As to the titles of many of these Western productions, it might be supposed these spring from the fertile brain of some incorrigible humorist. But this is not so. Nothing could be more real—"alive and kicking"—in Anno Domini 1904, than the Creede (Colorado) Candle, the Arizona Arrow of Chloride, Arizona, the Rifle Reveille, the Rising Star X-ray, the Bald-Knob Herald, the Dallas World Hustler, the Kosse Cyclone, the Blooming Grove Rustler, the Carrizo Javelin, the Noyales Oasis, and the Devil's Lake Free Press. The names of some Western towns are fantastic to a degree, and the editorial love for alliteration is strong. Thus we have the Bliss Breeze, the Mustang Mail, and the Searchlight Searchlight in addition to those I have mentioned. What more natural in the "city" of Tombstone, Arizona, than that the newspaper should be entitled the Epitaph? Or that an Epitaph should take as naturally to obituaries as a duck to water or an Arizonian takes to his "gun"?
Jake Moffatt Gone Skyward!
As we feared on hearing that two doctors had been called in, the life of our esteemed fellow-citizen Jake Moffatt ered out on Wednesday last, just after we had gone to press. Jake was every inch a scholar and a gentleman, upright in all his dealings, unimpeachable in character, and ran the Front Street Saloon in the very toniest style consistent with order. Jake never fully recovered from the year he spent in the county jail at the time of the Ryan-Sternberg fracas. His health was shattered, and he leaves a sorrowing widow and nary an enemy.
The Tombstone men are handy with their "shooting-irons," as may be judged from the accompanying cheery advertisement last Christmas time.
The chief advertisements in the Epitaph, as in the other papers in the ranching country, consist of cattle-brands—i.e., rude outlines or silhouettes of equine or bovine quadrupeds, marked with the peculiar sign which distinguishes their ownership from others. By this means any strayed or stolen cattle are readily identified.
