Tombstone
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Bound volumes of old files of the Tombstone Epitaph, Tombstone Nugget, and Tucson Star fill certain shelves in the rooms of the Arizona Pioneers Historical Society in Tucson. In these old newspapers, yellow with age, is to be found, if you take the time to dig it out—and it may take you weeks on end—a full history of Tombstone. The stories were news in their day and are as vivid now as when the ink on the type was still wet. These files constitute a full and authentic record of Tombstone, and they are the source of most of the tales told in this book. The bibliography of Tombstone is meagre. McClintock, in his History of Arizona, has sketched the town’s development, and Frederick Bechdolt, as a literary pioneer in the romantic field, has done some brilliant work in When the West Was Young; but nothing has been written or ever will be written of early days in southeastern Arizona of such intimate interest as the day-by-day history set forth in these old files.
My account of the origin of the Earp-Clanton feud and the street battle in which it culminated is based on testimony from the witness stand. At his trial after the fight in which Tom and Frank McLowery and Billy Clanton were killed, Wyatt Earp read a long and carefully prepared paper which gave in detail the Earp side of the vendetta, and Ike Clanton gave the Clanton side. The Tombstone Epitaph published this testimony in full and that of many other eyewitnesses to the battle from stenographic notes. From these authentic records I have presented both sides of the case. For my version of the assassination of Morgan Earp and the subsequent killing of Frank Stilwell and Florentino Cruz, or Indian Charlie, I have depended on the evidence brought out at the coroner’s inquests.
My Schieffelin chapter is based on the manuscript written by Schieffelin himself and now in the archives of the Arizona Pioneers Historical Society; my stories of Billy Breakenridge among the Curly Bill outlaws are based on the reminiscences of the adventurer himself, now Col. William P. Breakenridge of Tucson; my chronicles of John Slaughter are based on the recollections of Mrs. John Slaughter of Douglas, on the clippings treasured in her scrapbook and on the manuscript memoirs of the famous sheriff written by Mrs. W. E. Hankin of Bisbee, a lifelong friend of the Slaughter family.
My research into the printed records of Tombstone’s past has been supplemented by interviews with pioneers, and for information on many subjects dealt with in the book I am under obligations to William Lutley, C. L. Cummings, Porter McDonald, Mr. and Mrs. J. H. Macia, James Marr, A. H. Gardner, and Frank Vaughan of Tombstone; Jeff Milton of Fairbank; Leonard Redfield of Benson; United States Marshal George A. Mauk, and State Historian George H. Kelly of Phoenix; Edward Vail, Mrs. George F. Kitt, George R. Roskruge, L. D. Walters, and Melvin Jones of Tucson; Ross Sloan of Skeleton Canyon; James C. Hancock and Rube Hadden of Paradise; Henry Smith, Mrs. B. F. Smith, and Bill Sanders of Turkey Creek Canyon; and half a hundred other old-timers who knew Tombstone in its roaring days.
I
Hills of Silver
Geronimo and his warriors were out of their stronghold in the Dragoons. Through all the southeastern part of Arizona from the San Simon to the Huachucas and from the Gila to the Mexican line, the Apache bands were relentlessly harrying the thinly settled land with a warfare of ambuscade and assassination. Through desert mesquite and cactus, the invisible savages slipped with the noiseless swiftness of running water; like poisonous reptiles they wriggled upon their bellies to points of murderous vantage; as still as cougars and as patient, they lurked beside the trails or watched a cabin door. The sudden cough of a rifle through the golden peace of the sunshine gave the first intimation of their ghostly nearness. A wagon train was ambushed in some pass in the hills; a miner in some lonely gulch was murdered from a cholla thicket; a settler with his wife and children was massacred on his homestead claim. Back to their mountain fastnesses from their slinking, silent war trails, the red butchers bore their spoils—a side of bacon, a sack of flour, a bag of beans, a little tobacco, a pair of overalls, a calico wrapper, a baby’s rattle. Then the riotous feasting, the paeans of drumming tom-toms, the wild, impassioned dance of triumph. This was the Apache way in war. No battles, only murder. If the soldiers pressed hard upon their traces, the savages, on their tough, swift ponies, vanished as by magic through secret mountain paths to safety in old Mexico.
Into this wilderness land of ambushed death, Ed Schieffelin, unknown as yet to fame or fortune, came as a civilian scout in , with a flying column recruited in the Hualapai country on the borders of the Grand Canyon and under the command of Al Sieber, celebrated in Apache campaigns as one of the greatest government scouts of the Southwest. The troopers made their headquarters at Camp Huachuca, a newly established army post at the north end of the Huachuca range, and scoured the country round about for Indians.
