The Tombstone Epitaph

John Clum arrived in Tombstone in 1880 already knowing southern Arizona. He'd run the Tucson Citizen, served as the U.S. government's appointee over the San Carlos Apache Reservation, and held the distinction of being the only American authority to capture Geronimo — though Geronimo was released, and didn't finally surrender to the Army until 1886. When associates told Clum his new paper would write the town's epitaph rather than its future, he took the name and published the first issue on May 1, 1880.

What he built became the oldest continually published newspaper in Arizona. The *Epitaph* covered the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral on October 26, 1881 — three cowboys dead, an inquest ruling it justified, public opinion siding with the outlaws. Clum, who served as Tombstone's mayor and backed the Earps, left for Washington not long after. The paper stayed. In 2005, it published for the first time a sketch of the gunfight drawn by Wyatt Earp himself, shortly before his death.

The *Epitaph* outlasted the silver crash, the mines filling with water, the long slide from boom town to desert curiosity. In 1927, it moved from its original location to the present building at 11 South 5th Street, one lot south of Allen. Tombstone survived on automobile tourism and the story America never stopped wanting. The paper survived with it.

The free museum at the 5th Street office is open daily from 9:30. Inside: the Washington flatbed press on which early issues were printed, rare photographs, early Tombstone newspapers, and a video on printing in the 1880s — the physical record of how a frontier paper got made and why, against every reasonable expectation, it kept going.