“TOMBSTONE,” he said presently, “is a curious name for a town.”
“Some friends of mine,” I said, “have business interests there. It got
its name in this way: a party of young pioneers decided to go there
on a prospecting expedition. They were ridiculed, and told by another
party, who had refused to join them, that all they would find would
be a tomb. The adventurers, however, discovered mineral treasures, of
enormous extent, started a town, and, as a derisive answer to their
prophetic friend, called it Tombstone. This is the story of only a few
years. Tombstone is now a prosperous community, and has a daily paper.
What do you think its title is?”
“I cannot guess.”
“Eugene Field, a journalist whose name is well-known throughout the
West, gave me a copy of it only yesterday.”
I went to my room and brought down a well-printed four-page paper,
entitled “The Tombstone Epitaph.”
“And not a funny paper at all,” said Irving, examining it; “a regular
business-like paper, newsy and prosaic, except for the short literary
story and the poem that begin its pages.”
“Mr. Field gave me some remarkable newspaper trophies of these mining
towns, that may be said to grow up outside the pale of civilization, to
be eventually incorporated into the world of law and order. Here, for
instance, is a placard issued by ‘The Bazoo,’ a newspaper published at
the little town of Sedalia:—
BAZOO NEWS TRAIN!
—to—
NEVADA, MO.,