Eastward across the San Pedro Valley from the post, a group of high hills cut the skyline. Unlovely hills, treeless, their brown slopes a dreary monotony of huge rocks and boulders among which cactus and greasewood made hard shift to live. A sheer desert tumultuously uplifted and set on edge. There was a look of frank poverty about them. One sweep of the eye took them in. No dark, mysterious gorges, no hidden pockets, no shadowy valleys invited curious investigation. Spaniards of Coronado’s time coming up from Mexico on their quest for the Seven Cities of Cibola had passed them by with only an incurious glance. Scouts had threaded through them, troops of cavalry had circled them, Mexican smugglers had camped in their lower draws. But no one had suspected that their drab pauper’s mantle was only a masquerade hiding one of the continent’s richest treasures. They were hills of silver, veined through and through with ore of fabulous richness, filled to the cactus roots and ready to burst with precious metal. One rip of their sides with a miner’s pick and the hoarded wealth would have come gushing forth in resplendent flood. But their hour had not yet struck. The man with the pick had not yet arrived.
On one of their scouting expeditions from Camp Huachuca, Al Sieber and his men rode through the northern reaches of these hills. Schieffelin’s eye caught the gleam of deep mineral stains on a stone. He dismounted and examined the piece of float intently. Silver! Schieffelin looked up in astonishment at the piled-up ugliness of the range. For one skeptical moment, the squalid ridges seemed a sky-high lie. He shook his head. It was impossible. And yet … He dropped the chunk of rock in his coat pocket and rode on after his comrades. He said nothing. But his secret thrilled him like wine. He would be a scout no longer. When the Apache hunt was over, he would turn prospector again and hit the trail for the end of the rainbow.
On his return to Camp Huachuca, Schieffelin rode off alone on his mule to seek his fortune. For a while, he made his headquarters with George Woolfolk, who had just taken up land on Barbacomari Creek, sleeping at Woolfolk’s place at night and going out every day into the hills. He found the spot where he had picked up the float, but he was unable to trace the rock to its source. Falling in with William Griffith and a partner who had come from Tucson to do assessment work on the old Brunckow mine, he was induced to stand guard for them against the danger of Indian attack while they completed their job in the shaft.
The old Brunckow house, a long three-room adobe, stood in a little bowl of a valley a mile east of the San Pedro River. Its history even then was long and romantic. It was built in by Frederick Brunckow, a native of Berlin, graduate of the University of Westphalia, scholar and scientist who, exiled from Germany because of his activities in the revolution of , had drifted out into these solitudes. Brunckow had begun to dig a mine near the house, and it had reached the depth of a grave when an Indian arrow toppled him over into it dead.
Science on that primitive frontier connoted a sort of magic, and a story spread that the German wizard, by occult divination, had located a vast treasure deep in the earth. So a long succession of adventurers came and dug in the shaft, but death was all any man-jack of them ever found. Two in addition to Brunckow were killed by Apaches, and claim-jumping fights over the worthless hole in the ground brought the toll of dead men, it is said, up to seventeen. But the myth of treasure deeper down still lives, and year after year assessment work is done to hold the claim. Nowadays, the old house and mine are said to be haunted. Travellers along the old Charleston road, it is declared, hear cries and groans at night or see shadowy forms stalking in the moonlight.
Here at the old Brunckow mine, Al Sieber riding up with a party of scouts found Schieffelin sitting on a pile of rock on guard with his rifle across his lap.
“What’re you doin’, Ed?” asked Sieber.
“Prospecting, mostly,” Schieffelin drawled.
“Whar?”
“Over yonder.” Schieffelin waved his hand eastward toward the hills.
“Them hills?” scoffed Sieber. “Thar ain’t nothin’ thar.”
“I’ve picked up some mighty nice-looking stones.”
“All you’ll ever find in them hills’ll be your tombstone,” warned the scout. “Geronimo’ll git you ef you don’t watch out, and leave your bones fer the buzzards to pick.”
“I’ll take a chance,” Schieffelin replied.
His life against a million dollars. That was his chance.
A wide, shallow dry wash leading up from the San Pedro Valley, its sloping sides green with gramma grass and flowering weeds. Ocotillos whose tall, curving, graceful wands springing from a central root were like green jets from a fairy fountain. Chollas armed with needle-sharp spines as thick as bristles on a wild boar, brandishing weirdly deformed arms like truculent devils. Green and yellow mescal plants that shot thirty feet in air skyrocket stalks that exploded in starry white blooms. Schieffelin on his mule, rifle across his saddlebow, travelling through the wash at a walk, looking for stones.
