I
am confident that during March of 1879 Edward Schieffelin (above) was
suffering from ennui. He had new clothes, he was bathing and eating
regularly, and probably for the first time in his life he was being
treated with respect by strangers. But the man who had spent half
his life alone, seeking his fortune over the next hill, admitted,
"I never wanted to be rich, I just wanted to get close to the
earth and see mother nature's gold." His discovery of the
Tombstone silver lode had robbed him of what Shakespeare's
Hamlet called "...the name of action".
So in Philadelphia, he left negotiations for the million
dollar deal to his brother Alfred and their partner, Richard Gird.
The
principle investors in the richest silver strike since the Comstock
lode, Frank and Phillip Corbin, had built their fortune (above) making door
locks and metal trimmings for coffins. They knew nothing about
mining. But because they agreed how best to profit from the Lucky
Cuss and Tough Nut claims, they were welcomed as partners.
The new
corporate offices for The Tombstone Milling and Mining Company, at
425 Walnut Street in Philadelphia, issued half a million shares of
stock, which were quickly snapped up by investors. Almost over night
Ed Schieffelin was a millionaire. And there was more to come.
Within
a year there were 3,000 working mines between the Dragoon and Mule
mountains and the San Pedro River. Besides the original four, the
richest claims would be the Grand Central, the Goodenough, the Vizna, the
Empire, the Tranquility, the Sydney, The Girard, The Sulphuret and
The Bob Ingersoll. But none were as rich as the first. At depth the Tough Nut's vein was sometimes 20
feet wide, and required 75 men to extract it and another 80 to mill
what it produced. The vein in the Grand Central mine was 8 to 12 feet
wide.
Tombstone
Mining and Milling sold
half of the Lucky Cuss for $10,000,
using the cash to fund construction of stamping mills, under newly
named Superintendent Richard
Gird.
Over 500 tons of ore
each day from all the mines had to be transported by 16 mule team ore
wagons 8 miles west to the San Pedro river, at a cost of $3.50 a ton.
Along both banks, 7 deafening stamp mills were constructed, surrounded
by almost identical reverberating villages of between 200 and 600
residents each, named Charleston, Contention, Fairbank and Millville. Here running water or steam driven steel hammers, 140 "stamps"
in total, pounded the ore 24 hours a day until it was reduced to
powder. Separated in baths of cyanide, and then heated to 1,763
degrees Fahrenheit, the 90 % pure liquid silver was then poured into
molds. Carried by stagecoach to Benson, where it met the The New Mexico and Arizona branch of the Atchison Topeka and
the Santa Fe railroad, the ingots were then shipped the bars to El Paso,
Texas for ultimate refining.
In
one year alone- between April 1881 and April 1882 - the San Pedro
mills shipped $1.3 million worth of silver bullion to El Paso - about
$30 million today. In just 4 years greater Tombstone grew from
100 to 8,000 white males. Adding women, African Americans, Hispanics
and Chinese, the real total was probably closer to 10,000 souls
living in the Sonoran desert without direct access to fresh water,
food, or plumbing.
Everything had to be brought in by wagon or burro.
And still the town eventually supported Vogan's 10 pin Bowling Alley And Bar, a
gym, a book store, 4 churches, an ice house, one school, 2 banks, 3
newspapers, several billiard parlors, an ice cream parlor, 2 Italian,
1 French, a couple of Chinese and several Mexican restaurants, as
well as many that promised "Home Cooking" and a few which actually delivered it, 110
saloons, 42 lawyers, at least 14 gambling and dance halls and at least a dozen brothels.
The
Can Can French restaurant advertised "Game
as wild as a tornado, chicken as tender as a maiden’s heart,
ice-cream as delicious as a day in June, dessert that would charm the
soul of a South Sea Islander and smiles as bright as the morning
sun..."
The Grand Hotel boasted 16 rooms, each "..fitted
with walnut furniture and carpeted...spring mattresses that would
tempt even a sybarite, toilet stands and fixtures... the walls
papered, and...each room having windows." There was even limited
telephone service by 1882.
Most
famous (or infamous) business in Tombstone would be the tiny Bird Cage Theatre- open 24 hours a
day, 7 days a week after it opened Christmas eve 1881. It was named for the twin balcony, 7 bedrooms 2nd floor, suspended from the ceiling- their physical load transferred to the thick adobe
exterior walls (below). Their moral load carried by the patrons seemingly without effort
A beer at the bar cost a dollar - equivalent to $22
today - extra if you ordered it from one of the suspended "cages" (above).
These were single use spaces - prostitution being pound for pound and
minute for minute the most profitable business in Tombstone.
According to the New York Times the Birdcage was "...the
wildest, wickedest night spot between Basin Street (New Orleans) and
(San Francisco's) the Barbary Coast."
It
was also small. Past the bar (above), the main hall was just 15 X 15 feet,
not including the stage and orchestra pit. With summer temperatures
routinely reaching 118°F, and with open flame gas jets providing the
only lighting in the windowless building, crowded with warm bodies
and clouds of cigar smoke from the basement gambling parlor, tempers
and oxygen must have both been in short supply.
The
only thing holding the level of sin at bay seemed to have been the lack
of water, and by March of 1881 the Huachuca Water Company had trapped the flow
from 3 springs behind a dam (above) built across Miller canyon, 6,500 feet up
in the Huachuca Mountains, southwest of Tombstone. Gravity forced
the fresh water through the 7 inch iron pipe across 26 miles of
desert to a 1 million gallon reservoir just above Tombstone. The water must have been hot.
