Tombstone

To
My Wife

Sources

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 1877, 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 1858 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 1848, 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.