From the yellow, shadowy ramparts of the Dragoons nine miles across the mesquite mesa, a tall slender column of smoke, shimmering darkly in the sun, rose straight into the sky. It broke from its base and drawing slowly upward into space melted from view. A quick, ball-like puff of smoke shot upward like a bursting bomb. Again a slim spiral shorter than the first. Another explosive puff. Another. Once more a brief pillar. Dash. … Dot. … Dash. … Two dots. … Dash. Up there somewhere on the mountain wall a half-naked Apache, manipulating a deerskin over a brush fire, was telegraphing a code message to some war party in the valley. A queer little smile twisted the corner of Schieffelin’s mouth. What was that fellow saying? Humph! He tightened a bit his grip on his rifle and went on looking for stones. Find his tombstone? Well, maybe.
He turned a corner of the wash. His mule halted abruptly, ears pricked, forelegs stiffly braced. What was that that gleamed so snowy white among the clumps of bear grass? An outcropping of white rock, perhaps. Or the mouldering skull of some long-dead, crow-bait pony. But no. Schieffelin dismounted. A step forward and there before him lay a human skeleton. Just beyond it another. The sparse grass had laid green tendrils across the glistening shanks. Weeds had shot up between the ribs. A prickly pear was crawling greenly across a disarticulated spinal column. The disjointed bones, bleached to ghastly whiteness by the suns and rains of years, were only slightly out of place here and there, and the two dead men seemed to have lain undisturbed since the moment of sudden tragedy that had overwhelmed them.
The skeletons lay at full length, breast downward, head to head, with the finger bones of the long out-reaching arms almost touching. Between them stood a pile of silver ore perhaps a foot high, the dissevered arm bones almost enclosing it in a glimmering, broken circle. One skull lay turned on its side; the other was firmly imbedded upon its base in the earth, but the dark, hollow eye-sockets of both were trained, as if with conscious intensity, on the little heap of stones that suggested some idol’s shrine before which these ghastly spectres bowed to the ground in unending worship. High above them, on a single stem, a yucca lifted a great cluster of drooping lily-white blossoms that swayed gently in the breeze like a swung censer.
The story of the tragedy that had left these bones to bleach on the desert was as clear as if the skeletons themselves suddenly had sat upright and unfolded every vivid detail. Picture two prospectors beside their camp fire. Rugged men they are, bearded, clear-eyed, ruddy with health. Luck has been with them. They have located a rich ledge of silver during their day’s wanderings. They pour their specimens of ore on the ground. In the red glow of the firelight they gloat over their treasure. Wonderful ore. What will it run? Twenty thousand to the ton? These questions can wait. The assay in Tucson will tell. They pick up the stones, scrutinize them, weigh them in their palms. They are like misers threading fingers joyously through gold. They laugh exultant laughter. But it is growing late. They roll themselves in their blankets and go to sleep under the stars to dream of riches.
But out in the darkness, a devil’s ring has closed around them. While they are slumbering peacefully, fierce eyes keep them all night under baleful surveillance. Apache gods forbid a night attack; the night is sacred to ancestral ghosts. Rosy dawn is a choice time for murder. When morning breaks in rose and gold over the Dragoons, the two men tumble out of bed. For a happy moment they stand facing each other above their pile of ore. They stretch out comradely hands. “Put her there, pardner.” Their fortune’s made. Goodbye to desert hardships. They have struck it rich at last. … Apache rifles spit fire. Snaky wisps of blue powder smoke wriggle off across the mesquite. …
Schieffelin climbed down off his mule, and stepping gingerly among the bones, examined the pieces of ore one by one. Quick certainty flashed upon him like sunlight. This ore had come from the same source as the float he had found while scouting with Sieber. He was near the treasure for which he had hunted so long. Possibly this spot of dreams was now within the sweep of his vision. But where? He replaced the rocks as he had found them in the half-formed circle between the skeleton arms and rode away, leaving the dead at their eternal salaam before the tiny altar on which they had poured the oblation of their life blood.
At sunset, Schieffelin, several miles farther up the wash, prepared to camp. He picketed his mule in good grass in a secluded hollow and threw down his blankets on top of a hill a mile away. This was good strategy; a man will lie silent at night in Indian country but a mule may burst into song at any moment. The conical hill on which he made camp extended out into the wash in promontory wise and was thickly strewn with broken, gigantic fragments of rock. Just east of it was a fine spring in a clump of cottonwoods.
It was twilight when Schieffelin started for the spring to fill his canteen. As he turned a point of rock, he saw on the brow of the hill scarcely twenty yards from him an Apache warrior standing in fine, bold silhouette against the golden pallor of the sky, every detail delicately outlined—the dingy white turban, the single eagle’s feather in the hair, the necklace of bear’s claws, loincloth, high boot-moccasins. A rifle rested in the crook of the Indian’s arm; beneath his cupped palm, he was peering into the shadows beginning to veil the mesa. A noble picture, but appealing to Schieffelin more poignantly as a noble target. He dropped abruptly behind a rock and drew a careful bead.
