John P. Clum: Apache Agent, Editor, and Mayor of Tombstone

By George Self

From the Hudson Valley to the Apache Frontier

John Philip Clum was born on September 1, 1851, on a farm near Claverack, Columbia County, New York. He was raised, as he later wrote, as a "farmer boy in the valley of the Hudson." After graduating from Hudson River Institute, where he served as Captain of Cadets, he enrolled at Rutgers College, played on one of the earliest intercollegiate football teams in American history, and then withdrew in his second year when illness interrupted his divinity studies. He signed up as an Army Signal Corps weather observer and spent two years in Santa Fe, New Mexico, teaching school on the side and making connections throughout the territory.

In November 1873, a letter arrived from the U.S. Indian Bureau in Washington. The Dutch Reformed Church had put his name forward for a position as Indian agent on the San Carlos Apache Reservation in Arizona Territory. The annual salary was $1,600. Clum answered yes.

He was twenty-two years old when he reached San Carlos in August 1874. His first report to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs began, with characteristic confidence: "I have the honor to report that I have this day arrived at the San Carlos Agency. The Indians are all on the Reserve now and seem inclined to peace and quiet. . . . My first impressions are favorable and I hope for success." Two days later he was reporting that his scouts had returned with the head of a White Mountain renegade named Chappo, noting drily that it was "the fifth head brought to the Agency this summer."

Boss-with-the-White-Forehead

Clum moved fast at San Carlos. Within weeks of his arrival he had organized an Apache court and an Apache police force, paid at fifteen dollars a month. The force answered to him alone, not to the U.S. Army. That boundary became the central conflict of his three years on the reservation. The Army had long assumed authority over reservation Indians as a matter of course. Clum believed that civilian administration, not military occupation, was the only workable path to a stable Apache society, and he fought for that position with a stubbornness that made him enemies in both Washington and the territorial press.

The Apaches gave him a name: Nantan Be-tun-e-ki-ay, which translates roughly as "Boss-with-the-White-Forehead." His hairline had receded early. Clum received the nickname with good humor and used it himself for the rest of his life.

His Apache police force grew from four men to twenty-five, then larger. Under white scout Captain Clay Beauford, the force maintained order on the reservation and cracked down on the illegal manufacture and sale of tiswin, the fermented corn drink that was the source of much of the violence at San Carlos. "In this little temperance crusade," Clum reported with satisfaction in 1875, "the Indian police acted a most able and noble part." The adjacent military, who had tolerated the tiswin traffic, were not amused.

In the spring of 1876, Washington ordered Clum to consolidate the Chiricahua Apaches at San Carlos. Most of the Chiricahuas had been living on their own reservation west of Camp Bowie, near the Mexican border, under the terms of the 1872 treaty negotiated by General Oliver Howard with Cochise. When the Federal government moved to break that treaty and relocate them, many Chiricahuas bolted, including a sub-chief named Geronimo. Clum led fifty-four Aravaipa and Coyotero policemen into the Chiricahua Mountains, persuaded the main body of Chiricahuas to surrender, and brought 325 of them back to San Carlos.

The following year, intelligence reached Clum that Geronimo and other renegades were using the Hot Springs reservation at Ojo Caliente in New Mexico as a base for raids on both sides of the border, receiving government rations while continuing their depredations. Commissioner John Q. Smith telegraphed Clum on March 20, 1877: "If practicable, take Indian police and arrest renegade Indians at Southern Apache agency."

What followed became one of the most celebrated episodes of Clum's career. He traveled to Ojo Caliente with twenty-five Apache police, concealed eighty more inside a nearby commissary building, and called Geronimo and the other leaders to a morning council on April 21, 1877. When Geronimo and his men arrived and grew suspicious, Clum informed them: "I have come a long way to talk with you. If you are careful, none of you will be hurt." Geronimo's reply was scornful. Then, at a prearranged signal, the commissary doors opened and eighty armed Apache police bounded into the yard. Geronimo and six companions were taken without a struggle and put in irons. Within a week, more than 400 renegade Apaches had been disarmed and agreed to transfer to San Carlos.

Clum brought them all back to Arizona without military escort, covering more than 300 miles without incident. "No trouble with anyone now," he wrote to his wife. "Indians as quiet as children."

The Army was furious. General August Kautz, commanding the Department of Arizona, had been waging a relentless campaign against Clum's independence. When Washington, pressured by the War Department, issued an order requiring Army officers to be stationed at all Indian agencies, Clum's position became untenable. On June 5, 1877, he telegraphed Washington: "I will not submit to inspection by the Army. I am ready to transfer my property. How soon can I be relieved?" On July 1, at noon, he walked out of San Carlos for the last time. Geronimo was held in confinement at San Carlos, but subsequently escaped and resumed raiding on both sides of the border. Clum, watching the years of warfare that followed, later said he should have hanged Geronimo at Hot Springs and saved the territory a decade of grief. Geronimo did not finally surrender to the U.S. government until September 1886, nearly nine years after Clum had put him in irons.

