Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 19, Number 92, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 July 1898 — FOUNDER OF TOMBSTONE. [ARTICLE]

FOUNDER OF TOMBSTONE.

Remarkable Career of • St. Louis Boy Who Becauae * Miner. Edward Schefflein, who was found dead the other day in his miner’s shack in Oregon, had an eventful life, says the £t. Louis Republic. , “I remember well,” said William H. Boothe, an old-time mine promoter, to a reporter, “when he opened up the Contention mine at Tombstone and gave the place its queer name. I ought to remember it, for it was I who grubstaked Shefflein on that prospecting tour. He bunkoed me out of all but a few hundreds. “The stories that have been told about Schefflein’s daring in penetrating into the Apache country and particularly into the Cochise mountains, where he found the Contention lode, are not much exaggerated. It was a pretty ticklish thing to do down there. Old Cochise had been ‘pacified,’ it is true, but he had a lively son, Natchez, and a valiant nephew, Geronimo, and they were the active young leaders of about as ‘pizen’ a set of Indians as ever swung a Winchester. “So when Ed Schefflein struck the Contention lode and called the place ‘Tombstone,’ we thought it a happy play of Ed’s mind. “The Contention proved to be a great mine. It was enormously rich in silver, but it was discovered just about the time every condition arose to put down the price of that metal. However, it yielded an amount away into the millions. The Scheffleins sold half of the mine to Walter Dean, of San Francisco; Dick Gird, of Los Angeles; F. A. Tritte, then governor of the territory, and others in San Francisco for $500,000. “Of course the Sheffleins lost most of their fortune. They couldn’t help it. Ed was a restless fellow. He wasn’t dissipated, nor did he gamble or have other expensive vices, but he was generous and a plunger on his luck. He wouldn’t settle down and do business on business principles.”