As he was about to pull the trigger, a second savage, emerging noiselessly from behind the hilltop, seemed to float up against the sky like a mannequin manipulated against a lighted screen by strings. Well! A third mysteriously materialized. The tragic situation was achieving a certain comic relief. Two more Indians rose ghostlike against the sky from the nether shadows. Five! It began to look as if Sieber’s prophecy might come true, after all. A tombstone for the cornered prospector loomed just then as a not improbable tailpiece for his adventure. Schieffelin lowered his rifle. This thing was being overdone. He had had enough. Threading his way among the towering rocks, bent on stealthy flight in the gathering dusk, he espied from the verge of the crest twenty more Indians down by the spring.
But they were mounting their ponies. Schieffelin realized with a surge of relief that they were making ready to go away. The five that had floated up against the sky floated down again. Digging their heels into their ponies’ sides, the band got under way. Hoo-hoo-hoo-ah-hoo! Their chanted grunting came to Schieffelin’s ears in jolting rhythms as they rode off in the thickening darkness. But there was still danger. They were heading in the direction of Schieffelin’s mule. Would that fool beast have sense enough to stick to cropping grass or, under sudden lyric urge, would it intone a hymn to the evening star? An aria at this crisis would be fatal. Or would those desert bloodhounds pick up Schieffelin’s own trail in the wash and come back to lift his hair? Hoo-hoo-hoo-ah-hoo! The muffled cadence was growing fainter. With straining eyes, Schieffelin watched the huddle of jostling forms dwindle in the distance. It faded into a formless blur, winked out at last in blank darkness. They were gone. Still from far off the rhythmic whisper throbbed through the night. Hoo-hoo-hoo-ah-hoo!
Sweet music to Schieffelin’s ears after a night of sleepless vigilance was the hee-haw of his mule uplifted in joyous salute to the morning. When the sun again shone serenely over the familiar landscape, exorcising the lurking terrors of darkness, he felt the happy elation of one who has awakened in the nick of time to escape the hobgoblins of a nightmare. Three miles beyond him rose the hills that had so long intrigued and baffled him. He had had his first glimpse of them in April; this was the middle of August. Before him the wash led upward to the sunlit heights. Once more astride his mule, he set off on the day’s adventures.
Float was plentiful. The fragments scattered along the sides of the wash were like markers left to guide him. He entered the vestibule of the hills; the wash divided. Which branch should he take? One possibly led to poverty; the other to wealth. While he paused in momentary quandary, a cottontail rabbit darted from a covert, scurried across the wash from the left, and disappeared up the right-hand gulch, leaving a trail of tiny footprints in the sand. It seemed an augury. Schieffelin staked his mule in the brush and on foot followed the cottontail. Destiny at the crossroads was determined by a trifle.
He worked up the draw to its head far back in the range. The barren hills swept down in flowing curves that flattened into tables and dipped into hollows and saddles and were cut deeply by innumerable ravines. Far up toward the summit, he spied an irregular ledge of grayish rock marbled with black and reddish-yellow splotches; he estimated its length at fifty feet and its width at six or eight inches. There were other ledges in plain view striping the hills. But this ledge stretching its undulant length along the dark slant of mountain stirred him like a battle flag. Toward it, as if drawn by a magnet, he laid his course, never swerving or turning aside as, labouring upward, he stumbled across arroyos and crashed through thickets of cat-claw and pear.
Breathless, wet with sweat, his heart pounding, he stood before the ledge at last. He sank his prospector’s pick into the rock; it came crumbling down in a heap of brittle lumps. In a hand that trembled as with an ague, he picked up a fragment; he examined it with feverish eyes. It was streaked and veined and stained with silver. His brain reeled with the richness of it.
No one was there to see the climax of this one-man drama staged on the bleak hillside. No one but Schieffelin knew the thrill and romance of it. He was alone with his mountain, alone with his dreams come true, alone with his achievement, alone in the glory of it. For this he had wandered in poverty for years through mountains and deserts, starved, suffered, braved death. Here was the goal of his life, his ultimate destination. This desolate spot was the end of the rainbow.
He fished from his pants pocket a silver twenty-five-cent piece and pressed it against a slab of ore. In the soft, rich, metal content of the rock, the coin left an imprint so clearly defined that in it Schieffelin was able to decipher the national motto. Beneath his feet was a hill crammed as full of silver as was ever pirate treasure chest with doubloons and pieces-of-eight, but this quarter of a dollar was all the money he had in the world. With it, later on, he bought a plug of tobacco in Globe.
