A silver lining for the man who founded Tomb stone

IT’S a place that’s often featured in cowboy movies, but I’d like to know how the town of Tombstone, Arizona, got its rather macabre name. – L.

Tombstone is a historic city in Cochise County, Arizona, USA, founded in 1879 by a prospector, Ed Schieffelin, in what was then Pima County, Arizona Territory.

It became one of the last boomtowns in the American frontier.

Schieffelin was part of a scouting mission and, during his stay at a place called Camp Huachuca, he would leave the camp to look for rocks out in the wilderness.

Soldiers warned him not to, saying he wouldn’t find any ores, and would only find his own tombstone.

Fortunately for Ed, he didn’t find his tombstone, but he did find silver.

Mocking the advice his fellow soldiers gave him, Ed named his first silver mine The Tombstone.

It wasn’t long before homesteaders, cowboys, speculators, prospectors, lawyers, business people and gunmen headed to the area, and the whole place took the Tombstone name.

The city has featured in dozens of movies, mainly because it was where The Gunfight At The O. K. Corral took place, on October 26, 1881. The shootout between lawmen Virgil, Morgan and Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday and a loosely organized group of outlaws called the Cowboys lasted just 30 seconds, when three outlaws lay dead.

They were buried in the city’s Boot Hill cemetery.