More than forty years ago a raw young mining camp down in southeastern
Arizona was preparing to assume the functions of a duly organized
municipality, and its population--at that period nearly every one in
the place was a male of voting age--was considering the important
question of a name.
The camp stood out against the sky-line at the crest of a ridge in the
foot-hills of the Mule Mountains, not far from the Mexican boundary.
For the most part it consisted of tents; but there were a few adobe
buildings and some marvelous creations from goods-boxes and tin cans.
Facing one end of its single brief street you looked out upon a dump
of high-grade silver ore, and if you turned the other way you surveyed
a sprouting little graveyard hard by a large corral. From almost any
point you had a good view of the Dragoon mountains across a wide
stretch of mesquite-covered lowlands, and at almost any hour of the
day you were likely to see the smoke of at least one Apache
signal-fire rising from those frowning granite ramparts.
The men in the camp were, nearly all of them, old-timers in the West:
miners from the Comstock lode whose boom was then on the wane,
teamsters who had been freighting all over the blazing deserts of the
Southwest, investors and merchants from Tucson, buffalo-hunters from
western Kansas, Texas, and Colorado, gamblers from Dodge City, El
Paso, and Santa Fe, Indian-fighters, cattle-rustlers, professional
claim-jumpers, and some gentle-voiced desperadoes of the real breed,
equally willing to slay from behind or take a long chance in front,
according to the way the play came up. Few of these men wore coats; a
great many of them carried single-action revolvers in holsters beside
the thigh; the old-fashioned cattleman's boot was the predominant
footgear; and, excepting among the faro-dealers, there was a rather
general carelessness in sartorial matters. Nicknames were even more
common than surnames, and it was bad form--sometimes dangerously
so--to ask a man about his antecedents until he had volunteered some
information on that point.
In such a crowd it is easy to see there would be many ideas on any
given subject, and the question of the new town's name had evoked a
multitude of suggestions. Amusements were still few; the purveyors of
hectic pleasure had thus far succeeded in bringing only one piano and
a half-dozen dance-hall girls--all decidedly the worse for wear--into
the camp; and either faro or whisky has its limitations as a steady
means of relaxation. So it came about that any advocate could usually
find an audience to harken to his arguments for his pet selection.
At intervals when they were not toiling at assessment work in the
shafts which pocked the hillside or dodging Apaches in the outlying
country, the citizens found diversion in discussing the ideas thus
submitted. And the merits of these propositions were debated by groups
in the brief street, by players seated before the tables in the
gambling-halls, by members of the never-absent lines before the bars,
and by dust-mantled travelers within the Concord stages which came
tossing over the weary road from Tucson.
Gradually public opinion began to crystallize. One name was spoken
more often as the days went by. Until it became evident that the great
majority favored it, and it was chosen.
They called the town Tombstone and placed one more tradition on the
Western map.
The old-timers always showed a very fine sense of the fitness of
things when they christened a river, mountain range, or town. If one
were to devote his time to studying the map of our country west of the
Mississippi River and resuscitating the tales whose titles are printed
thereupon, he could produce a large volume of marvelous stories. But
the entire compilation would contain nothing more characteristic of
the days when men carried rifles to protect their lives than the story
of that name--Tombstone.
It deals with a period when southeastern Arizona was Apache-land.
Geronimo, Victorio, and Nachez were constantly leading their
naked warriors into the mountain ranges which rise from those
mesquite-covered plains, to lurk among the rocks watching the lower
country for travelers and when these came to descend upon them for
the sake of loot and the love of murder. A few bold cattlemen,
like John Slaughter and Peter Kitchen, had established ranches in
this region; these held their homes by constant vigilance and force
of arms. Escorts of soldiers frequently guarded the stages on
their way to and from Tucson; and there was hardly a month in the
year when driver, guard, and passengers did not make a running
fight of it somewhere along this portion of the route.
Such were conditions during the summer of 1877 when the tale begins in
the dry wash which comes down from the Tombstone hills into the valley
of the San Pedro, near where the hamlet of Fairbank stands to-day.