As Schieffelin leaned on his pick and in a brief moment of reverie gazed over the San Pedro Valley shimmering under a blazing sun, Al Sieber’s warning at the old Brunckow house came back to him: “All you’ll ever find in them hills’ll be your tombstone.” It flashed upon him now that, as a prophet, old Sieber was a great Indian fighter. Schieffelin grinned at the merry conceit. Instead of a tombstone, he had discovered a silver mine—a million-dollar silver mine, perhaps. But if those Indians had caught him last night … After all, he had missed a tombstone—or death, at least—only by an inch or two. Tombstone. Not such a bad name for his mine considering his close squeak and Sieber’s fool prediction. Well, what was the matter with that name, anyway? Why not? The mine might be his tombstone some day—or his monument. So he made his decision. His mine was the Tombstone … now … for all time. That was settled on the spot. The name was coloured with a little irony, a little cynicism, a little drama, a little romance, a little fun, a little seriousness. Unconsciously, with an unuttered word, Schieffelin had christened not only the mine but the hills, a whole silver field, and an unborn town whose story was to develop into one of the most picturesque and dramatic chronicles of the Southwest.
Schieffelin filled a bag with specimens from the ledge for assay, built a small monument of stones to mark his claim, and trudging down the hill, mounted his mule. Settling into the saddle, he gave the beast a kick in the ribs with his boot heel. “Giddap,” he said.
A stranger had ridden out of the desert into Signal and startled the raw mining town up in the Bill Williams River country of northwestern Arizona with his ineffable sartorial chaos. As the tall, lean, broad-shouldered newcomer stalked past the unpainted shanty saloons and gambling places of the main street, the citizens loitering on the plank sidewalks, themselves roughly clad and familiar with the uncouth dress of frontier riffraff, turned to stare in amazement at the ruinous figure. His corduroy clothes, shiny and threadbare, a thorn-torn hole showing here and there, were patched like a crazy-quilt with deerskin, flour sacking, and rags of saddle blanket. His ancient slouch hat was so thickly pieced with rabbit skin that little of the original felt remained visible. His pants were stuffed into rusty boots run down at heel and his coat flapped open to reveal a flaming expanse of red flannel shirt. His face was half-hidden by a heavy curly brown beard and a mass of dark, tangled, unkempt hair fell upon his shoulders.
But, oddly enough, no one laughed at this weird figure that would have frightened crows from a cornfield; no sly, snickering comment accompanied the sidelong glances. There was something in the bearing of the stranger that touched his rags with a certain nobility; the unmistakable quality of spiritual vision lighted his serious deep gray eyes, and through the bronze of his weather-beaten face shone the purpose and fine courage of a vivid personality. The face of this rugged man was that of a poet who dreamed splendid dreams but had never learned to sing. This was Ed Schieffelin, if you please, discoverer of the Tombstone mines and potential millionaire, “thirty years old, looking forty.”
The late afternoon whistle blew at the McCracken mine. The miners coming off shift swarmed into town. To one striding along with swinging dinner pail, Schieffelin stuck out a grimy paw.
“Hello, Al. Haven’t seen you for four years.”
“Don’t believe I know you.”
“Hardly blame you. I look like the devil, but I happen to be your brother.”
Beside a stove fire in Al Schieffelin’s cabin that night, Ed Schieffelin poured out the tale of his wanderings. From the Tombstone hills he had ridden to Tucson, living on game he shot on the way, and on , while the Mexicans of the little adobe town were celebrating the fiesta of San Juan’s Day, he had filed upon his claim and inscribed its name as the Tombstone in the official records. Thence to Globe in search of Brother Al to help him work or finance his new mine, only to learn that Brother Al long ago had gone to Signal. His last twenty-five cents spent for tobacco, Schieffelin had worked for fourteen days on the windlass at the Champion mine and, having purchased provisions with his earnings and got his mule newly shod, had struck out for Signal, three hundred miles westward across deserts and mountains. At the end of his journey, he found Brother Al’s interest in the fancied bonanza only lukewarm. Brother Al’s long experience as a miner was littered with collapsed bonanzas. But Ed Schieffelin had brought along his ore specimens. He spread them on the table in the shine of the tallow dip. Here was his proof. Practical Brother Al examined them calmly and shook his head.
“Poor,” he said. “Nothing to get excited about.”
But Schieffelin’s enthusiasm was not to be easily squelched. He wanted a more authoritative opinion. Next day Brother Al brought in the foreman of the McCracken plant.
“Mostly lead,” the foreman declared.
Still unconvinced, Schieffelin showed his specimens to twenty or thirty other mining men who might reasonably be assumed to have expert knowledge. All pronounced the ore of little value. The verdict seemed unanimous.
