The Tombstone Epitaph

John Clum arrived in Tombstone in January 1880 — former Indian agent, former Tucson newspaper man, a Republican in cattle-country Democrats' territory. When friends told him his new paper would write the town's epitaph, he took the name and ran with it. The first issue of *The Tombstone Epitaph* appeared May 1, 1880.

By then, three years after the first silver claims, production had hit $11 million. Northern businessmen and Texas cowboys brought the Civil War's sectional fights with them into Apache country. Clum, who also served as Tombstone's mayor, backed the Earp brothers as they tried to impose order. On October 26, 1881, the *Epitaph* published the contemporary account of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral — three cowboys dead in an explosion of gunfire near Fremont Street, the legal inquest ruling it justified, public opinion siding with the outlaws.

Clum left for Washington and a postal job not long after. The *Epitaph* stayed, outlasting the silver crash of 1886, the mines filling with water, the long slide from boom to bust. Tombstone survived on mild desert winters and automobile tourism. The paper moved in 1927 from its original Fremont Street adobe to the present building at 11 South 5th Street, one lot south of Allen.

It's the oldest continuously published newspaper in Arizona. The free museum at the 5th Street office is open daily, 9:30 to 6. Inside: the Washington flat bed press that printed early issues, composing stones, linotype machines, type cases from the hot-metal era. A video explains how it was done in the 1880s. What you're looking at is 145 years of unbroken publication in a town the mines abandoned, kept alive by the fact that America never stopped wanting to know what happened that October afternoon when the shooting started.