Fragments of horn silver lay scattered among the cactus and
dagger-plants in the bed of the dry wash. There was a point where the
stony slope above the bank was strewn with them. A little farther up,
an outcropping of high-grade ore showed plainly in the hard white
sunshine. The flank of the hill was leaking precious metal like a
rotting treasure-chest.
A solitary Apache stood on a mesa ten miles away. He had cut a fresh
trail down in the valley at dawn, and had dogged it reading every
minute sign--a displaced rock, a broken twig, a smudge of disturbed
earth--until he had the fulness of its meaning: two prospectors
leading a pack-mule, both men armed and keeping sharp lookout against
attack. Then he had climbed to this remote vantage-point and caught
sight of them as they turned from the river-bottom up the wash. They
were traveling straight toward that outcropping.
The Apache stood at the edge of the mesa facing the newly risen sun, a
savage vision in a savage land. His narrow turban, shred of
loin-cloth, and knee-high moccasins merely accentuated his nakedness;
they held no more suggestion of clothing than his mass of rusty black
hair and the ugly smears of paint across his cheeks. A tiny fire
beside him sent a tenuous smoke column into the glaring sky.
He kept his malignant little eyes on a notch in the Dragoon Mountains
twenty miles away, scowling against the sun's bright flood. Across the
far-flung interval of glowing mesas and dark mesquite flats the stark
granite ramparts frowned back at him. And now a hair-line of pallid
smoke twined upward from the point he watched.
He sank down, crouching beside his fire. He swept his hand over it
sprinkling bits of powdered resin into the wisp of flame. The smoke
turned black.
He waited for some moments, scanning the rising fumes, then swerved
his lean brown torso toward a mesquite bush. He stripped the leaves
from a twig and scattered them upon the blaze. A white puff climbed
into the sky.
From time to time he moved, now dropping on his belly to blow the
coals, now feeding them with resin, now with leaves. The slender
column crawled on upward taking alternate complexion, white and
black.
Where the bare summits of the Dragoon range broke into a multitude of
ragged pinnacles against the eastern horizon, another swarthy warrior
stood, remote as a roosting eagle on the heights. Beneath his
feet--the drop was so sheer that he could have kicked a pebble to the
bottom without its touching the face of the cliff in its fall--the
shadows of the mountain lay black on the mesquite flat. He gazed
across that wide plain and the mesas climbing heavenward beyond it in
a series of glowing steps. His face assumed a peculiar intentness as
he watched the distant smoke column; it was the intentness of a man
who is reading under difficulties. In dot and dash he spelled it as it
rose--the tidings of those two prospectors who traveled up the wash.
While the last puff was fading away he glided down from pinnacle to
narrow shelf, from shelf to cliff, and made his way toward the rocks
below to tell the news to the rest of his band.
Their camp lay at the head of a steep gorge. Several low wickiups had
been fashioned by binding the tops of bushes together and throwing
skins or tattered blankets over the arched stems. Offal and carrion
were strewn all about the place; it swarmed with flies. Nesting
vultures would have built more carefully and been fully as fastidious.
When the warrior reached the spot the rocks became alive with naked
forms; they appeared from all sides as suddenly and silently as
quail.
He told the tidings to the men. An unclean, vermin-ridden group, they
squatted around him while he repeated the smoke message, word for
word. There was no particular show of enthusiasm among them, no
sign of haste. They began to prepare for this business as other
men begin getting ready for a day's work, when they see good wages
ahead of them and the task is very much to their taste. Prospectors
were becoming an old story in that summer of 1877; two of them
meant good pickings--bacon, coffee, sugar, and firearms; and there was
the fun of killing with the chance for torture thrown in.
Some of the band departed leisurely to catch the ponies. The victims
would be busy for a long time in the wash. They would not travel far
to make their camp. And wherever they went they must leave tracks. The
day was far advanced when the party rode forth upon the flat, their
dirty turbans bobbing up and down above the mesquite bushes as they
came along.
Several of them carried lances; there was a sprinkling of bows and
arrows; a number bore rifles across their saddles, wearing the
cartridge-belts athwart their naked bodies. All of them moved their
thin brown legs ceaselessly; their moccasined shanks kept up a
constant drumming against the ponies' sides.
