It has been the town’s voice almost since the inception of the city. It has been described by author and historian Douglas Martin as “…the faithful recorder of Tombstone’s wild days of sin and silver and unfaltering keeper of the faith through the town’s lonely years of incredible disasters.”
At the height of Tombstone’s building boom, building materials were hard to come by – and expensive. But
Epitaph founder John Clum wasted no time getting started in business at Tombstone and immediately secured a lot on the north side of Fremont Street between Third and Fourth Streets. This would eventually become 325 and 327 Fremont Street. He purchased enough lumber to form a framework over which he stretched a large piece of canvas to form a tent-like structure on the back portion of the lot. He brought in a printing press, and, together with a partner, Thomas R. Sorin, began business, on May 1, 1880, as Tombstone’s second newspaper. The Tombstone Nugget, which would prove to be a rival newspaper in more ways than one, was already there. From his original manuscript for Apache Agent, Clum notes, “Our temporary canvas home was erected on the rear of a lot and very soon the stout adobe walls of a two-story building began to arise on the front of the lot. Within a few weeks all equipment and printing material were transferred from the humble canvas birthplace to the more substantial and commodious quarters in the new building, - which still survives.”
(Author’s Note: At the time Clum was writing his text for Apache Agent in the late 1920’s, the building was still standing. The building was torn down sometime in the late 1930’s. Today, the lot is vacant and used as a parking lot for tourists.) But the newspaper needed a name. With his usual sense of humor, Clum easily quipped, “We’ll call it the Tombstone Epitaph…”. Clum’s old friend and fellow newspaperman, John Wasson now of the Territorial Surveyor of Tucson argued that the name was too sordid and it would scare people away. He predicted the paper’s demise in six months. Clum argued in the other direction – that the name would bring a million dollars in free advertising because, “every wit and paragrapher will lie awake at night creating more or less smart (or smarting) quips relative to the new journal.”
Clum went on to state that he couldn’t understand why such a name for a newspaper would not occur spontaneously to most people who possessed a sense of humor. There is another, perhaps darker side of the story of the newspaper’s name. Ed Schieffelin, Tombstone’s founder suggested the name stating that newspapers, like epitaphs, were only a collection of lies. Clum disagreed with that story. In a 1928 letter to Arizona State Historian George Kelly, Clum addressed it with, “These recent stories going the rounds of the press that the name was ‘suggested’ by Ed Schieffelin or John Hays Hammond are all THE BUNK.”
In Apache Agent, Clum gives this personal account of the newspaper’s name, “Many stories have been published attributing the suggestion of the name, The Epitaph, to various persons more or less active in the life of early Tombstone. I am sorry, very sorry, to spoil these legends, but the simple truth is that I figured it out all by myself. Certainly it was no flash of genius, as some folks seem to think; no tombstone is complete with its epitaph.”
Today, over 130 years later, the Tombstone Epitaph continues to endure, continues to raise eyebrows, and continues to provide its readers with fascinating stories of Tombstone and the old west.
