O Homo Rides Again!

November 18, 2011

Working on our Arizona Centennial issue. Big plans, lots of amazing, outrageous coverage. For example, back in 2002 we covered a character who showed up in Tombstone in the summer of 1891, without a gun, without a name and without clothes. He was arrested in nearby Charleston and the constable, Frank Broad, brought him to Tombstone. The bronzed visitor insisted on being called "O Homo." He claimed to have been arrested some 40 times prior to this, but, he added indignantly, Tombstone was the only place to put him behind bars. Camillus S. Fly paid him $5 for a sitting at his Fremont Street gallery (famous site of the Earp-Clanton gunfight). Fly took three photos and sold them nationwide for $1 a piece. A local newspaper, The Prospector,
offered him a column where he waxed philosophically on many subjects during his 30 day sentence. The articles became a nationwide sensation and O Homo received marriage proposals from many women. After his release, he showed up in Yuma, then from there he vanished. Or, did he?

In our 2002 coverage of O Homo in True West magazine we offered a $500 reward for anyone who could produce a Fly photo of O Homo. Obviously, Fly claimed to have sold quite a few prints, but even estimating conservatively, there must be a couple dozen of these novelties scattered in various attics, or storage sheds. Somewhere, someone has this picture and they probably think it's of a mountain climber or a circus performer. A San Francisco paper did a crude line drawing based on the photo and from that I created this sketch of what the print may look like:

The Mapinator, Gus Walker is in our offices today, working on a couple maps on Robert Ray's computer. Been a while since he has been here (he retired to Alabama several years ago). Great to see him. We're taking him out to lunch.

"An army of sheep led by a lion will defeat an army of lions led by a sheep."
—Old Vaquero Saying