Ed Schieffelin and the Stone That Named a Town

This town owes its strange name to a stubborn prospector and a soldier's grim joke. Edward Schieffelin came to the Arizona Territory in the late eighteen seventies, working as a scout out of a nearby army post while he searched the rocky hills east of the San Pedro River for silver. The soldiers thought he was a fool.

This was Apache country, dangerous and dry, and they told him that the only stone he would ever find out there would be his own tombstone. In eighteen seventy seven, Schieffelin found something far better. On a high, wind swept plateau called Goose Flats he turned up pieces of rich silver ore.

When he filed his first mining claim that September, he remembered the soldiers laughing at him, and out of pure defiance he named the claim Tombstone. Word of the strike spread, and Schieffelin, his brother Al, and a mining engineer named Richard Gird formed a partnership. That agreement made all three of them wealthy men.

Over the boom years the district's mines would give up tens of millions of dollars in silver. The prospector who was told he would only find his grave instead found a fortune, and gave a legend its name.