The afternoon was old when they reached the dry wash. They left two or
three of their number behind in charge of the ponies. The others came
on afoot. Two leaders went well in advance, one of them on each bank,
creeping from rock to tufted yucca and from yucca to mesquite clump,
watching the sun-flayed land before them for some sign of their game.
A squad of trackers slipped in and out among the dagger-plants and
boulders in the bottom of the gulch.
One of the trackers held up his hand and moved it swiftly. To the
signal the others gathered about him. He pointed to the outcropping of
high-grade ore. They saw the traces left by a prospector's pick. For
some minutes their voices mingled in low gutturals. Then they
scattered to pick up the trail, found it, and resumed their progress
down the arroyo.
Evening came on them when they reached the river-bottom; and with the
deepening shadows, fear. Night with the Apache was the time of the
dead. They made their camp. But when the sun was coloring the eastern
sky the next morning they were crawling through the bear-grass on the
first low mesa above the stream, silent as snakes about to strike.
The prospectors awoke with the growing light. They crept forth from
their blankets. Two or three rifles cracked. And then the stillness
came again.
The Apaches stripped the clothing from the dead men and left them to
the Arizona sun. They took away with them what loot they found. They
never noticed the little heap of specimens from the outcropping. Or if
they noticed it they thought it of no importance. A few handfuls of
rock fragments meant nothing to them. And so the ore remained there
near the bodies of the prospectors.
The old-timers go on to tell how Jim Shea came riding down the dry
wash one day late in the summer with his rifle across his saddle-horn
and a little troop of grim horsemen about him. Of that incident few
details remain in the verbal chronicle which has come down through
four decades. It is like a picture whose background has been blurred
by age.
Somewhere ahead of these dusty, sunburned riders a band of Apaches
were urging their wearied ponies onward under the hot sun. They herded
a bunch of stolen horses before them as they fled.
The chase had begun with the beginning of the day, at Dragoon Pass.
What bloodshed had preceded it is not known. But Shea and his
companions were following a hot trail, eager for reprisals, cautious
against ambush. As they came on down the wash the leader scanned the
stony bed reading the freshening signs left by the fugitives; while
two who rode on either side of him watched every rock and shrub and
gully which might give cover to lurking enemies.
Now, as they clattered along the arroyo's bed, Shea suddenly drew
rein. Leaning far to one side and low, after the lithe fashion of the
cow-boy, he swept his hand earthward, picked up a little fragment of
dark rock, straightened his body in the saddle once more, and,
glancing sharply at the bit of ore, dropped it into his pocket. He
repeated the movement two or three times in the next hundred yards.
Chasing Apaches--or being chased by them--was almost as much a part of
life's routine in those days as sleeping without sheets. And no one
remembers how this particular affair ended. But Jim Shea kept those
bits of silver ore.
Later he showed them to an assayer somewhere up on the Gila and
learned their richness. Then he determined to go back and locate the
ledge from which the elements had carried them away. But that project
demanded a substantial grubstake, and other matters of moment were
taking his attention at the time. He postponed the expedition until it
was too late.
In Tucson they tell of a prospector by the name of Lewis who wandered
into those foot-hills during that year, found some high-grade float,
and traced it to a larger outcropping than the one down by the dry
wash. But he had hardly made the marvelous discovery when he caught
sight of a turbaned head above a rocky ridge about fifty yards away.
He abandoned his search to seek the nearest cover. By the time he had
gained the shelter a dozen Apaches were firing at him.
He made a good fight of it with his rifle, and the luck which had
caused him to look up before the savages had their sights trained on
him had put a wide space of open ground about his natural fort. No
Apache ever relished taking chances, and Lewis was able to hold the
band off until darkness came. Then he crept forth and wormed his way
through the gullies to the San Pedro Valley. Dawn found him miles from
the spot.
He came back to Tucson with his specimens. Marcus Katz and A. M.
Franklin, who were working for the wholesale firm of L. M. Jacobs &
Co., heard his story, saw the ore, and grubstaked him for another
trip.
But when he reached the foot-hills of the Mule Mountains Lewis found
that the long afternoon of battle and the ensuing night of flight had
left him utterly at sea as to the location of that large ledge. He had
to begin his hunt all over again. He used up his grubstake, got a
second from his backers, and subsequently a third.