“Better forget your bonanza and go to work,” suggested Brother Al.
Schieffelin, in a fit of disillusion, stepped to the cabin door and hurled his specimens one by one as far as he could throw them out on the hill. He was on the point of throwing away a whole splendid future in one mad impulse, but restrained himself in time and saved three pieces of ore. Gloomy and disgusted, he went to work in the McCracken mine and wielded a pick and shovel for four weeks.
The miners at Signal sometimes referred to Richard Gird, who recently had arrived to assume the position of mining and mechanical engineer and assayer at the properties, as “the famous Mr. Gird.” He had had an extensive mining experience, and his reputation as an expert had preceded him. A dour, hard-featured, hardheaded, competent man was the famous Mr. Gird, without a drop of romance in his practical soul, his shrewd gray eyes looking upon adventure only as an opportunity to make money, but with a gambler’s cold nerve in his willingness to take risks in a game for big stakes.
The early dusk of a winter afternoon was darkening the windows of Gird’s office. A draft of cold air as the door opened accompanied a sound of boots scraping on the floor. Working at his desk by lamplight, Gird looked up. Before him stood a bearded young giant, evidently painfully embarrassed. Well? Schieffelin laid his three remaining specimens on the desk. Everybody had said they were no good, but he wanted to know for sure; then he could sleep better of nights. Would Mr. Gird take a look at them? And did he think them worth assaying? Gird picked up the pieces and turned them over in his hands. A sudden gleam kindled in his eyes and as suddenly died out. Well, yes, he would assay them. Fine. He could send word of the result by Brother Al who was on night shift and could call at the office any afternoon after work was over. Ed himself was working days.
Ed Schieffelin was sleeping soundly in his bunk a few nights later when Brother Al came bustling and stamping into the cabin and shook him vigorously by the shoulder.
“Get up, Ed,” said Brother Al quite out of breath. “Mr. Gird wants to see you right away in his office. Come on now. Hurry up.”
“I’ve assayed your ore,” said Gird when the two brothers arrived at the office. “One piece runs $2,000 to the ton, another $600, and the third only $40. You can’t always estimate the richness of a lode by two or three samples of rock. But I’m convinced you’ve made a strike. Where is your claim?
“Over on the San Pedro.”
“That’s not very definite.”
No, it wasn’t very definite. But that’s all the information Gird got just then. Ed Schieffelin had a certain shrewdness himself. He knew how to keep a bonanza secret. He hadn’t even told Brother Al.
“How much money have you?”
“Not much. All I’ve got’s a mule.”
“I’m willing to throw in with you,” Gird went on. “If you’ll let me in on this, I’ll buy a second mule to make a span, outfit a travelling rig, and furnish a grubstake, you and Al and myself to be equal partners in the venture and everything we find to be split three ways.”
“That suits me,” shot back Schieffelin. “We’re partners from now on.”
The business partnership entered into this night in the little office at Signal and ratified by a handshake all round never was put in writing. Though it lasted for years and involved the handling of millions of dollars, it rested wholly on honour and was held inviolate by the three men to the end.
“What about your position here at the mines?” asked Schieffelin.
“To hell with my position!” snapped Gird.
The question of the time for starting came up. Gird thought they had better wait until the warm weather of spring had opened the trails.
“No.” Schieffelin banged his fist on the table. “We’ll start now.”
The famous Mr. Gird was slightly taken aback by this imperious vehemence. No immediate rush seemed necessary. He had certain affairs to be arranged, certain business matters that—
“Right now,” thundered Schieffelin. “Or never.”
So preparations for an immediate departure were made. Gird resigned; the company, in an effort to hold him, offered him the general superintendency of the mines, but he refused it. Gird bought a secondhand blue spring wagon and loaded it with provisions, cooking equipment, and firearms, including in the cargo his assay outfit and a surveyor’s transit and level. He also purchased a mule which, paired with Schieffelin’s, made the team. As the three men were ready to pull out, the noon whistle at the mines blew for dinner. Gird and Brother Al wanted to take time to eat. Ed Schieffelin refused to wait for food or anything else. Then prudent Brother Al changed his mind at the last moment and decided he wouldn’t go; he was dubious about leaving a good job at $4 a day. Without a word either of anger or persuasion, Ed Schieffelin whipped up his mules and left Brother Al standing lonely and wistful behind. So Ed Schieffelin and Gird, in the first week of , started for the San Pedro. Brother Al joined them on horseback at their first night’s camp at Dripping Spring; the lure of bonanza had changed his mind again.
