< PREVIOUS ] [ 2003 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >
Our tourism industry complained back in 1993 when Colorado voters refused to extend a small sales tax earmarked for promotion. More recently, with the defeat of Amendment 33 earlier this month, the complaints have continued. The gist of it is that unless Colorado finds some money to promote itself to travelers, then they'll go somewhere else.
But there may be another way to go about this. It wouldn't require any state tax money, but it would require some creativity. All we need to do is figure out where we need more tourists, then install some headstones and legends. This will generate publicity, and that produces tourists.
Our southern neighbors have already figured this out.
It starts, more or less, with the New Mexico saga of
Billy the Kid, also known as William Bonney, Henry McCarty
and Kid Antrim. In modern parlance, he was a cop
killer,
since he killed two deputies while escaping
from jail after he had been convicted of killing Lincoln
County Sheriff William Brady in 1878.
That's only a start on his possible homicides, although it might be more fair to think of him as a soldier, rather than as a criminal, since many of the killings came in the course of the three-year Lincoln County War.
Both factions, Murphy and Chisum, were trying to get lucrative government beef contracts. The competition involved political and commercial control of the area. The regular authorities -- territorial government, sheriffs, constables, prosecuting attorneys -- were corrupt and took sides. So the factions engaged their own forces of gunhands for both defense and offense.
That's a long and complicated story. The relevant part is that on July 14, 1881, Lincoln County Sheriff Pat Garrett found Billy the Kid at Pete Maxwell's ranch and killed the dangerous fugitive, who was about 22 years old. The Kid was buried at Ft. Sumner, and the grave is now a tourist attraction.
But is he really buried there? After all, there's the 1950 grave of Bushy Bill Roberts in Hamilton, Texas -- he claimed he was really the Kid. And a 1937 grave in Prescott, Ariz., of another claimant, one John Miller.
Two New Mexico sheriffs are trying to find out. They want to exhume the grave of the Kid's mother, Catherine Antrim, in Silver City, N.M., and get DNA to compare to what they hope to find in the other graves. The mayors of Fort Sumner and Silver City oppose the exhumations and DNA testing, and it's all supposed to go to court next month.
One of the curious sheriffs, Gary Graves of De Baca
County, observed that This is a very, very hot
issue,
since it concerns a lot of tax dollars
from tourist income.
Now, I don't recall ever going out of my way to see a
famous grave. We had some time to kill in Taos once, so we
walked through the cemetery and saw Kit Carson's tombstone.
And on a walking tour of historic Littleton last year, we
saw Alfred Packer's grave. But that's it -- I've been in
Glenwood Springs on many occasions without ever feeling any
desire to see the last resting place of John Henry
Doc
Holliday.
Lots of people must feel differently, though, since one argument against exhumation in Silver City and Ft. Sumner is that thousands of people come to see the historic graves, which would be disturbed by DNA recovery, and thus no longer historic attractions -- even if the DNA confirmed the identities of the occupants.
For our purpose, the important thing about this is that tourists can't tell real graves from fake ones. Historians might fret about such matters, but chambers of commerce need not worry. After all, even if it turns out that the site is a fraud, there's still plenty of publicity, and people might well come to see the fake grave site.
Where to start? There's a John Wilkes Booth
grave
marker in Leadville's Evergreen Cemetery; start claiming it
marks the assassin of Abraham Lincoln.
Then expand. It would be safest, and most profitable, to
install graves for famous people whose burial sites are
unknown, and contrive some local lore about how, in the
fall of 1930, a man with a New York accent moved to town,
bought a small farm and kept to himself until his death in
1948 or so. Then point tourists to the grave of Judge
Joseph F. Crater.
Another town could claim Jimmy Hoffa or Ambrose Bierce. The tourists would come and the controversies would mount and more tourists would come -- all without spending any tax money.
And why should truth matter? After all, a lot of our
towns already boast of their connection to Alfred Packer,
the only man in American history ever convicted of
cannibalism.
Truth is, he wasn't, because cannibalism
has never been a crime in Colorado. We haven't let that get
in our way yet, so why start worrying about the truth now,
especially not when we're supposed to be attracting
tourists.
< PREVIOUS ] [ 2003 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >