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Updated: May 4, 2025
Schiefflin drew rein. "This," he said to Barron, "is the place where I camped that night when the Apaches almost got me, the night before I found the stringer on the hill. And when I die I want to be buried here with my canteen and my prospector's pick beside me."
They cited various gruesome examples of the fate which overtook solitary wanderers in this savage land. They might as well have saved their breath; Schiefflin had seen some mineral stains on a rock outcropping when he passed through the country with the cavalry earlier in the season.
In after years when men had learned the fulness of that secret which the Apaches had guarded so well from the world when Bisbee and Nacosari and Cananea were yielding their enormous stores of metal and Tombstone's mines had given forth many millions of dollars in silver, Ed Schiefflin remained a wealthy man.
They made their permanent camp here, and Schiefflin took his two companions up the dry wash. They found the outcropping undisturbed. Gird and Al Schiefflin dug away at the dark rock with their prospector's picks. Less than three feet below the surface the stringer pinched out. The claim was not worth staking.
One of their number he had lost two or three small bets by Schiefflin's appearing safe and sound on various evenings took it upon himself to give their visitor a bit of advice. "What for," he asked, "do yo'-all go a-takin' them pasears that-a-way?" Schiefflin smiled good-naturedly at the questioner. "Just looking for stones," he said. "Well," the other told him, "all I got to say is this.
His garments were sadly torn, and he had patched them in many places with buckskin. Such men still come and go in the remote places among the mountain ranges and deserts of the West. They were almost the first to penetrate the wilderness and they will roam over it so long as any patch of it remains unfenced. Schiefflin had left his father's house in Oregon ten years before.
Both of the savages turned and descended the knolls. They caught up their ponies and rode on, following the course of the wash below them. The band down in the arroyo's bed were receding. The rattle of hoofs grew fainter. Schiefflin lowered the hammer of his rifle and took his first full breath. A low outcry down the wash stopped his breathing again.
So when he died up in Cañon City, Oregon, just about twenty years after he had made that discovery, they brought his body back and buried it on the summit of the knoll. And they erected a great pyramid of granite boulders on the spot for his monument. And within sight of that lonely tomb the town stands out on the sky-line, commemorating by its name the steadfastness of Ed Schiefflin, prospector.
Schiefflin found a narrow crack between two boulders and peeped out. Another savage appeared at that moment on the summit of the next knoll. He was afoot; and now he stood there motionless searching the wide landscape for any moving form. He was so near that in the waning light the smear of war-paint across his ugly face was visible.
The shadows of noonday lengthened into the shades of afternoon; they crept up the hillsides until only the higher peaks remained a-shine; evening came. Schiefflin picked up a sharp fragment of blackish rock. Horn silver.
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