Tombstone and The Epitaph™

By Frederick Schoemehl
Editor, National Edition

Note: Several published accounts were used in the compilation of this narrative history. These include a retrospective by Wallace E. Clayton that appeared in The Tombstone Epitaph in May 1980; a special historical edition on John P. Clum, published by The Epitaph in 2006; a special historical edition on the O. K. Corral gunfight reissued by The Epitaph in 2007; several “Hall of Fame” biographies prepared for the Arizona Newspaper Association; Arizona’s Territorial Newspapers, by Sam S. Webb; and Newspapering in the Old West, by Robert F. Karolevitz. Other material was drawn from The Epitaph files.

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Law and Order

For their obvious interest in developing the western frontier, those who came early were also interested in transferring Eastern institutions to the West. Settling, the process of physically adapting to new places, was accompanied by settling down, the companion process of establishing law and order by bringing existing institutions to the new towns on the frontier. Part of the structuring process was to ensure that new settlements would mirror the old through the prompt creation of political forms, schools, churches, transportation lines, post offices and newspapers.

Newspapers on the western frontier did several things. By the second half of the 19th century, newspapers were ubiquitous in America’s print culture. The development of telegraphic communication now permitted information to move extraordinarily quickly from point to point. But there still needed to be a means of handing off the “news” to the consumer. Newspapers became the transfer medium in a new information age, the delivery agent to what today we call the end user. In 1886, for example, the Epitaph used its “Telegraphic” and “Special Telegrams” column give its readers reaction in Washington, DC to Geronimo’s final surrender to Gen. Nelson Miles. At that same time, newspapers were an essential element in political persuasion and marketing endeavors. Newspapers, through editorial positions, communicated with different constituencies on local, regional and national issues. By discussing, dissecting and defending different ideas, they were important engines in shaping public opinion. By carrying advertising, their readerships learned about who did and sold what. Such information was important in boom towns, like Tombstone, where new arrivals needed to know about stage schedules, fine cigars and life’s other necessities. Finally, newspapers were heralds, often unabashedly so. Striking an oratorical pose, they often were the chief champions of what their locales were “destined” to become.

John Philip Clum

In this mix of technological change, political contention and prophesy, many newspapers were not beacons of objectivity. News was served up with equal helpings of politics and passion. When The Tombstone Epitaph was founded in 1880, John Philip Clum did not discuss the need to report the goings on in Tombstone without fear or favor or about being “fair and balanced,” to borrow a phrase. What Clum did inflect were the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. Echoing John Winthrop’s words upon the founding of Massachusetts Bay Colony, Clum called the bustling silver camp “a city upon the hill.” The comment surely belied Clum’s belief that religion was necessary in the process of settling down. Clum said the Epitaph would be “a representative mining journal,” a vehicle for enhancing Tombstone’s founding industry.

Clum had little need to mask his bias in the biggest story of his newspaper career – coverage of the October 1881 shootout at the O. K. Corral. The gunfight broke the town’s “quietness and good order,” Clum wrote in his lead, a solitude that law enforcement had brought over the previously “fractious” and “dreaded cowboys.” With three cowboys dead and Wyatt Earp walking tall, Clum wasted no time in using the sub-head “EARP BROTHERS JUSTIFIED” to state his immediate conclusion. With references to “the best class of citizens” and “all good citizens” and “the better portion of our citizens,” Clum’s view of the matter was settled. That he repeatedly used the word “citizen” conveyed special meaning. To Clum, cowboys were not citizens as he defined the word; citizens had settled down and respected law and order. The cowboys’ decision to come into town while armed was prima facie evidence they were not behaving as citizens in a well-ordered city on a hill. If there was an alternate explanation of the day’s events – a counter-narrative – it was not going to be part of the Epitaph’s immediate coverage.