And now while Lewis was combing down the gullies between those broken
ridges for the ore body--he slew himself from disappointment later
on--and while Jim Shea was meditating an expedition after the riches
of which he had got trace down in the dry wash, Ed Schiefflin came to
the Bruncknow house to embark on the adventure which was to give the
town of Tombstone its name.
The Bronco house, men call it now, but Bruncknow was the man who built
it and the new term is a corruption. Its ruins still stand on the
side-hill a few miles from the dry wash, a rifle-shot or so from the
spot where the two prospectors met their deaths. In those days it was
a lonely outpost of the white man in the Apache's land. The summer of
1877 was drawing to a close, its showers were already a distant
memory, and all southeastern Arizona was glowing under the white-hot
sun-rays when Schiefflin rode his mule up from the San Pedro to seek
the protection of its thick adobe walls.
The flat lands of the valley stretched away and away behind him to the
foot of the Huachucas in the west. They unfolded their long reaches to
the southward until they melted into the hot sky between spectral
mountain ranges down in Mexico. He came up out of that wide landscape,
a tall wild figure, lonesome as the setting sun.
His long beard and the steady patience in his eyes--the patience which
comes to the prospector during his solitary wanderings in search of
rich ore--gave him the appearance of a man past middle age although he
had not seen his thirtieth year. His curling hair reached his broad
shoulders. Wind and sun had tanned his features so deeply that his
blue eyes stood out in strange contrast to the dark skin. His garments
were sadly torn, and he had patched them in many places with buckskin.
Such men still come and go in the remote places among the mountain
ranges and deserts of the West. They were almost the first to
penetrate the wilderness and they will roam over it so long as any
patch of it remains unfenced.
Schiefflin had left his father's house in Oregon ten years before. He
searched the Coeur d'Alenes for riches, and, finding none, struck out
from Idaho for Nevada. There he remained through two blazing summers
traveling afoot from the sage-brush hills in the north across the
silent deserts east of Death Valley. He wandered on to Colorado, where
he toiled in the new mining camps between prospecting trips into the
great plateaus along the western slope of the Rockies. From Colorado
he went southward into New Mexico; thence westward to Arizona. He
accompanied a troop of cavalry from Prescott down to the foot of the
Huachucas where they established a new post. During the last leg of
that journey he saw these foot-hills of the Mule Mountains in passing,
and in spite of warnings from the soldiers, he was now returning to
prospect the district.
He had spent some days at the Herrick ranch down in the valley, and
the men about the place had strongly advised him against traveling
into the hills. They cited various gruesome examples of the fate which
overtook solitary wanderers in this savage land. They might as well
have saved their breath; Schiefflin had seen some mineral stains on a
rock outcropping when he passed through the country with the cavalry
earlier in the season.
So now he came on toward the Bruncknow house, where he could make his
camp closer to the hills upon whose exploration his mind was set.
There were several men lounging about the adobe when he reached it.
Even in those days, when the most peaceful border-dweller carried his
rifle almost everywhere except to his meals and was as likely as not
to have slain one or two fellow-creatures,--days when the leading
citizens of that isolated region presented a sinister front with their
long-barreled revolvers slung beside their thighs,--the members of
the group showed up hard.
A lean and seasoned crew, dust-stained from many a wild ride,
burned by the border sun, they watched the new-comer with eyes
half-curtained, like the eyes of peering eagles, by straight lids.
They welcomed him with a few terse questions as to where he had
come from and what the troops were doing over at the new post. Of
themselves they said nothing nor offered any information of their
business in this lonely spot.
But when Schiefflin had made his camp close to the shelter of those
thick adobe walls he learned more of his hosts. There was a mine hard
by, at least it went by the name of a mine, and it was a sort of
common understanding that the owners were doing assessment work. The
fragments on the dump, however, were only country rock. In later years
gorgeous tales of rich ore at the bottom of the shallow shaft resulted
in a series of claim-jumpings which in their turn netted no less than
eleven murders, but the slayers only wasted their powder, for the
ground here never yielded anything more interesting than dead men's
bones. And at the time when Schiefflin was abiding at the Bruncknow
house the inmates were letting their mining tools rust, the while they
kept their firearms well oiled.
