The Story of Camillus Sidney Fly
by
Bill Hedrick
There wasn’t much going on in southeast Arizona prior to 1877 in an area known as Goose Flats. It was a harsh land, and the U.S. Army was doing what they could to protect the settlers and prospectors who were drifting into the area with the dream of striking it rich. There were, however, hostile Indians in the area who resented the white man’s presence in the land they called “home.” One of those early settlers who braved this desolate land was 30-year-old Ed Schieffelin, a prospector and Indian Scout who was described as wearing “clothing pieced and patched from deerskins, corduroy, and flannel, and his hat was originally a slouch hat that had been pieced with rabbit skin until very little of the original felt remained.”
Since the age of 17, Ed Schieffelin had been looking for gold and silver, searching from Oregon to Nevada into Death Valley, back into Colorado and New Mexico, and even the Grand Canyon. After hearing that the U.S. Army had established a camp in southeast Arizona to counter the Chiricahua Apache threat and to secure the nearby border with Mexico, Schieffelin signed up and accompanied the scouts on a few trips into the back country while prospecting part-time. Against the advice of others, he ventured further into hostile territory seeking that illusive pay dirt. His friends thought he was crazy and told him, “The only rock you will find out there will be your own tombstone.”
Schieffelin would prove them wrong when he located a vein estimated to be 50 feet long and 12 inches wide. The silver ore he discovered would assay out at $2,000 per ton. He filed his first mining claim on September 21, 1877, and fittingly named his stake “Tombstone.” As the mining operation grew, so did the need for men. Soon, a tent community sprang up and, when the word got out, the settlement grew into a metropolis almost overnight and adopted the name of Schieffelin’s claim… Tombstone.
Mining for ore is a harsh and dangerous way to make a living. There were frequent mine floods, unstable mine structures, poor ventilation, and the use of explosives, yet many people saw it as their opportunity to wealth. But one man named Camillus Sydney Fly, who went by the name of “Buck,” sought to make his own fortune, not by mining, but by taking pictures of anyone who could pay the studio price of 35 cents.
Fly was previously a farmer in California where he met his wife, Mollie. After moving to Tombstone, Fly and his wife first opened a temporary photography studio in a tent. By July of 1880, they completed construction of a 12-room boarding house at 312 Fremont Street that housed their photography studio and gallery in the back, called the “Fly Gallery.” Mollie was also an accomplished photographer herself, one of only a few female photographers of that era, and quite capable of running the studio whenever Buck was away.
On October 26, 1881, Buck and Mollie heard a commotion in an area between their studio and Jersey’s Livery Stable just off Fremont Street. Members of a loosely organized group of cattle rustlers and horse thieves called the Cochise County Cowboys were pitted against lawmen Virgil, Morgan, Wyatt Earp, and Doc Holliday. Nobody really knows who fired first, but the volley of gunfire lasted less than a minute. Suddenly, a man named Ike Clanton, one of the cowboys, took refuge inside Fly’s studio before fleeing in terror proclaiming he was unarmed. Before the smoke could clear, Buck Fly was outside with his Henry rifle, disarming another man named Billy Clanton.
For some strange reason, Fly did not photograph the aftermath of the shoot-out, but legend has it that one of the Earp brothers threatened him if he did. The gunfight would become known as the infamous Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. The only photographic record of the event would be a photograph taken by Fly of Tom McLaury, Frank McLaury, and Billy Clanton in their caskets.
Perhaps it was this missed opportunity to record an historic event or his restless nature that prompted Fly to seek a new direction for his photography business by recording people and events outside the confines of his studio. That opportunity came in March of 1886 when Fly accompanied General George Crook to the Canyon de Los Embudos in the Sierra Madre Mountains, about 85 miles from Fort Bowie, to negotiate with none other than Geronimo himself. Fly packed his equipment and attached himself to the military column and, during the three days of negotiations, took about 15 exposures on 8×10 inch glass negatives.
Captain John Bourke, noted author who was present during those negotiations, described the scene. “Tombstone photographer Fly kept busy at his camera, posing his Apache models with a nerve that would have reflected undying glory on a Chicago drummer. He coolly asked Geronimo and the warriors with him to change positions and turn their heads to improve the negative. None of them seemed to mind him in the least except Chihuahua, who kept dodging behind a tree, but was at last caught by the dropping of the slide.”
Others noted that Fly was “not a respector of persons or circumstances, and even in the midst of the most serious interviews with the Indians, he would step up to an officer and say, ‘Just put your hat a little more on the side, General. No, Geronimo, your right foot must rest on the stone,’ etc., so wrapped was he in the artistic effects of his views.”
In 1887, Fly joined another expedition after a large earthquake struck Bavispe in Sonora, Mexico. Tombstone Doctor George E. Goodfellow wanted to visit the area, accompanied by Fly. They traveled over 700 miles through the Sierra Madre Mountains recording observations, mostly on foot. Goodfellow used Fly’s images of the effects of the earthquake, the damaged and ruined buildings, and survivors to illustrate his report.
All of this was more than a century before the idea of photojournalism was born. But Fly apparently recognized the value of his images as illustrations and furnished high-quality prints to editors of journals, magazines, and newspapers. He sent images of Geronimo and his Apache band to Harper’s Weekly which published six of them in their April 24, 1886, issue, giving Fly nationwide exposure. His photos from that expedition are the only known photographs taken of an American Indian while still at war with the United States.
Even with nationwide exposure of his images, C.S. Fly never achieved the wealth he had hoped to attain. There were setbacks along the way and his studio was twice destroyed by fire. By this time his health was deteriorating due to heavy drinking and when he died on October 12, 1901, Mollie was at his bedside.
Mollie continued to run the Tombstone gallery on her own after her husband’s death and, in 1905, she published a collection of her husband’s photographs entitled “Scenes from Geronimo’s Camp.” In 1912, the boarding house burned to the ground for the second time. The fire prompted Mollie to retire and she moved to Los Angeles. A replica of the studio was built some time later in Tombstone. Before she died in 1925, Mollie Fly donated her husband’s collection of images to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. C.S. “Buck” Fly was buried in the Tombstone City Cemetery, not to be confused with Boot Hill.
