The town is located at the foot of the Dragoon Mountains, about fifteen miles northeast of Tombstone, and was named after Courtland Young, one of the owners of the Great Western Mining Company.

By the time it became a ghost town there was a car dealership, an ice cream parlor, a movie theater, a baseball field and a horse racing track, and more necessary buildings, such as houses, hotels and county branch jail.

As part of the efforts to preserve the history of Courtland, tours of the ghost town are now offered where visitors can go into a 19th-century mine, see pre-Hispanic Hohokam bedrock mortars and see a 20th-century copper acid leach plant.

On the morning of June 2, 1909, the prisoner being held in the jail attempted to escape by placing his mattress up against the door and lighting it on fire.

[4] Because most of Courtland's inhabitants lived in cabins, shacks or tents, spending the night in the jail was appealing to some miners.

The town court created a system which allowed prisoners time off their sentence in exchange for working on roads.

Not only was the town short of workers to build and maintain the streets, records indicate that the county had to pay a considerable amount of money to feed inmates, who referred to the jail as "The Bright Hotel.

On the morning of September 5, Mexican outlaw Francisco Chavez assaulted a local, Gregorio Barela, so Cates and Bright attempted to make an arrest.

Danielson then put the weapon inside the drawer of the bar, but, a few minutes later, Parker grabbed it and shot the man in the back.

Parker was arrested by Deputy Bright and put on trial in Tombstone, where she was sentenced to serve an unspecified amount of time at the prison in Florence, which began on April 28, 1913.

That day two Mexican outlaws broke into a local man's house and stole a pair of pistols, boxes of ammunition, and other items.

Deputy Bright was informed soon after, and when he was done searching the town he mounted up and rode to the top of a nearby hill, which provided a good view of the surrounding area.

A few minutes later, Bright made good on his escape by crawling back to Leadville Canyon, which was later found to have been unnecessary.