For the mine was nothing more nor less than a blind, and the adobe was
simply a rendezvous for Mexican smugglers.
In that era, when a man practised pistol-shooting from the hip,--as a
man practises his morning calisthenics in this peaceful age, for the
sake of his body's health,--the written statutes were one thing and
local conceptions of proper conduct another. Here, where the San
Pedro valley came straight northward across the boundary, affording a
good route for pack-trains, smuggling American wares into the southern
republic was nearly a recognized industry. As long as a man could
bring his contraband to market past marauding Apaches and the bands of
renegade whites who had drifted to the border, he was entitled to the
profit he made--and no questions asked.
So the men at the Bruncknow house accepted Schiefflin's presence
without any fear of ill consequences. Had their calling been more
stealthy they would not have worried about him; prospectors went
unquestioned among all sorts of law breakers then, owning something of
the same immunity which simple-minded persons always got from the
Indians. He came in at evening and rolled up in his blankets after
cooking his supper; and in the morning he went forth again into the
hills. No one minded him.
Now and again a cavalcade came out of the flaming desert to the south,
appearing first as a thin dust-cloud down on the flat, as it drew
nearer resolving itself into pack burros and men on mule-back; then
jingling and clattering up the stony slope and into the corral. And
when they had dismounted, the swarthy riders in their serapes and
steep-crowned sombreros trooped into the adobe, their enormous spurs
tinkling in a faint chorus upon the hard earthen floor.
Then the men of the house got out the calicoes and hardware which they
had brought over the hot hills and through the forests of giant cacti
from Tucson. The smugglers spread blankets, unbuckled broad
money-belts from their waists, and stripped out the dobie dollars,
letting them fall in clinking heaps upon the cloth. The bargaining
began.
And when the last wares had been disposed of and the last huge silver
coin had been stowed away by the hard-eyed merchants, the Mexicans
opened little round kegs of mescal, the fiery liquor which is
distilled from the juice of the cactus plant.
They gambled at monte, quien con, and other games of chance. They
drank together. The night came on.
Sometimes pistols flamed under those adobe walls and knives gleamed in
the shadows.
Then, when the hot dawn came on, the burros were packed and the whole
troop filed down the hill; the seraped Mexicans riding along the
flanks of the train, their rifles athwart their saddles. The dust rose
about them, enwrapped them, and hid them from sight. Finally it
vanished where the flat lands reached away into the south.
But Schiefflin was indifferent to these wild goings on. To him the
Bruncknow house meant shelter from the Apaches; that was all. He could
roll up in his blankets here at night knowing that he would waken in
the morning without any likelihood of looking up into the grinning
faces of savages who had tracked him to his camp.
He minded his own business. As a matter of fact his own business was
the only thing he deemed worth minding. It was the one affair of
importance in the whole world. The more he saw of those hills the
surer he became that they contained minerals. Somewhere among them,
he fervently believed, an ore body of great richness lay hidden from
the world. And he had been devoting the years of his manhood to
seeking just such a secret. In those long years of constant search a
longing mightier than the lust for riches had grown within him.
Explorers know that longing and some great scientists; once it owns a
man he becomes oblivious to all else.
Every day Schiefflin set forth on his mule from the adobe house. He
rode out into the hills. All day he hunted through the winding gullies
for some bits of float which would betray the presence of an
outcropping on the higher levels. Once he cut the fresh trail of a
band of Apaches and once he caught sight of two mounted savages riding
along a slope a mile away. Several times he picked up specimens of
rock which bore traces of silver. But he found no ore worth assaying.
The men at the Bruncknow house saw him departing every morning and
shook their heads. They had seen other men ride out alone into the
hills and they had afterward found some of those travelers--what the
Apaches had left of them. It was no affair of theirs--but they fell
into the habit of watching the tawny slopes every afternoon when the
shadows began to lengthen and speculating among themselves whether the
bearded rider was going to return this time. Which was as close to
solicitude as they could come.
One of their number--he had lost two or three small bets by
Schiefflin's appearing safe and sound on various evenings--took it
upon himself to give their visitor a bit of advice.