Why? As a representative mining journal, the paper’s job was to align itself with the forces that were intent on consolidating mining capital in a land that was groping for an economic raison d’etre. In the leapfrog nature of western development, California’s Sierra foothills represented capital’s first big mark on the West. That was followed by the less indelible impression made by Nevada’s Comstock. Did Ed Schieffelin’s discovery mean that Arizona was next in line? Moreover, parked in the mind of every person associated with western mining was the idea that livestock and pastoral activities were becoming quaint. Clum was a Republican. And Republicans of the early 1880s believed in several types of hardness – an industrial plant and transportation system fashioned of iron and steel, a money supply backed by precious metal, and what was seen as the inherent rigidity and regulation of a market economy. This was at some remove from the older, Jeffersonian view of a nation of free-holding agriculturalists – ruralists who tended crops and animals, bartered face to face in local market towns and that were more communitarian than commercial. To Clum and the western modernizers, that was just so old school.

By the time he reached Tombstone in 1880, Clum knew much about new school. Born in New York in 1851, Clum came to Santa Fe, N. M., in 1871 and initially worked in the new information industry by sending weather observations to Washington, DC by telegraph. As a new face in the countryside, Clum was schooled in one of the biggest problems in the West, the continuing unrest between native people and the newcomers. Drawing on his extant government service and his Dutch Reformed Church faith, Clum decided he might succeed whether others had failed: to find a way to achieve peace between eastern entrants and Apaches in the Southwest. The U. S. Army method – direct orders backed up with physical force – had not brought peace to the San Carlos Indian Reservation in Arizona or lands beyond. While Clum was sympathetic to Apache concerns, his was a paternal sympathy. Clum did not believe in Indian rights to self-determination as the term is understood today. He envisioned Indians settling down. The way to accomplish that was to concentrate them into a colony, the San Carlos reservation, where they would have limited self-government under the watchful eye of the colonial authority, the Office of Indian Affairs. If enlightened in theory, the comforting idea of a settled reservation was thwarted by off-reservation Apaches, including Geronimo, who were not ready to give up traditional lifeways just because it fit the agenda of the government’s peace through piety program.

Though Clum had been the only government attaché – civilian or military – to capture Geronimo, and had recommended unsuccessfully that Geronimo be executed for numerous killings, Clum was on his way out of the Indian business. This occurred in 1875, when the Army decided it would take a tougher line at San Carlos. Would the Army or Clum’s appointed Indian police force manage the reservation? Stung by the vitriol slung over his ideas of using Apaches to police Apaches, Clum began his move toward the exit, and finally left in 1877. After San Carlos, Clum moved in two directions. He studied law and quickly was admitted to the Pinal County, Ariz., bar. He also banded with other businessmen and purchased a newspaper, the Tucson Citizen. He renamed it the Arizona Citizenand moved it to Florence in Pinal County. At this time, the Citizen was seven years old. It was not Arizona’s first paper – that designation goes to The Weekly Arizonian which was launched in Tubac, then in New Mexico Territory, in March 1859, under the editorship of Edward E. Cross. In any event, the Citizen holds the title as Arizona’s oldest continuously published newspaper; the Epitaph, at 127 years, is Arizona’s second oldest continuously published newspaper.

Clum’s first venture into newspaper publishing was not particularly notable, save his use of the Citizen to justify his paternal approach in dealing with the Apaches – as opposed to the Army’s tougher strategy. Florence did not prove to be the newspaper town that Clum envisioned, and within two years, he moved the publication back to Tucson, took back its old name and switched to daily circulation. With about 5,000 residents, Tucson could support its citizen-run Citizen. By 1879, two years after Schieffelin's silver discovery southeast of Tucson, Clum’s attention was drawn to the dazzle that was Tombstone. Clum sold his interest in the Citizen in January 1880, moved to Tombstone, and launched the iconic Epitaph with an afternoon issue on Saturday, May 1, 1880.

