Exploring the Ghost Town of Two Guns, Arizona and the Apache Death Cave

today we're at the historic route 66 ghost town of two guns arizona home of the historic canyon diablo bridge and the apache death cave where legend has it navajo warriors killed 42 members of an apache raiding party in 1878 so we're going to explore the ruins of the town and hopefully the apache death cave as well [Music] two guns arizona has an amazing and frankly downright crazy history nowadays two guns is just a single exit off interstate 40 east of flagstaff the first thing you'll notice when pulling off the road is this abandoned and much graffitied gas station there's actually someone camped out here so we aren't going to explore it too much plus there are some much more interesting and much older things to be found at two guns behind the gas station is the remains of an old campground here we are at the campgrounds pool which is supposedly a very popular spot for skateboarders it's definitely a popular spot for graffiti artists [Music] the pool building is pretty much the only building still standing here at the campground [Music] as you can see most of the others haven't really fared all that well [Music] this building is pretty much just a roof now [Music] this campground was open from the 1960s up until the 1980s and looking around you can still find the places for rv hookups everywhere [Music] here's another one it doesn't look like any of these were removed when the campground shut down from the campground you can just kind of see arizona's meteor crater where a meteor struck the earth about 50 000 years ago it's a pretty cool place to visit on its own and they have a great museum there every time we go i comment on how lucky they are that the meteor just missed the gift shop when it struck [Music] all right let's head down this abandoned portion of route 66 and get to some of the older ruins and 2 guns and talk about the history of this wild place we should also be able to get to the historic canyon diablo bridge and hopefully find the infamous apache death cave [Music] well here are the ruins of the old zoo as you can probably tell by the big giant mountain lions written across the top let's explore these ruins and we'll kind of talk about the history of two guns while we do it two guns was first settled in the early 1900s by a man named ed randolph who built a store here with the national old trails highway going through here starting in 1907 this was the perfect place for a rest stop so in 1922 earl and louise cundiff purchased 320 acres of land from randolph at this location for about a thousand dollars and built a store restaurant and gas station here's where things start to get a little crazy a guy named harry e miller shows up in the area and leases property from the cundus in 1925. miller starts claiming he's an apache indian and calling himself chief crazy thunder and begins constructing this zoo here at the zoo he had animals such as mountain lions gila monsters coral snakes bobcats birds and even a lynx and i just want to stop for a minute and look at these cages i mean i can't imagine animals such as mountain lions being enclosed in such a small area i mean this seems really cruel to the animals keeping animals in enclosures like these is something that people were able to get away with in the 1920s but is thankfully something that you know really wouldn't fly today by getting back to chief crazy thunder miller himself he also opened a restaurant and indian gift shop here and started giving tours of the apache death cave but we'll come back to that a little bit later so miller had signs placed along route 66 advertising his establishment which he called fort two guns supposedly as an homage to silent movie actor william two guns heart who miller claimed to have worked with previously if we look back this way we could see how close the zoo was to canyon diablo and there's the historic canyon diablo bridge in 1926 the national old trails highway here formally became u.s route 66 that same year miller and earl cundiff got into a disagreement over the lisa's terms miller ended up shooting cunduff in cold blood killing the unarmed man miller claimed it was self-defense and was somehow acquitted but i guess karma wasn't on his side soon afterwards he was mauled by not one but two of his mountain lions and if that wasn't bad enough he was then bitten by one of his own venomous gila monsters [Music] in 1929 the interior of miller's store burned and soon after he just left the state but not without taking the turquoise jewelry silver and other expensive merchandise with him i know the whole thing is pretty nuts but we haven't even gotten to the apache death cave yet [Music] in 1929 the widowed louise cunduff ended up building her own tourist store and in 1934 opened the two guns texaco service station along a new alignment of route 66. someone else bought the store and stationed in 1950 and then it was sold again in 1963. a fire in 1971 pretty much ended the town as a tourist stop aside from the campground we visited earlier now let's go try to check out the canyon diablo bridge which actually predates the town and is on the national register of historic places [Music] so here's the canyon diablo bridge the bridge was built in 1915 and was part of route 66 from 1926 to 1938 it also looks like there is a fence in between us and the bridge so let's see if we could find our way around and get on the bridge [Music] as settlers started coming through this area in the mid-1800s this location was recognized as a good place to cross canyon diablo so wagon trails and later the first cars would follow paths that zigzagged along the canyon and then crossed the usually dry riverbed the addition of this bridge in 1915 was a huge improvement for travelers and made crossing through this area so much easier the bridge cost nine thousand dollars to build which is about 260 000 in today's dollars the canyon diablo bridge was placed on the national register of historic places in 1988 the ultimate dilemma go around the fence or go through the fence [Music] well i've made it over to the bridge now you're probably wondering if i took the long way and went around the fence or if i went through the fence well i'll give you a hint it is hot today it's easily a hundred degrees so you can pretty much guess how i did it let's uh take a look over the side here this thing is pretty high up but if you'll notice on the bridge how one of the walls has slots on it and the other one is solid that's supposedly to protect the bridge from flooding the upstream wall is the solid wall to stop water from getting on the bridge while the downstream wall has the slots to let it drain but if you look how high this bridge is i just can't imagine there being that much water that flooding this bridge was a huge concern but i guess it must happen for them to design the bridge that way it looks like there's some uh ruins on the other side of the bridge so let's walk over and check those out as