When the West Was Young

by Frederick R. Bechdolt

But when he reached the foot-hills of the Mule Mountains Lewis found that the long afternoon of battle and the ensuing night of flight had left him utterly at sea as to the location of that large ledge. He had to begin his hunt all over again. He used up his grubstake, got a second from his backers, and subsequently a third.

And now while Lewis was combing down the gullies between those broken ridges for the ore body––he slew himself from disappointment later on––and while Jim Shea was meditating an expedition after the riches of which he had got trace down in the dry wash, Ed Schiefflin came to the Bruncknow house to embark on the adventure which was to give the town of Tombstone its name.

The Bronco house, men call it now, but Bruncknow was the man who built it and the new term is a corruption. Its ruins still stand on the side-hill a few miles from the dry wash, a rifle-shot or so from the spot where the two prospectors met their deaths. In 64 those days it was a lonely outpost of the white man in the Apache’s land. The summer of 1877 was drawing to a close, its showers were already a distant memory, and all southeastern Arizona was glowing under the white-hot sun-rays when Schiefflin rode his mule up from the San Pedro to seek the protection of its thick adobe walls.

The flat lands of the valley stretched away and away behind him to the foot of the Huachucas in the west. They unfolded their long reaches to the southward until they melted into the hot sky between spectral mountain ranges down in Mexico. He came up out of that wide landscape, a tall wild figure, lonesome as the setting sun.

His long beard and the steady patience in his eyes––the patience which comes to the prospector during his solitary wanderings in search of rich ore––gave him the appearance of a man past middle age although he had not seen his thirtieth year. His curling hair reached his broad shoulders. Wind and sun had tanned his features so deeply that his blue eyes stood out in strange contrast to the dark skin. His garments were sadly torn, and he had patched them in many places with buckskin. Such men still come and go in the remote places among the mountain ranges and deserts of the West. They were almost the first to penetrate the wilderness and they will roam over it so long as any patch of it remains unfenced.

Schiefflin had left his father’s house in Oregon ten years before. He searched the Cœur d’Alênes for riches, and, finding none, struck out from Idaho for Nevada. There he remained through two blazing summers 65 traveling afoot from the sage-brush hills in the north across the silent deserts east of Death Valley. He wandered on to Colorado, where he toiled in the new mining camps between prospecting trips into the great plateaus along the western slope of the Rockies. From Colorado he went southward into New Mexico; thence westward to Arizona. He accompanied a troop of cavalry from Prescott down to the foot of the Huachucas where they established a new post. During the last leg of that journey he saw these foot-hills of the Mule Mountains in passing, and in spite of warnings from the soldiers, he was now returning to prospect the district.

He had spent some days at the Herrick ranch down in the valley, and the men about the place had strongly advised him against traveling into the hills. They cited various gruesome examples of the fate which overtook solitary wanderers in this savage land. They might as well have saved their breath; Schiefflin had seen some mineral stains on a rock outcropping when he passed through the country with the cavalry earlier in the season.

So now he came on toward the Bruncknow house, where he could make his camp closer to the hills upon whose exploration his mind was set.

There were several men lounging about the adobe when he reached it. Even in those days, when the most peaceful border-dweller carried his rifle almost everywhere except to his meals and was as likely as not to have slain one or two fellow-creatures,––days when the leading citizens of that isolated region presented a sinister front with their long-barreled revolvers slung 66 beside their thighs,––the members of the group showed up hard.

A lean and seasoned crew, dust-stained from many a wild ride, burned by the border sun, they watched the new-comer with eyes half-curtained, like the eyes of peering eagles, by straight lids. They welcomed him with a few terse questions as to where he had come from and what the troops were doing over at the new post. Of themselves they said nothing nor offered any information of their business in this lonely spot.