Not that it was all that easy. Clum had to purchase printing equipment, land, and support his wife and son. Two partners, both printers, joined him in the new enterprise. Clum maintained, in a wonderful turn of a phrase, that “no Tombstone is complete without its epitaph.” While true epitaphs are just so much gloss about a decedent’s life; Clum’s first Epitaph read as prophecy. Like many in the periphery, Clum envisioned Tombstone as a wealth-producing engine of change. Its underground riches would attract investment capital that would set the stage for continued growth and development. The city would mature, in Clum’s words, to that “city on a hill,” a beacon as bright as “ancient Rome,” inhabited by a civilized citizenry.

The problem with most beacons is that there are occasional dips in the supply voltage, if not outright outages. Tombstone’s early years were marked by mudslinging, gunslinging, murky land dealings, and the ill-effects of water and fire in the wrong places at the wrong times. In two years, Clum went from Tombstone mayor to a position in the U. S. Post Office’s inspection department in Washington, DC. What had gone wrong? Boomtowns moved at a boomtown’s pace – those who get in on the ground floor are anxious to preserve their position at all costs – and Clum was among those willing to apply the brakes. When Clum arrived in Tombstone, the town was run by appointed officials, including a justice of the peace, Mike Gray, who was a real estate agent. Under federal land laws, townsite lots were sold by the town, with proceeds used to underwrite the cost of public services. Clum’s contented that the mayor, Alder Randall, had simply doled out lots to business associates, including Gray. In rapidly developing conditions, squatters had taken to some lots, while others had been sold or resold by people who had purchased the lots from others who claimed lawful title. Gray’s company, of course, believed it was the only lawful broker. In the boomtown period, Clum asserted, “Tombstone has been handed over to the speculators. Our citizens are being ousted from their homes.”

Now doubling as postmaster and an editor-publisher, Clum ventured farther into the political arena. Having won a court order that ended the town lot sale, Clum decided to run for elective office. As a mayoral candidate under the newly former Citizens Protective Party, Clum sought a settled town in which he would “defeat corruption,” while bringing “peace and prosperity to our city.” He was elected Jan. 4, 1881.

Now a postmaster, an editor-publisher and a mayor, Clum faced the challenge of what he labeled “the county ring.” When Cochise County was made a free-standing political jurisdiction, several Democrats won coveted appointed offices doled out by the territory’s Republican governor, John C. Frémont. In essence, Clum broke ranks with the territory’s best-known Republican figure, brotherly fallout not new then or now. In addition, Clum drew a close association between the “ring” and local ranchers who were allied with outlaw elements. Thus, Tombstone cleaved between two factions. In one, Clum, the Epitaph, local Republicans, mining capital, and the Earp brothers; in the other, the rivalNuggeti>, local Democrats, the ranch trade, and several of the so-called cowboys with names like Clanton and McLaury.

If the former group won the battle for control of Tombstone on a cold Wednesday afternoon in October 1881, Clum’s vision of a settled and prosperous Tombstone remained confounded. Eight months before the infamous gunfight at the O. K. Corral, the Epitaph reported “water has been struck in one of the leading mines of the district.” This was not seen as a cause for concern, but optimism with the experts certain that good water meant good silver could not be far behind. Five years later, Tombstone's silver production was silenced by water mixed with the inability of major mines in the district to address the problem, a major equipment fire and languishing silver prices. And four months before the shootout, Tombstone’s town core – “largely made up of combustible material” – was destroyed by fire. Fire safety ordinances, which Clum had supported editorially, hadn’t been adopted. It took a second fire, 11 months later, to bring improvements.

By mid-1882 Clum had enough. Whatever role the Epitaph had played in helping Tombstone to settle and settle down, it was not enough to hold Clum’s interest. He had lost a wife, a daughter, and, in an undignified move by superiors, his job as postmaster. With his term as mayor also over, Clum was left with the Epitaph, which he sold – to, ironically, interests in the “ring” he had fought since arriving in Tombstone in 1880.

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