well i'm not exactly sure what these are the ruins of i know there was another business that started around the same time as old chief crazy thunder's business and i'm not sure if that was here or if that was elsewhere there's some other ruins further down the road a little bit as well so i'm not exactly sure what these are the ruins for if you know let me know in the comments uh but yeah these are pretty cool too just look how big this building was i mean this is pretty huge if we take a look across the canyons we can see the ruins of our next stop which is where the apache death cave should be [Music] all right we've made it over here and the apache death cave should be just right down here in this hole and yep it looks like there is the pathway to it all right let's head down because this doesn't look unsafe at all these rocks look like the better bet than the wood just thought that was a snake right there so we've made it to the entrance of the apache death cave and i'm gonna head inside and take a look around this may be the stupidest thing we've ever done on this channel hopefully there's not a mountain lion or snakes or any sort of creatures in there but let's uh take a look around the apache death cave all right we're heading in i swear if we run into some sort of wild animal well i guess actually wild animals are not really much of a problem i'd much rather run into a wild animal than a wild human in here [Music] lots of loose rocks here at the beginning and it looks like we're gonna have to duck down a little bit here i think the story of the apache death cave is one of the better known route 66 legends but we'll talk about the story as we explore through the cave so the story goes in 1878 a band of apaches raided two navajo camps killing everyone except for three girls who were kidnapped and it looks like we're coming to another opening in the cave already these rocks here this wall that's part of a fake cliff dwelling that was placed here in the 1920s by henry miller as part of his tour of the apache caves so let's go a little bit deeper in [Music] so here's a side tunnel looks like you have to crawl to get in there and i'm not about to do that today uh so let's head back down the main tunnel [Music] so getting back to 1878 and the apache raid of the navajo camps other navajo warriors attempted to follow the apaches but the raiders seemed to vanish into thin air while scouting along the edge of canyon diablo they heard voices from beneath them and warm air coming up from a fissure in the ground they quickly realized they were above a cave which the apaches their horses and possibly the three navajo girls were hidden the navajo found the mouth of the cave and lit a fire intending to smoke out their enemies the apache tried to escape the cave and were killed by the waiting navajo warriors and wow this room is huge take a look at this i mean this is a massive room here and it's not too far from the entrance this thing here looks like it's holding the the crack in the ceiling together like a staple i don't know if this was used to hang something or or what this is for but yeah this room is definitely kind of sketchy here let's keep going so getting back to the story when the navajo found out that the navajo girls who had been kidnapped were already dead it was decided to kill all the apaches in the cave in revenge after those trapped in the cave had used all their water in attempt to put out the flames they began cutting the throats of their horses in order to use the blood to douse the flames but as the corpses of their horses piled up against the opening and the navajo continued to fuel the flames with sagebrush so this looks like about as far as we go i'm not fitting any further down there um let's see how dark it is in here let me turn off the flashlight yeah it's it's pretty dark in here so it was said that 42 apaches died in this cave it was later said that henry miller old chief crazy thunder himself after turning the cave into a tourist attraction would find the apache bones and sell them as souvenirs it's a really fantastic story and makes climbing through this cave pretty eerie the only problem is the story is almost certainly a complete work of fiction there are no historical sources anywhere to support the story of the apaches being killed in this cave the first known time this cave was ever called the apache death cave or the story of the slaughter was told was in 1967 in an article in big west magazine then a year later in a 1968 book on the history of two guns both the magazine article and the book were written by the same person gladwell richardson though the magazine article was written under an alias a number of other facts in the book such as billy the kid hiding out in two guns have been widely debunked by historians the fact that there is no evidence of the apache story anywhere in the 90 years between when it happened and when richardson wrote about it makes one skeptical but having climbed this far in i can't imagine 42 people plus horses in here either while miller certainly used the cave as a tourist attraction and built these fake cliff dwellings no historic sources used the word death in reference to the cave at all in old pictures you can see the cave was just called apache caves there is also no evidence to support miller ever selling bones the apache death cave is a cool tale though and it's helped keep the story of this route 66 ghost town alive and really it's a lot more fun than the truth anyway it is somewhat comforting to know that 40 plus apaches probably weren't killed right here though all right now we gotta work our way back at there wow it is hot today even though it's nice and shaded in the cave it's still just as hot in there and i am just drenched covered in sweat take a last look back at the apache death cave here's the ruins above the apache death cave let's take a look inside here real quick wow amazingly the roof is still here you don't see that very often you don't see a wooden roof still on ruins like this lots of graffiti in here of course just for reference i'll show how close this building is to the apache death cave just right out the front door a few feet and here we are the entrance to the apache death cave again [Music] so that's our look at two guns arizona the historic canyon diablo bridge and the apache death cave thank you so much for watching if you enjoyed the video please give it a thumbs up consider subscribing and we'll see you next week

Channel: Sidetrack Adventures

Views: 260,994

Keywords: Two Guns AZ, Two Guns Arizona, Arizona Ghost Towns, Apache Death Cave, Route 66 ghost town, abandoned Route 66, Historic Route 66, Arizona history, Interstate 40, Meteor Crater Arizona, Arizona urbex, abandoned ghost town, abandoned zoo, Arizona ruins, Arizona legends, Route 66 roadtrip, Arizona roadtrip, Arizona travel, Route 66 attractions, Route 66 legends, two guns

Id: KPF33LUH15o

Length: 18min 49sec (1129 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 13 2022