Boasted
the "Epitaph", "It is safe to say that no other town
in America, of its size and population, is better supplied with
amusements...Only last evening...there were meetings of firemen, Odd
fellows, city council, the literary and debating society, together
with a ball, a theatre, a dancing school, and a couple of private
parties, all at full blast! Hurrah for Tombstone! (above)"
The
town's economy rested on the strong backs and arms of its 6,000 male miners and mill workers - mostly Cornish,
Irish, Poles and Germans (above). They earned
the union wage of $4 for every 10 hour shift in the tunnels. Between
that sum and the pay for teamsters and support staff, $168,000 in
cash was injected into Tombstone's economy each week.
And just about
as many faro dealers, bartenders, south side prostitutes, lawyers,
restaurant owners, hotel clerks, bakers, Chinese laundrymen, Mexican
laborers, opium den operators, life insurance salesmen and
politicians did their very best to take every dime of it. It was a
miner, whose addictions had reduced him to a dish washer, who bestowed
upon Tombstone it's official nickname - not El Dorado (golden city)
but Helldorado.
Still,
in its bloodiest year - 1881 - Tombstone, Arizona officially recorded
only 6 homicides. And 3 of those were by police officers, in the
shoot out at the O.K. Corral. Over the decade between the town's
founding and water flooding into the mines, there were 130 "murders
and self-defense" gun deaths, 18 "accidental" gun deaths and 15 self inflicted gunshot deaths. That low a death toll, when
compared to the higher rates in outlying mill towns, can only be
ascribed to ordinance Number 9, imposing a $25 fine for carrying a
deadly weapon "...in the hand or upon the person or
otherwise....within the limits of said city of Tombstone..."
Guns were still readily available, but the slight delay in accessing
them seems to have made all the difference.
Meanwhile
Mose Drachman, resident of the little mill town of Charleston (above, bottom) - population about 350 - and without benefit of ordinance Number 9 - remembered "...it
was not an uncommon sight to see one or more dead men lying in the
street when going to work...If a dead man had a gun on him and was
shot from the front, no one bothered to look for the killer.”
Charleston's only
employee was sheriff, judge, treasurer and Justice of the Peace, James
Burnett, "...a
known scoundrel..." "Justice Jim" operated on a
strictly cash basis, kept the town treasury in his pocket, recorded no records and favored the "open carry" approach to justice.
One of the few murders in Charleston to ever go to trial occurred outside Harry Queen's saloon on 1 October, 1881. Braggart and hothead James Hickey was on the tail end of 3 day bender, and out of money. As he staggered out the door he ran into Billy "The Kid" Claiborne (above). Hickey had been looking for the popular Claiborne for days, spoiling for a fight and calling him "a prick eating son-of-a-bitch". The Kid tried to walk away from the drunk, and warned Hickey that if he kept following, Claiborne would kill him. When Hickey kept coming, Billy shot him down, and when Hickey got up, The Kid shot him once more in the face, killing him. It took 2 trials but Billy Claiborne was eventually found to have killed in self defense.
More typical were 2 other murders in Justice Burnetts' jurisdiction of Charleston (above). First, the January
of 1881 shooting of W.P. Scheider, chief
engineer of the Corbin Mill, who was gunned down by
Johnny-Behind-the-Deuce, AKA Micheal O'Rourke - and the March 1882
killing of 26 year old Martin Ruter Peel, who was murdered in
full view of witnesses by 2 masked men. Martin was an engineer
for Tombstone Mining and Milling, and the son of a prominent judge.
Yet no one was ever charged in his murder. O'Rourke was arrested and was threatened by a lynch mob of miners and cowboys - encouraged by Curly
Bill Brocius and Johnny Ringo. The lynching was blocked by among others Wyatt Earp, who managed to lock up the killer in Tombstone. But Johnny-Behind -The- Deuce never stood trial because he escaped jail. Thus the "Open Carry" version of justice was far from open or just.
Albert
Schieffelin stayed around Tombstone long enough to build the largest
adobe structure in the southwest, where men could take their wives to
hear music and see theatre - Schieffelin Hall. Then he left for Los
Angeles, where he died in 1885, of the consumption he contracted in the mines. Richard Gerd ran the
mills for years, eventually selling his share of the flooding mines
for $800,000. But the finder, Ed Schieffelin , never returned to Tombstone.
Eventually Ed (above) bought a ranch near the Schieffelin homestead in the Rogue Valley in
Oregon. But even a wife and child, and mansions outside of San
Francisco and in Los Angeles could not hold him. In May of 1897 Ed
suffered a heart attack, alone in a California mountain cabin, still looking for "Mother Nature's Gold". When he died, Ed was not yet 50 years old. He left his wife
Mary, "...all...real and personal properties,
in...California", and gave the rest of his fortune to his only surviving
brother, Jay.
As
his will requested Ed was buried 3 miles east of Tombstone, near the
dry wash where he had first found ore. In his coffin he was provided with a
pick. a shovel and his old canteen, should the afterlife offer him opportunities for more prospecting. His tombstone (above) is, as he requested, "a
monument, such as prospectors build when locating a mining claim." It was as if he were saying this was where his life ended, after 15 years of searching and 20 years before his death.
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