Past Martinez, Hassayampa, Wickenburg into Salt River Valley, their route led them, across Salt River at Hayden’s Ferry, on through Tempe to Maricopa, where they struck the old Overland stage trail, and so to Tucson. They were entering the Apache country now. The old stage station at Pantano bore the bullet scars of a recent attack. They doused their camp fire at night, spread their blankets at a distance from their wagon and mules, and at daybreak climbed to a hilltop to search the country with field glasses for any sign of red marauders. Beyond the old Ohnersorgen stage station where they crossed the San Pedro, they found the fresh graves of two men murdered by Indians. Up the east bank of the San Pedro through the new Mormon settlement of St. David, on past the present site of Fairbank, they came at last to the old Brunckow house in sight of the Tombstone hills. Here they made permanent camp, and Gird built a crude assay furnace in the corner fireplace with old adobe bricks and a sheet of iron.
Out at once they hurried with picks and shovels to the Tombstone ledge. Gird the expert soon determined that, though the ore was rich, the pocket was shallow and would quickly be exhausted. This was a blow to Gird and Brother Al. Deep gloom settled upon them that night at the Brunckow house. Gird regretted his resignation at Signal; Brother Al mourned over his lost $4 a day. Gird talked of going on into Mexico; Brother Al wondered plaintively if there wasn’t a mine somewhere around there where he could find a job. But Ed Schieffelin remained cheerfully confident. The silver was here in these hills—he knew it. These two disconsolate ones might do as they pleased; he would stay.
Followed meagre, disappointing weeks. The silver hills, it appeared, were not to be taken by quick assault but must be besieged. The three partners settled down into systematic routine, with Ed Schieffelin as prospector, Gird as assayer, Brother Al as cook. No longer was Ed Schieffelin in doubt as to the value of his finds; every evening he brought in ore, and Gird determined its richness in his furnace.
Brother Al, riding out one morning after deer, encountered Ed in the hills, elated over a piece of float.
“Here, Al, look at this,” said Ed in a glow of excitement. “This is the best-looking piece of ore I’ve found yet.”
But Brother Al was not to be bothered. “I’m looking for a deer,” he said, and rode on.
Ed Schieffelin was building a monument when Brother Al rode back with a fat buck slung across his saddle.
“I’ve struck it rich this time,” Ed called out joyously.
“You’re a lucky cuss,” Brother Al flung back indifferently over his shoulder as he moved off toward camp dreaming of venison steaks for supper.
So the Lucky Cuss mine got its name. The ore samples Gird assayed that night ran $15,000 to the ton.
No more gloom or despondency now. Gird was full of enthusiasm. Brother Al showed a flash of optimism. Bonanza dreams were on the verge of fulfilment. Off to Tucson, Gird and Brother Al hurried to stock up on provisions for a long stay, dropping there incidentally a hint of the richness of the new treasure field. A few days after their return, Hank Williams and John Oliver were exploring the Tombstone hills. While Gird and Brother Al were building a cabin on the Lucky Cuss claim, Ed Schieffelin discovered the Tough Nut lode, rich in horn silver.
Ed Schieffelin laid off prospecting for three days to help move camp from the Brunckow house to the Lucky Cuss cabin, forever afterward blaming these lost three days for his failure to discover the Grand Central mine. Two mules belonging to Williams and Oliver, who were camped over a hill from the Lucky Cuss, broke loose at night and wandered off on a hunt for water. Searching for the animals next morning, Williams spied the gleam of metal in the trail left by the dragging halter chains, and lost no time in staking a claim. Gird contended this claim infringed upon a prior claim of the three partners. After a wrangle, Williams and Oliver agreed to divide the location; the part they retained, they named the Grand Central; the part that fell to the share of Gird and the Schieffelins was christened, because of the quarrel, the Contention. These two mines, discovered through vagrant mules, turned out to be the richest ever found in the district.
The period of discovery was drawing to a close; the time of consolidation and development was at hand. News of the strike spread abroad; crowds of adventurers took the trail for the hills; the town of Tombstone evolved overnight, as if out of thin air, to become one of the greatest silver camps of the West. Mining machinery was freighted in, stamp mills for reducing ore sprang up, bullion began to flood out across the desert to world markets.
Gird and the Schieffelins jumped at the first chance to sell the Contention for $10,000; the purchasers took millions from it. The three partners sold a half interest in the Lucky Cuss, but the other half, retained for years, poured a steady stream of money into their coffers. The two Schieffelins sold their two thirds of the Tough Nut group for a million dollars; Gird sold his one third later for an equal sum. Gird long remained in the country building his fortune to greater proportions; the Schieffelins took their departure. The two brothers had come into the hills almost penniless; they went out millionaires.
