TOMBSTONES Chapter Five

 

I am confident that during March of 1879 Edward Schieffelin (above) was suffering from ennui. He had new clothes, and probably for first time in his life he was being treated with respect.  But the man who had spent half his life alone, seeking his fortune over the next hill, admitted, "I never wanted to be rich..."  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 in 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- serving customers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week after it opened Christmas eve 1881.  It was named for the twin second floor balconies, housing seven tiny 7 bedrooms, all  without support beams. The most profitable square feet in Tombstone was suspended from the ceiling- it's 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, far exceeding the silver mines. 

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.

The brother, Albert Schieffelin, stayed around Tombstone only 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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TOMBSTONES Chapter Three

 

I know what James Holmes said he was thinking as the big man approached, "waving his arms and shouting like a mad man". Holmes said he feared for his life. If that was true, it was courageous when he stepped from the cool dark of Brunckow's adobe (above) into the dessert sun to display his double barrel shot gun. He said he warned the hulking figure "not to move a foot". 

But the big man, Milton Duffield, "The Most Violent Man in Arizona", infamous for his "withering temper, belligerent and disputatious" nature, whose fists were “as big as any two fists to be seen...”, and who always carried an arsenal of weapons, just kept coming. And Holms insisted that reputation justified hitting Duffield with both barrels.  But because there were no witnesses to verify  his version of this 4 June, 1874 confrontation, I harbor doubts as to Mr. Holms' veracity.

Edward Laurence Schieffelin (above) was not an educated geologist like Frederick Brunckow. But Ed had been crisscrossing the Basin and Range province since he was 17, looking to reverse his family fortunes. Yet separated by 16 years  and by a yawning education gap, both men, Brunckhow and Schieffelin, ended up in the same 3 room adobe, a mile east of the San Pedro River. 

 Army Scout Al Sieber warned Edward about prospecting in Apache territory of southern Arizona. "The only rocks you will find there will be your tombstone." But in the spring of 1877, about 8 miles from the Brunckow adobe, Ed found chunks of silver "float", rocks washed down by the cloudbursts and gully washers during the summer "Monsoons".  He started working his way back up the wash, toward the plateau at the southern end of the Dragoon Mountains (above), a tilted plane called Goose Flats.

In 1852 the 42 year old Milton Duffield (above) abandoned a wife and child to seek California gold. His pugnacious personality made him so unpopular in the gold fields that in 1854 he was confronted at gunpoint by 3 antagonized acquaintances. Milton killed one and wounded another. Within ten years he's reputation as a gunman earned him appointment as the first Federal Marshal of Arizona Territory. Shortly thereafter a drunken lout named "Waco Bill" boasted he could not wait to meet the new marshal. Whereupon, Milton, who had been drinking at the same bar, knocked Bill down, shot Bill in the stomach and then grandly introduced himself.

Ed Schieffelin spent June and July combing Goose Flats mesa for the source of the red and black silver ore. The vein he found was 50 feet long and 12 inches wide before it disappeared into the earth. It was so rich in silver, that a coin pressed against it left an imprint. Gathering samples of the ore, Ed built 3 foot high stone cairns bracketing the site, "staking his claim", and then hurried to the San Pedro river camp of would-be rancher, William Griffith, who had offered to "stake" Ed if he found a likely spot. At the end of August the two traveled the 70 miles northwest to Tuscon, where, on 3 September 1877 Griffith paid the $5.00 double filing fee to the county clerk. Ed called his new mine the "Tombstone" and Griffith's "The Grave Yard".

When a lynch party broke into the Phoenix jail, Marshal Milton Duffield defended his 4 prisoners - sort of.  As they tied him to a chair, he warned the vigilantes, "You can hang a Mexican, and you can hang a Jew and you can hang a nigger, but you can't hang an American." Evidently, they could - hanging all four men. Once he was released, Marshal Duffield found it politically expedient not to arrest the prominent members of the lynching party.

Schieffelin (above) and Griffith showed their ore samples to several Tuscon miners, and none thought the rocks worth a chemical examination. Griffith accepted their judgment and bowed out of the partnership. But with only 30 cents to his name, Ed Schieffelin could not afford to surrender his dream.  However, in his present incarnation, he could attract no other investors. One observer described him in 1877 as having "...black hair that hung several inches below his shoulder and a beard that....was a mass of unkempt knots and mats", and wearing "...clothing pieced and patched from deer skins, corduroy and flannel..." Ed gathered up his ore samples and headed out to find his brother Al, who was working at the Silver King mine 100 miles north of Tuscon, in Globe, Arizona.

Marshal Duffield continued to inspire people to seek to kill him. One would-be assassin even took a shot at him in open court. Finally, in 1865, offended by his low salary, Milton resigned. The lack of a badge did nothing to mediate his personality. One night in a whore house a friend, John Gregory Bourke, asked Duffield just how many weapons he carried. Milton was just drunk enough not to take offense, and proceeded to lay his ever present hand gun on the table, joined by a second gun from a hidden shoulder holster, and derringers from his vest pocket, another tucked into his boot, his hip pocket, his front pant pocket and a rear pant pocket. Then he began to produce a variety of knives. Eventually Milton Duffield lay 11 weapons on the table, and no one thought he had completely disarmed.

