Two Guns: Murder, Mountain Lions, and Route Sixty-Six

Two Guns sits on the east rim of Canyon Diablo in Coconino County, between Flagstaff and Winslow. In the nineteen twenties, a man named Earl Cundiff ran a trading post here, and an eccentric named Harry Miller who billed himself as an Apache leased part of his land. Miller opened his own trading post and a roadside zoo stocked with mountain lions, cougars, Gila monsters, and snakes.

He named the settlement Two Guns, supposedly in honor of the silent film actor William Surrey Hart, whose twin Colt revolvers appeared in roughly seventy films. The name fit the place. Miller and Cundiff eventually quarreled, the argument turned into a gunfight, and Miller shot Cundiff dead. He was acquitted at trial. Shortly after, a mountain lion mauled him. He survived. A second mountain lion attacked him later. He survived again.

Route Sixty-Six brought enough traffic to keep Two Guns alive through the thirties and forties. When the highway was rerouted and then replaced by Interstate Forty, the tourist traffic that had sustained the town vanished. The zoo ruins and collapsed stone buildings still stand beside the interstate, one of the most photographed ghost towns on the old Mother Road.