Tombstone, Arizona: Named for a Grim Prospecting Warning

Ed Schieffelin was told the only stone he’d find in the hills of Tombstone, Arizona, would be his tombstone. He found silver and named his claim Tombstone.

An 1883 territorial guide called it a name “so ‘gloomy and peculiar.’” The name went first to the claim, then to the whole mining district, and then to the town that grew up there.

“The stone you will find”

The district was a favorite haunt of Cochise and his Apaches, according to Patrick Hamilton, who compiled The Resources of Arizona under the authority of the territorial legislature. He says Schieffelin was “warned that he would find a tombstone instead of a fortune in Cochise’s domain.” He went anyway, leaving Camp Huachuca in the last days of 1877.

James McClintock tells it with the dialogue in his 1916 state history. Schieffelin was doing work on the Brunckow mine, a worthless claim near what became Charleston, and spent his idle time prospecting. He was “probably the only man in the camp who cared to prospect,” McClintock says, because the slopes were uninviting and “it was known that they contained Apaches.” As he set off one day, a companion asked where he was going. “Just out in the hills to look for stones,” he said. The parting reply: “The stone you will find will be your tombstone.” Then, McClintock writes, “possibly that very day,” Schieffelin followed some rich silver “float,” loose bits of ore, up to a ledge and announced that he’d found his tombstone at last.

He named the claim the Tombstone. Hamilton says he gave the name to the whole district “in remembrance of the doleful prognostications of his companions at Huachuca.” Henry Gannett’s 1905 federal bulletin on place names keeps it short: the founder was “assured he would ‘find his tombstone.’”

Which year

You’ll see different dates depending on where you look. McClintock says Schieffelin recorded the Tombstone claim at Tucson on September 3, 1877, and repeats the date in Mormon Settlement in Arizona (1921). Yet McClintock also puts the Brunckow job in “the winter of 1877-8,” which doesn’t square with his own September date. Hamilton, writing in 1883, has him setting out late in 1877 and making the discovery in February 1878. The Geological Survey’s database says he “discovered ore here in 1879.” The warning and the name don’t change from book to book; only the calendar moves.

There’s a twist in the geography too. That first claim “did not prove of much value,” McClintock says, and it sat several miles from the later camp. The rich mines were staked on the site of the town itself, by Schieffelin, his brother Al and the assayer Dick Gird. The name went with them, because Schieffelin had given it to the whole district.

The newspaper with the punch line

When John Clum and two partners started a paper in Tombstone in May 1880, they called it the Epitaph. McClintock gives two stories for that name. In one, a mining engineer suggested it at a banquet. In the other, Clum asked his fellow stagecoach passengers for ideas, and one of them was Schieffelin, who said: “Well, I christened the district Tombstone; you should have no trouble in furnishing the Epitaph.” Either way, a town named for a grim warning got a newspaper named for the punch line.

Sources & further reading

• Patrick Hamilton, The Resources of Arizona, 2nd ed. (1883), p. 74. The warning, the start from Camp Huachuca, the February 1878 discovery and the name “so ‘gloomy and peculiar.’”
• James H. McClintock, Arizona: Prehistoric, Aboriginal, Pioneer, Modern, vol. 2 (1916). The Brunckow mine, “The stone you will find will be your tombstone,” the claim recorded September 3, 1877, “the winter of 1877-8,” and the later mines (p. 410); the Epitaph and its two naming stories (pp. 505–506).
• James H. McClintock, Mormon Settlement in Arizona (1921), p. 238. The September 3, 1877, recording at Tucson.
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905), p. 302. Named because the founder was “assured he would ‘find his tombstone.’”
• GNIS feature 12590 (U.S. Geological Survey). Named by Ed Schieffelin; ore discovered in 1879, by its count.