardson had a past of his own. In San Francisco in 1923 he was charged with the beating death of a rabbi, Alfred G. Lafee. He argued self-defense. The case was dismissed.
The man usually blamed for the cave story is Harry "Indian" Miller, who built Two Guns into an attraction in the 1920s. Miller was a fraud in his own right: a white man born in Roswell, New Mexico, who faked an Apache identity, wore a braid, called himself Chief Crazy Thunder, sold fake cliff dwellings and ran a zoo. He was also tried and acquitted for killing his landlord, Earl Cundiff, in 1926. That killing is documented in the papers of the day.
Yet Miller's own pitch never mentions a massacre. The surviving ads and postcards from his years bill the cave as "Underground Dwellings" and "Mystery Cave." In 1926 he and a Hopi friend, Joe Secakuku, announced plans to build a dance floor inside it. The death story looks like it arrived with a different owner, a writer who bought the place decades later and needed a reason for people to stop.
None of that proves forty-two people didn't die in that cave in 1878. A thing can happen and go unwritten, and oral history is real history. What it does prove is narrower and stranger: every written account of the Apache Death Cave traces back to one man who spent his life making up the West, telling the story ninety years after the fact, about a cave he owned.
The ruins are real. The fraud was real. The killing was real. The massacre has one witness, and he was a novelist.