"What for," he asked, "do yo'-all go a-takin' them pasears that-a-way?"
Schiefflin smiled good-naturedly at the questioner.
"Just looking for stones," he said.
"Well," the other told him, "all I got to say is this. Yo'-all keep on
and yo'll sure find yo'r tombstone out there some day."
He never dreamed that he had named a town.
Nor did Schiefflin think much of it at the moment: he had received
other warnings, just as strong, before. But none of them had been put
as neatly as this. So the words abode in his memory although they did
not affect his comings and goings in the least.
Only a few days later he left the Bruncknow house for a longer trip
than usual. He rode his mule down the San Pedro toward the mouth of
the dry wash in which the two prospectors had found that silver ore
the day before they died.
And the luck that guides a man's steps toward good or ill, as the whim
seizes it, saw to it that he came into the old camp where the Apaches
had enjoyed their morning murder months before.
Some one had buried both bodies but whoever had done this--possibly it
was one of the self-styled miners at the Bruncknow house--had not
enough interest in minerals to disturb the little heap of specimens.
It lay there near the graves, just as the Apaches had left it, just as
its original owners had piled it up before they sought their blankets;
to dream perhaps of their big strike while death waited for the coming
of the dawn, to cheat them out of their discovery.
The story was as plain as printed words on a page: the nameless
graves among the tall clumps of bear-grass proclaimed the penalty for
venturing into this neighborhood. The little handful of dark-colored
stones betrayed the secret of the riches in the hills. The dry wash
came down between the ridges half a mile ahead to show the way to
other float like this.
It was as though, after the years of long and constant search he found
himself faced by a grim challenge, to attain the consummation of his
hopes on pain of death.
When he had examined the bits of rock he mounted his mule and struck
out for the mouth of the dry wash.
After he had ridden for some distance up the stony bed of the arroyo
he dismounted and came on slowly leading the patient animal. He
searched the rocks for fragments of float. At times he left the mule
and crept to the summit of a near-by ridge where he remained for some
minutes looking out over the country for some sign of Indians.
The day wore on and as he went further the hills to the south became
loftier; the banks drew closer in on both sides of him; the boulders
in the arid bed were larger. Cactus and Spanish bayonet harassed him
like malignant creatures; skeleton ocatillas and bristling yuccas
imposed thorny barriers before him. The sun poured its full flood of
white-hot rays upon him. He wound his way in and out among the
obstacles, keeping his intent eyes upon the glaring rocks, save only
when he lifted them to look for lurking savages. The shadows of
noonday lengthened into the shades of afternoon; they crept up the
hillsides until only the higher peaks remained a-shine; evening came.
Schiefflin picked up a sharp fragment of blackish rock.
Horn silver. In those days when the great Comstock lode was lessening
its yield and the metal was at a premium, such ore as this which he
held meant millions--if one could but find the main ledge. He scanned
the specimen closely, looked round for others and then, as his eyes
roved up the hillside the exultation born of that discovery passed
from him.
Dusk was creeping up from the valley. The time had passed when he
could return by daylight to the Bruncknow house. He must make the most
of the scant interval which remained before darkness, if he would find
a hiding-place where he could camp.
He glanced about him to fix the landmarks in his memory, that he might
return to this spot on the morrow. Then he led the mule away into the
hills and picketed it out behind a ridge where it would be out of
sight from passing Apaches.
He found his own hiding-place a mile away from where he had tethered
the animal. Here three huge bare knolls of granite boulders rose
beside the wash. From the summit of any one of these a man could
survey the whole country; between its ragged rocks he would be
invisible to any one below. He chose the highest one and crept to its
crest.
The gray twilight was spreading over the land when he raised his head
above one of the boulders. In that instant he dropped to earth as if
he had been shot. An Indian was riding up to the bottom of the knoll.
The Apache's rifle lay across his lean bare thighs; his gaunt body
bent forward as he scanned the rocks above him. He had been heading
for the hill from this side while Schiefflin was climbing up the
opposite slope. Evidently he was coming to the summit to look over the
country for enemies. There must be others of the band close by.
Schiefflin found a narrow crack between two boulders and peeped out.
