For twenty years since he had stood in thrilling triumph beside his newfound riches in the Tombstone hills, he had heard the still small insistent voice of the wilderness calling him back. He had assayed civilization and found only disillusion. The pleasures of wealth were not in its possession, but in the adventure of finding it. Society, with its pride, pretense, jealousies, and vainglory, was for others. Sweeter far to him were camp fire bacon and coffee in a desert than the luxuries of cities. One lonely purple mountain was worth all the world’s Broadways. So the rich man laid off his fine raiment, put on his old corduroys and his old red flannel shirt, buckled on his old canteen, and, with his old pick on his shoulder, went home to the wilderness.
Night had fallen in the Oregon forest. Schieffelin sat alone in his cabin in the ruddy glow of the firelight shining through the chinks of the stove. A pot of beans was boiling and bubbling with a cozy, cheerful murmur, sending up a cloud of savoury steam. A pan of biscuits was baking in the oven. … A sudden blinding effulgence filled the cabin. Out of the heavens, through the night, a long beam of splendour was slanting down to him, like a wide, gleaming pathway. Far up along its dazzling reaches he saw with a quick glow of happiness the loom of the Tombstone hills; there were the Lucky Cuss, the Contention, the Tough Nut, all his old mines as plain as day. Beyond, against a radiant suffusion of silver light, towered a great gateway flashing as with opals and sapphire and gold, and from its wide-flung portals were streaming glorious winged figures with snowy, shimmering garments; they were coming toward him, their arms outstretched as in welcome. He started from his chair, his rapt eyes filled with the wonder of the vision, his face transfigured and glorified. With his old corduroy pants stuffed in his boots, his old red flannel shirt open at the throat, its sleeves rolled to the elbows, he stumbled forward to climb the resplendent pathway leading to the skies.
A traveller along the lonely trail that passed the cabin found Schieffelin next morning. He lay face downward at full length on the floor. A tramp hound he had befriended crouched and whimpered at his feet. The stove was cold; the pot of beans had boiled down to a charred mass; the bread in the oven was burned black.
Schieffelin’s body was taken to Tombstone. His funeral was the largest in the camp’s history. Stores were closed and dwellings deserted on this May day in , and everybody followed the dead man to his last resting place on the rock-strewn eminence beside the dry wash where he had had his adventure with the Indians and from which he had gone up to discover the riches of the hills of silver. The body was dressed in Schieffelin’s red flannel shirt and prospector’s clothes and, in accordance with his last wishes expressed in his will, with his pick and shovel and canteen lying beside him in the coffin. To mark his last claim, they erected over his grave, in the likeness of a prospector’s monument, a tall, massive, tower-like structure of rough stones visible for miles across the rolling mesquite mesa.
But town, mines, and hills are all likewise his monuments. The very name of Tombstone, with all it implies of history, drama, romance, and achievement, is itself an intangible but enduring monument to the pioneer who, with steadfast faith and courage, followed his dream into the deserts. Schieffelin rests in the glamour of it. He sleeps forever in the shadow of a name.
II
Red Lights and Altar Candles
Tombstone was unique among the frontier towns that have achieved lurid distinction in the history of the American West. It had, according to its legend, its man for breakfast every morning, but it was touched with the refinements of old and ordered communities. It had its desperadoes, but it had also its hardworking citizens who established homes and built prosperity. It was isolated in an Arizona desert, but civilization was just over the horizon.
A mining town in the heart of a cattle country, it had the picturesqueness of a boom silver camp and the colour of a trail-end, cowboy capital. It was a town of lawlessness and law, saloons and schools, gambling halls and churches, lurid melodrama and business routine, red lights and altar candles. It was Hangtown of the gold-rush days of ’Forty-nine. It was San Francisco of the Stranglers. It was Virginia City, Alder Gulch, Poker Flat, and Deadwood. It was the Hays City and Abilene of Wild Bill Hickok, the San Antonio of Ben Thompson and King Fisher, the Dodge City of Bat Masterson. It was all the hectic, mad romance of the old Western border, but in a stage-setting of modern comforts and conveniences.
Bad men, cattle thieves, stage robbers, and gamblers brushed elbows with wealthy mine owners, merchants, and men of the professions. Six-shooters