Newspapers and a Silver Town

After leaving San Carlos, Clum moved to Florence, read law, was admitted to the bar, and purchased the Arizona Citizen from its founder, John Wasson. He moved the paper first to Florence, then back to Tucson, where in February 1879 he made it Arizona's first daily newspaper. He threw himself into Tucson civic affairs, organized road construction, promoted the railroad, and became an active voice in territorial Republican politics. But Tucson in 1879 was watching something new rise to the east. Silver had been discovered at Tombstone in 1877, and by early 1880 the boom was unmistakable.

Clum sold his interest in the Citizen and followed the silver trail. He arrived in Tombstone in early 1880, purchased a lot on the rear portion of the main business block on Fremont Street, erected a canvas-roofed structure, and started setting type. On May 1, 1880, he published the first issue of the Tombstone Epitaph. His editorial declared: "Tombstone is a city set upon a hill, promising to vie with ancient Rome, upon her seven hills, in a fame different in character, but no less in importance." He had named the paper himself: "No tombstone is complete without its epitaph."

The paper became a daily in July 1880. Clum also accepted appointment as postmaster. A visitor who wrote about the post office in early 1881 noted that lines of men stretched daily from the delivery window into the street, that the monthly supply of stamps was used up in three weeks, and that Clum was subsidizing the operation out of his own pocket to keep pace with demand. In December 1880 alone, 3,712 letters were sent from the Tombstone post office.

Mayor of Tombstone

In January 1881, Tombstone held its first election under a proper city charter. The Republican candidate for mayor, Robert Eccleston, withdrew less than a week before the election, and Clum's name was substituted. He won 532 votes to 165 for his opponent, Mark P. Shaffer. He was thirty years old.

The most consuming issue of his administration was not crime. It was property. Tombstone had been incorporated over land that was simultaneously claimed by the Tombstone Townsite Company, a group of investors including former territorial governor Anson P. K. Safford and other well-connected speculators who held what they claimed were valid title documents to the original townsite. The Company had received a federal patent covering most of the developed city and was moving to require residents to pay again for lots they believed they already owned. Clum made the Epitaph the voice of the residents, took to the street corners as a speaker, and fought the Townsite Company at every turn. "Party lines were obliterated," he recalled. "The vital issue was the question of title to the city lots: the citizens versus the Townsite Company."

He also organized the Citizens' Safety Committee, a body of between one hundred and two hundred of Tombstone's representative business and professional men who pledged to assemble, armed, in front of the Epitaph building on Fremont Street whenever the Vizina Hoisting Works whistle gave the agreed-upon emergency signal. The committee existed, in Clum's words, "for the purpose of supporting the duly authorized officers of the law in maintaining order within the city limits and protecting the lives and property of citizens, particularly in the event of an invasion by the lawless outside element."

About crime itself, Clum was characteristically direct: during the entire 365 days of his administration, three murders were committed within the city limits. Not the "dead man for breakfast every morning" of popular legend. Clum enjoyed pointing that out.

The Fight on Fremont Street

On the morning of October 26, 1881, Clum had just left his desk in the Epitaph office and was walking toward the Grand Hotel on Allen Street for lunch when he passed Ike Clanton standing at the corner of Fourth and Fremont Streets, holding a Winchester rifle and talking in low tones with a companion. The Clantons had lived near the San Carlos reservation during Clum's time there; he and Ike were on casual speaking terms. "Hello, Ike! Any new war?" Clum called out as he passed. Ike replied that there was "nothing in particular." Clum moved on a few paces, met the sheriff of Pima County, and paused to talk.

Within moments, Virgil and Morgan Earp swung around the corner from Fremont Street, each with a revolver in hand, walking fast. "What does that mean?" the sheriff asked. "Looks like real trouble," Clum replied. The chief of police overtook Clanton near the middle of the block, arrested him, and took him before Judge Wallace, who fined him twenty-five dollars for carrying concealed weapons.

About two hours later, Virgil Earp, accompanied by Wyatt, Morgan, and Doc Holliday, walked west on Fremont Street. A few paces beyond the Epitaph office they met Ike and Billy Clanton, Frank and Tom McLaury, and Billy Claiborne. The fight lasted less than a minute. Frank and Tom McLaury and Billy Clanton were killed; Virgil and Morgan Earp were wounded; Doc Holliday was grazed. A detachment of the Citizens' Safety Committee, fully armed and marching in a column of twos, reported to Clum in front of the Epitaph building within ten minutes of the shooting.