Another savage appeared at that moment on the summit of the next
knoll. He was afoot; and now he stood there motionless searching the
wide landscape for any moving form. He was so near that in the waning
light the smear of war-paint across his ugly face was visible.
Schiefflin crooked his thumb over the hammer of his rifle and raised
it slowly to the full cock, pressing the trigger with his finger to
prevent the click.
The first Apache had dismounted and was climbing the hill. As he drew
closer the clink of ponies' hoofs sounded down in the dry wash. A
number of dirty turbans came into sight above the bank. More followed
and still more, until thirty-odd were bobbing up and down to the
movement of the horses.
A moment passed, one of those mighty moments when a man's life appears
before him as a period which he has finished, when a man's thoughts
rove swiftly over what portions of that period they choose. And
Schiefflin's mind went to that talk with the man at the Bruncknow
house.
"Yo'-all keep on and yo'll sure find yo'r tombstone out there some
day."
He could hear the old-timer saying the words now. And, as he listened
to the grim warning again, he felt--as perhaps those two prospectors
felt in the moment of their awakening down by the river--that fate
had sadly swindled him. He was stiffening his trigger-finger for the
pull, peering across the sights at the Indian who had climbed to
within a few yards of the weapon's muzzle, when--the warrior on the
summit of the next knoll waved his hand. The Apache halted at the
gesture and Schiefflin followed his gaze in time to see the lean brown
arm of the sentinel sweep forward. Both of the savages turned and
descended the knolls.
They caught up their ponies and rode on, following the course of the
wash below them. The band down in the arroyo's bed were receding. The
rattle of hoofs grew fainter. Schiefflin lowered the hammer of his
rifle and took his first full breath.
A low outcry down the wash stopped his breathing again. The band had
stopped their ponies; some of them were dismounting. He could see
these gathering about the place where he had led his mule up the
bank.
Two of them were pointing along the course he had taken with the
animal. Several others were creeping up the slope on their bellies
following the fresh trail. The murmur of their voices reached the
white man where he lay watching them.
Then, as he was giving up hope for the second time, a mounted
warrior--evidently he was their chief--called to the trackers. They
rose, looked about and scurried back to their ponies like frightened
quail. The whole band were hammering their heels against the flanks of
their little mounts. The coming of the night had frightened them
away.
The shadows deepened; stillness returned upon the land; the stars
grew larger in the velvet sky. Schiefflin crouched among the boulders
at the summit of the knoll and fought off sleep while the great
constellations wheeled in their long courses. The dawn would come in
its proper time, and it seemed as certain as that fact that they would
return to hunt him out.
He dared not leave the place, for he might stray into some locality
where they would find him without shelter when the day revealed his
trail. So he waited for the sunrise and the beginning of the attack.
At last the color deepened in the east. The rocks below his
hiding-place stood out more clearly. He could see no sign among them
of creeping savages. The sun rose and still nothing moved.
He came forth finally in the full blaze of the hot morning and found
the mule where he had picketed it behind the ridge. When he returned
to the dry wash he saw the tracks where the band had passed the
evening before. For some reason of their own they had found it best to
keep on that course instead of coming back to murder him.
He resumed his search for float where he had left it off. It showed
more frequently as he went on. He followed the bits of ore to a narrow
stringer of blackish rock. He dug into it with his prospector's pick,
chipped off specimens, and carefully covered up the hole. The danger
of Apaches had passed, but a new fear had come to him, the dread that
some rival prospector might happen upon his discovery before he could
establish possession.
For his provisions were running low. He had no money. He needed a
good grubstake--and companions to help him hold down the claim against
jumpers--before he could begin development work.
He hurried back to the Bruncknow house. An attack of chills and fever,
brought on by his night among the rocks, gave him a good excuse to
leave the place. The climate, he said, did not agree with him.
While he was trying to think of one with whom to share his secret, one
whom he could trust to take his full portion of the dangers which
would attend the claim's development, he remembered his brother Al,
who was working at the Signal mine way over in Mohave County, There
was the man. So he made his way across the State of Arizona. He
stopped at times to earn money for food to carry him through and it
was December before he reached his destination.
