Gleeson

A turquoise camp first, built on top of what the Chiricahua Apache had worked before the miners arrived. They called it Turquoise — a post office ran from 1890 to '94 — and then John Gleeson opened the Copper Belle Mine and the camp got his name. The post office came back October 15, 1900, and stayed open until March 31, 1939, which tells you how long the money lasted.

Copper brought people. The town rebuilt itself after 28 buildings burned in 1912 — saloons, hospital, shops, all of it — and kept going. Gleeson sat on the south slope of the Dragoon Mountains, 16 miles east of Tombstone on what they now call the Ghost Town Trail, linking it to Courtland and Pearce. The mines worked hard during the First World War, copper feeding the war machine, and then the seams thinned and the price dropped and by the 1930s it was over.

What's left: the ruins of the hospital, the saloon, the cemetery. The school's foundation. Mine shafts and tailings carved into the hillside. The 1910 jail, restored and run now as a small museum, opens twice a month if you time it right. The whole site sits on Cochise County's ghost-town circuit — longtime residents say the cemetery's the real draw, stones tilted in the high desert light, the dead outnumbering the living by a comfortable margin.

The copper played out but the bones stayed. You can walk the Ghost Town Trail, see what fire and abandonment leave behind, trace the arc from boom to silence. It's the same story as a dozen other Arizona camps — the difference is Gleeson kept its jail, and someone cared enough to fix the roof.