The north central Arizona town of Globe earned its name in 1875 when a round clump of horn silver was found on Apache lands. When Ed Schieffelin arrived in the fall of 1877, there were 3 mines operating in the area. But Ed's brother Al had just left town, chasing a new silver strike, 300 miles north on the Big Sandy River, at the foot of the Poachie Mountains. Ed spent 2 weeks working at the Champion mine in Globe to earn enough money to make the trip. When he arrived in the new town of Signal, it had a post office and barely 100 residents, one of whom was Al Schieffelin. After a brief reunion (the brothers had not seen each other in 4 years) Ed showed his ore samples to a number of other miners, none of whom thought them worth anything. That night Ed got drunk, and threw his samples as far as he could into the desert night.

Milton Duffield went into real estate, speculating in mining claims. And he continued offending people. When he got into a poker argument, Milton knocked his opponent to the ground, then kicked him in the head. And for good measure, Milton ended the discussion by shooting the stunned man in the ass. One night in June of 1870, 2 men tip toed into his bedroom. Milton awoke to the pain of an axe slicing into his shoulder. He fought the attackers off, sending them retreating into the dark. But it cost Milton his right thumb, in addition to 31 stab wounds

In February of 1878 a new assayer arrived in Signal. His name was Richard Gird. When Ed Schieffelin worked up the courage to show him some ore samples he had missed throwing away the previous fall, Gird was interested enough to run some chemical tests. Three days later he informed Al and Ed the ore tested as being worth $2,000 a ton. The three men (above) made a handshake deal on the spot. Gird bought a second hand blue spring board wagon, and a mule for Ed, and the partners headed back to the Goose Flats mesa.

Time, and his lifestyle was taking a toll on Milton Duffield. His dark eyes still flashed, but his dark hair was turning white. Since the nighttime attack he "...no longer took pleasure in rows, but acted like one who had enough of battles..." Known now generally as "Old Duffy" Milton concentrated on speculating in other people's mining claims. And in 1872 Milton acquired claim to the "Bronco" mine and the adobe, once owned by Frederick Brucnkow (above). A year later, in a tax ploy, he transferred ownership of the mine to his Phoenix landlady, Mrs. Mary E. Vaghn.

In the early spring of 1878 the three partners occupied the Brunckow adobe (above). Gird built an assay furnace in the remains of the cabin's fire place, and the Schieffelin brothers began chipping away at the lode on Goose Flats. The vein proved worth the $2,000 a ton estimate, just as Gird had predicted, but there was barely a ton of it. The vein pinched out three feet below ground level. Al and Gird were despondent, but Ed insisted there was more silver in hills above the mesa, and set out to find it.

The day that Milton Duffield rode his wagon out to the Brunckow adobe - Thursday, 5 June, 1874, he was 64 years old. "Old Duffy" knew he was going to confront a claim jumper - James T. Holmes. Holmes had occupied the cabin a few weeks before, and had ostentatiously begun working the Bronco mine. But Milton knew there was not enough silver left in the 14 year old Bronco to be worth digging out, dragging to the surface and grinding into dust. Apache's and local bandits had murdered some 20 men within sight of the cabin, and it seems that Milton might even have been trying to talk sense to the younger man. It may even have been that his arrival was not a surprise to Holmes, since "Old Duffy" made the trip unarmed.

On Tuesday, 17 June, 1879, Ed Schieffelin arrived in Tuscon driving a battered blue spring wagon. He stopped first at the county recorder's office, to register 2 new mining claims above Goose Flats - the "Tough Nut" and "The Lucky Cuss".  He also filed paperwork forming a legal partnership, The Tombstone Gold and Silver Mining Company. Then, Ed delivered his buggy load of silver bullion to the bank, making a deposit the bank valued at $18,744 - almost half a million in today's currency. 

The 90 foot wide "Tough Nut" (above) vein would assay out at $15,000 a ton. And it would not pinch out for ten years.

Milton B. Duffield (above) , "The Most Violent Man in Arizona", was buried near the Brunckow adobe. But the new Marshal testified the old one had been killed by a double barrel shotgun blast to the head. The wound suggested that James Holmes had laid in wait and assassinated "Old Duffy".   And it was said that in jail Holmes confessed to having been paid $2,000 to eliminate the old man. But who paid him would remain a mystery. Holmes "escaped" before his trial, and was never seen or heard from again. Maybe he changed his name and moved to California, or maybe his employers shut his mouth forever. Much of Milton Duffield's estate had already been signed over to his Phoenix landlady, Mrs. Mary E. Vaghn, hinting the old man was near broke. What was left would be contested by his three wives - the one abandoned in West Virginia, one in California and one in Arizona. It seems the only thing the first Marshal of Arizona Territory never did, was divorce.

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TOMBSTONES Chapter Five

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 whatShakespeare'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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