Clum supported the Earps without hesitation, both as mayor and as editor. His view of the fight was simple: the rustler faction had come to town, refused to disarm when ordered, and demanded a confrontation. He said later: "I see no reason why an officer should wait until the other fellow fires two or three times before opening up himself."

On the Death List

After the Spicer hearing acquitted the Earps and Holliday, rumors circulated through Tombstone that the outlaw faction had drawn up a death list, the names reportedly written in blood during a midnight ceremony in a desert canyon. Clum's name was on it, alongside the Earps, Doc Holliday, Judge Spicer, and attorney Tom Fitch, among others.

Whether the ceremony was real or a piece of frontier theater hardly mattered. What followed was real enough. On the night of December 14, 1881, Clum was traveling by stage from Tombstone to Benson, intending to take the train east to Washington for the holidays. About three miles out of town, riders fired on the coach. Clum escaped into the desert in the darkness, wandered on foot over the scrub flats, narrowly missing the open shafts of abandoned mines he could not see in the dark, and reached Benson in time for breakfast the following morning.

He was still in Washington two weeks later, on December 28, when Virgil Earp was ambushed by shotgun-armed assassins at Fifth and Allen Streets and left crippled for life. On March 18, 1882, the night Morgan Earp was shot through the billiard-room window at Campbell and Hatch's saloon, Clum had been at Schieffelin Hall watching an entertainment with Wyatt and Morgan earlier that evening, each of the three men carrying a concealed revolver. Morgan was dead within the hour.

In the aftermath, as Wyatt prepared to escort Virgil and Morgan's body toward California with a mounted escort, Clum watched the final acts of the feud play out. After Frank Stilwell, identified as one of Morgan's likely killers, was found shot near the Tucson train depot, Sheriff Behan came looking to arrest Wyatt. As Wyatt and his party prepared to leave Tombstone, Behan appeared and said: "Wyatt, I want to see you." Wyatt replied: "Johnny, you may see me once too often." No arrests were made. Wyatt left Arizona and did not return.

After Tombstone

Clum sold the Epitaph in April 1882 and resigned as mayor. The flooding of the mines had begun to undermine the town's economic base, and the violence of the preceding year had taken a toll on him personally. He spent time attached to the Chief Post Office Inspector's office in Washington, then returned to Tombstone in January 1885 as postmaster and later as city auditor, hoping a scheme to reopen the flooded mines would revive the town. It did not. In 1886 he moved to San Bernardino, California, and then on through a series of ventures: real estate, newspaper editing, the San Bernardino County Citrus Fair, and eventually a twenty-year career as a U.S. Post Office Inspector.

As an inspector, Clum chased mail robbers through the mountains of Kentucky and West Virginia, prosecuted a Mexican lottery company in El Paso, and worked across Louisiana and South Carolina. The Klondike Gold Rush of 1898 sent him to Alaska on special assignment, organizing post offices throughout the territory and the Aleutian Islands. He and his nineteen-year-old son Woodworth covered more than ten thousand miles of far-northern wilderness between March and August 1898. He followed the Nome stampede back in 1900 and spent five more years cycling between Alaska summers and Washington winters. In Nome in 1900, he ran into Wyatt Earp, who was operating a saloon called the Dexter. The two old Tombstone allies had a good deal to talk about.

In his later years Clum settled in Los Angeles and turned to writing. He produced a dozen articles about his Apache years and his Tombstone years, contributing extensively to the New Mexico Historical Review and the Arizona Historical Review. He also took to the lecture platform, billed by the Southern Pacific Railway as the "Trail-Blazer of Civilization," delivering illustrated talks on the Southwest, Yellowstone, Alaska, and Hawaii to promote western tourism.

Wyatt Earp died in Los Angeles on January 13, 1929. John Clum was one of the pallbearers. A few months later he wrote a memoir of their shared years, "It All Happened in Tombstone," published in the Arizona Historical Review. He was seventy-eight years old when he wrote it.

John P. Clum died in Los Angeles on May 2, 1932, midway through his eighty-first year. His son Woodworth published a semi-autobiographical book, Apache Agent, in 1936, drawing on his father's papers and manuscripts. In 1956 Audie Murphy played a fictionalized version of John Clum in the film Walk the Proud Land, the story of the San Carlos years. The Tombstone Epitaph, which Clum founded with canvas walls and kerosene lanterns in the spring of 1880, is still published today, making it one of the oldest continuously published newspapers in the American West.