Al Schiefflin had a friend, Dick Gird, who was an assayer. Gird saw
the specimens, tested them, and was on fire at once. He joined forces
with the brothers, helped them to procure a grubstake, and in January,
1878, the three men set forth from Williams Fork of the Colorado River
in a light wagon drawn by two mules.
Spring was well on its way when they reached Tucson and made their
camp in Bob Leatherwood's corral. The Apaches were raiding throughout
the southeastern part of the territory and the little town of adobes
was getting new reports of murders from that section every day.
They drove their mules on eastward up the long mesas leading to the
San Pedro Divide. At the Pantano stage station they saw the fresh
scars of Apache bullets on the adobe walls. The men had held the
place against a large band of Geronimo's warriors only a few days
before.
Now as they drove on they kept constant lookout and their rifles were
nearly always in their hands. Every morning they rose long before the
dawn, and two of them would climb the ridges near the camp to watch
the country as the light came over it, while the other caught up the
mules and harnessed them.
They turned southward up the San Pedro, avoiding the stage station at
the crossing of the river lest some other party of prospectors might
follow them. They made a circuit around the Mormon settlement at St.
Davids and came on to the Bruncknow house, to find two more fresh
graves of Apache victims under the adobe walls.
They made their permanent camp here, and Schiefflin took his two
companions up the dry wash. They found the outcropping undisturbed.
Gird and Al Schiefflin dug away at the dark rock with their
prospector's picks. Less than three feet below the surface the
stringer pinched out. The claim was not worth staking.
Beside the little strip of ore, whose false promises of riches had
lured them into this land of death, they held a conference. The hills
opened to a low swale which led up toward the loftier summits in the
south. They decided to follow that depression in search of another
ledge.
They made their daily journeys along its course, returning with
evening to the Bruncknow house, whose inmates were away at the time on
some expedition of their own. Sometimes they saw the smoke of
signal-fires over in the Dragoons; sometimes the slender columns rose
from the summit of the Whetstone Mountains in the north. One
morning--they had spent the previous night out here in the hills--they
awoke to find a fresh trail in the bear-grass within a hundred yards
of where they had been sleeping, and in the middle of the track Dick
Gird picked up one of the rawhide wristlets which Apaches wore to
protect their arms from the bowstring.
That day Ed Schiefflin discovered a new outcropping. Gird assayed the
specimens in a rude furnace which he had fashioned from the fireplace
at the Bruncknow house. Some of them yielded as high as $2,200 to the
ton. Exploration work showed every evidence of a great ore body. Two
or three of the fragments which they had chipped from it below the
surface assayed $9,000 a ton. They had made their big strike. They
staked the claim, and when they came to fixing on a name Ed Schiefflin
remembered once more those words of the old-timer at the Bruncknow
house.
"We'll call it the Tombstone," he said, and told the story.
It was recorded in Tucson as the Tombstone. And when the big rush
came, Ed Schiefflin, then a figure of importance in the new camp,
recited the tale to some of the men who had risked their lives in
traveling to these hills. And so they in turn retold the tale.
That is the way the town got its name.
In after years when men had learned the fulness of that secret which
the Apaches had guarded so well from the world--when Bisbee and
Nacosari and Cananea were yielding their enormous stores of metal and
Tombstone's mines had given forth many millions of dollars in silver,
Ed Schiefflin remained a wealthy man. But the habit of prospecting
abided with him and he used to spend long months alone in the
wilderness searching for the pure love of search.
Just before one of these expeditions he was driving out of Tombstone
with Gus Barron, another old-timer and a close friend, and as they
went down the Fairbank road they reached the spot where the three
great boulder knolls rise beside the dry wash. Schiefflin drew rein.
"This," he said to Barron, "is the place where I camped that night
when the Apaches almost got me, the night before I found the stringer
on the hill. And when I die I want to be buried here with my canteen
and my prospector's pick beside me."
So when he died up in canyon City, Oregon, just about twenty years
after he had made that discovery, they brought his body back and
buried it on the summit of the knoll. And they erected a great pyramid
of granite boulders on the spot for his monument.
And within sight of that lonely tomb the town stands out on the
sky-line, commemorating by its name the steadfastness of Ed
Schiefflin, prospector.