Jim Turner 7/17/22 Jim Turner 7/17/22

Naming Tombstone

Destination Tombstone: Adventures of a Prospector

By Edward Schieffelin founder of Tombstone, Arizona 1877

Royal Spectrum Publishing, Mesa, Arizona 1996

Manuscript is from the handwritten memoirs of Edward Lawrence Schieffelin

In March 1877 I was prospecting in the Hualapai County country along the line of where the Atlantic & Pacific Railroad now runs when a company of Hualapai Indians were enlisted to go to the southern part of the territory on a scouting expedition against the Chiricahua Apaches who was committing depredations whenever the opportunity presented itself. Thinking that there was a good opportunity for prospecting by going with them for they would afford me protection I went along. But not as a scout as many supposes. Arriving at Camp Huachuca about the first of April where the scouts remain for some time recruiting and making preparations for the summer's campaign.

During that time I would take trips through the country notwithstanding the warnings I received from the soldiers of the danger of going alone and on my return would ask if I had found anything, which I had not.

You will, they would say. You will find your tombstone if you don't stop running through this country all alone as you are while the Indians are so bad. The remarks being made often impressed the name on my mind so much that the first mind of any importance that I found I called it Tombstone thinking at the time of the vast difference in the one I had found and the one referred to by the soldiers.