Flushed with achievement, rich, famous, still young, Ed Schieffelin turned to civilization to prospect for new adventures. Civilization to him was little more than a name; he had glimpsed its peaks only from far off; he might find misery there or strike it rich in happiness; he would see what it held for him. He went to New York and lived there for a time; passed on to Chicago, Washington, other cities; travelled extensively; met many distinguished people. Everywhere this picturesque young plutocrat with his background of romance was lionized.
But fortune and adulations made no change in him; he remained always the same simplehearted, kindly, sympathetic soul, helping poor relations and old friends generously, responding to every appeal for charity, his hand forever in his pockets. For a summer, he flitted to the Yukon in a steamer built at his own expense, on an unsuccessful hunt for gold. On his return, he married Mrs. Mary E. Brown and built a mansion for his bride in Alameda on San Francisco Bay. He purchased a residence in Los Angeles later, and, with his wife, father, and Brother Al to share its comforts, relaxed into tranquil domesticity, Brother Al dying here in .
But civilization had failed to drug his memories of old wilderness days. He was a wilderness man, bred to its solitudes, trained to its primitive conditions. Born in a coal-mining region in Pennsylvania, he had gone as an infant with his parents to a gold-mining region in Oregon. His earliest recollections were of washing sands for gold with a milk pan in a creek that meandered past the family log cabin. At twelve he had run away to join the gold rush to Salmon River; an old family friend had captured him and led him home by the ear. He had started out on his own as a prospector and miner at seventeen. For years there was hardly a mining stampede in the Western country in which he had not shared, hardly a boom camp in Oregon, California, Nevada, Idaho, Utah, Colorado in which he had not tried his luck. Deserts and mountains had been home to him; on their lonely trails he had found happiness.
For twenty years since he had stood in thrilling triumph beside his newfound riches in the Tombstone hills, he had heard the still small insistent voice of the wilderness calling him back. He had assayed civilization and found only disillusion. The pleasures of wealth were not in its possession, but in the adventure of finding it. Society, with its pride, pretense, jealousies, and vainglory, was for others. Sweeter far to him were camp fire bacon and coffee in a desert than the luxuries of cities. One lonely purple mountain was worth all the world’s Broadways. So the rich man laid off his fine raiment, put on his old corduroys and his old red flannel shirt, buckled on his old canteen, and, with his old pick on his shoulder, went home to the wilderness.
Night had fallen in the Oregon forest. Schieffelin sat alone in his cabin in the ruddy glow of the firelight shining through the chinks of the stove. A pot of beans was boiling and bubbling with a cozy, cheerful murmur, sending up a cloud of savoury steam. A pan of biscuits was baking in the oven. … A sudden blinding effulgence filled the cabin. Out of the heavens, through the night, a long beam of splendour was slanting down to him, like a wide, gleaming pathway. Far up along its dazzling reaches he saw with a quick glow of happiness the loom of the Tombstone hills; there were the Lucky Cuss, the Contention, the Tough Nut, all his old mines as plain as day. Beyond, against a radiant suffusion of silver light, towered a great gateway flashing as with opals and sapphire and gold, and from its wide-flung portals were streaming glorious winged figures with snowy, shimmering garments; they were coming toward him, their arms outstretched as in welcome. He started from his chair, his rapt eyes filled with the wonder of the vision, his face transfigured and glorified. With his old corduroy pants stuffed in his boots, his old red flannel shirt open at the throat, its sleeves rolled to the elbows, he stumbled forward to climb the resplendent pathway leading to the skies.
A traveller along the lonely trail that passed the cabin found Schieffelin next morning. He lay face downward at full length on the floor. A tramp hound he had befriended crouched and whimpered at his feet. The stove was cold; the pot of beans had boiled down to a charred mass; the bread in the oven was burned black.
Schieffelin’s body was taken to Tombstone. His funeral was the largest in the camp’s history. Stores were closed and dwellings deserted on this May day in , and everybody followed the dead man to his last resting place on the rock-strewn eminence beside the dry wash where he had had his adventure with the Indians and from which he had gone up to discover the riches of the hills of silver. The body was dressed in Schieffelin’s red flannel shirt and prospector’s clothes and, in accordance with his last wishes expressed in his will, with his pick and shovel and canteen lying beside him in the coffin. To mark his last claim, they erected over his grave, in the likeness of a prospector’s monument, a tall, massive, tower-like structure of rough stones visible for miles across the rolling mesquite mesa.
But town, mines, and hills are all likewise his monuments. The very name of Tombstone, with all it implies of history, drama, romance, and achievement, is itself an intangible but enduring monument to the pioneer who, with steadfast faith and courage, followed his dream into the deserts. Schieffelin rests in the glamour of it. He sleeps forever in the shadow of a name.
fetching the rest…