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by Walter Noble Burns
An embellished retelling of the town of Tombstone, Arizona, during its heyday in the late 19th century, featuring famous heroes and outlaws of the American Old West.
Opening
A few passages to enter the atmosphere.
Hills of Silver
Geronimo and his warriors were out of their stronghold in the Dragoons. Through all the southeastern part of Arizona from the San Simon to the Huachucas and from the Gila to the Mexican line, the Apache bands were relentlessly harrying the thinly settled land with a warfare of ambuscade and assassination. Through desert mesquite and cactus, the invisible savages slipped with the noiseless swiftness of running water; like poisonous reptiles they wriggled upon their bellies to points of murderous vantage; as still as cougars and as patient, they lurked beside the trails or watched a cabin door. The sudden cough of a rifle through the golden peace of the sunshine gave the first intimation of their ghostly nearness. A wagon train was ambushed in some pass in the hills; a miner in some lonely gulch was murdered from a cholla thicket; a settler with his wife and children was massacred on his homestead claim. Back to their mountain fastnesses from their slinking, silent war trails, the red butchers bore their spoils—a side of bacon, a sack of flour, a bag of beans, a little tobacco, a pair of overalls, a calico wrapper, a baby’s rattle. Then the riotous feasting, the paeans of drumming tom-toms, the wild, impassioned dance of triumph. This was the Apache way in war. No battles, only murder. If the soldiers pressed hard upon their traces, the savages, on their tough, swift ponies, vanished as by magic through secret mountain paths to safety in old Mexico.
Into this wilderness land of ambushed death, Ed Schieffelin, unknown as yet to fame or fortune, came as a civilian scout in , with a flying column recruited in the Hualapai country on the borders of the Grand Canyon and under the command of Al Sieber, celebrated in Apache campaigns as one of the greatest government scouts of the Southwest. The troopers made their headquarters at Camp Huachuca, a newly established army post at the north end of the Huachuca range, and scoured the country round about for Indians.
Eastward across the San Pedro Valley from the post, a group of high hills cut the skyline. Unlovely hills, treeless, their brown slopes a dreary monotony of huge rocks and boulders among which cactus and greasewood made hard shift to live. A sheer desert tumultuously uplifted and set on edge. There was a look of frank poverty about them. One sweep of the eye took them in. No dark, mysterious gorges, no hidden pockets, no shadowy valleys invited curious investigation. Spaniards of Coronado’s time coming up from Mexico on their quest for the Seven Cities of Cibola had passed them by with only an incurious glance. Scouts had threaded through them, troops of cavalry had circled them, Mexican smugglers had camped in their lower draws. But no one had suspected that their drab pauper’s mantle was only a masquerade hiding one of the continent’s richest treasures. They were hills of silver, veined through and through with ore of fabulous richness, filled to the cactus roots and ready to burst with precious metal. One rip of their sides with a miner’s pick and the hoarded wealth would have come gushing forth in resplendent flood. But their hour had not yet struck. The man with the pick had not yet arrived.
Tombstone
Continue readingOn one of their scouting expeditions from Camp Huachuca, Al Sieber and his men rode through the northern reaches of these hills. Schieffelin’s eye caught the gleam of deep mineral stains on a stone. He dismounted and examined the piece of float intently. Silver! Schieffelin looked up in astonishment at the piled-up ugliness of the range. For one skeptical moment, the squalid ridges seemed a sky-high lie. He shook his head. It was impossible. And yet … He dropped the chunk of rock in his coat pocket and rode on after his comrades. He said nothing. But his secret thrilled him like wine. He would be a scout no longer. When the Apache hunt was over, he would turn prospector again and hit the trail for the end of the rainbow.