Clifton's jail, blasted straight into the cliff in 1881 — and the mason who carved it became its very first inmate.
Now let me tell you about the wildest little town at the end of this road, and the best piece of poetic justice in the state of Arizona.
Clifton. A copper camp jammed into a canyon so narrow that the buildings back straight up against the rock, with the river on one side and the cliff on the other and about enough room between them for a street. In the eighteen eighties this was a genuinely rough place — hundreds of miners, mostly young, mostly single, working brutal shifts underground and coming up with money in their pockets and a powerful thirst. Saloons, gambling halls, dance halls. Gunfire in the evenings. The kind of town where a Saturday night could put a man in the ground.
And it had a problem. It badly needed a jail — and there was not one square foot of flat ground left in that canyon to build one on. Every scrap was already spoken for by the mine, the smelter, the store or the saloons.
So they looked at the one thing they had plenty of, which was cliff. And they hired a hard-rock miner named Margarito Varela to do what he did best: blast. Not to build a jail — to CARVE one. Straight into the solid rock face. Two cells hacked out of the mountain with a hammer, a drill and black powder, with an iron door bolted across the front and a hole cut for air. No windows to speak of. No way out through walls that were the mountain itself.
Varela did the work. It took him weeks of drilling and shooting rock in the heat. And when it was finished, he collected his pay — a decent sum for a hard job well done.
And then he went down to the saloon to celebrate.
You can see where this is going, and the story goes exactly where you think. Varela got gloriously, monumentally drunk. And somewhere in the small hours he pulled his pistol and shot up the dance hall — no one killed, by most tellings, but a considerable amount of noise and broken glass and a great many people diving for the floor.
So they arrested him. And they marched him up the canyon and locked him in the brand-new jail.
The very first man ever held in that cell was the man who had just carved it out of the mountain with his own two hands. He knew every inch of it. He knew exactly how thick the rock was, because he had drilled it. And there was not one thing he could do about any of it.
Now, I will be honest with you the way I try to be: parts of that have been polished by a hundred and forty years of retelling in this canyon, and you will hear it slightly differently depending on who is telling it. But the jail is not a story. It is right there, cut into the cliff on the edge of town, and you can walk up and look into it today. Stand at that iron door and put your hand on the rock and you will feel the drill marks he left.
I have always liked this one more than the shootouts and the outlaws, and here is why. It is not about a bad man. It is about an ordinary working man who did a good job, got paid, and then celebrated a little too hard — and got caught by the exact thing he had made. There is no villain in it. Just a fellow, and a bottle, and a hole in a rock that fit him perfectly.
Go and look at it before you leave. Then think about how you would feel, sitting in a room you built yourself, waiting to sober up.