Just before one of these expeditions he was driving out of Tombstone with Gus Barron, another old-timer and a close friend, and as they went down the Fairbank road they reached the spot where the three great boulder knolls rise beside the dry wash. Schiefflin drew rein.
“This,” he said to Barron, “is the place where I camped that night when the Apaches almost got me, the night before I found the stringer on the hill. And when I die I want to be buried here with my canteen and my prospector’s pick beside me.”
So when he died up in Cañon City, Oregon, just about twenty years after he had made that discovery, they brought his body back and buried it on the summit of the knoll. And they erected a great pyramid of granite boulders on the spot for his monument.
And within sight of that lonely tomb the town stands out on the sky-line, commemorating by its name the steadfastness of Ed Schiefflin, prospector.
TOMBSTONE’S WILD OATS
In the good old days of Indians and bad men the roaring town of Tombstone had a man for breakfast every morning. And there were mornings when the number ran as high as half a dozen.
That is the way the old-timers speak of it, and there is a fond pride in their voices when they allude to the subject; the same sort of pride one betrays when he tells of the wild oats sowed by a gray-haired friend during his lusty youth. For Tombstone has settled down to middle-aged conventionality and is peaceable enough to-day for any man.
But in the early eighties!