Alaskan History
U.S. Post Office Inspector John Clum in Sheep Camp, Alaska, on the Chilkoot Pass trail. [LoC photo]
John Philip Clum, Gold Rush Postal Inspector Tombstone, Arizona Territory, labeled “the town too tough to die,” was founded in 1879 by U. S. Army scout Ed Schieffelin, who was told he would only find his tombstone in the desert. But he found silver, a vein a foot wide and fifty feet long which he dubbed the Tombstone claim, and the rest became history. The following spring an enterprising newspaper publisher named John Clum and his wife Mary left Tucson, where they’d been publishing the Tucson Citizen, and founded the Tombstone Epitaph newspaper, noting “every tombstone needs an epitaph.” John Clum had arrived in Arizona Territory in 1874 as the Indian Agent for the San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation, a position fraught with corruption, violence and animosity generally instigated by the military and far-off politicians. Only 23, Clum took a different approach, befriending the Apaches and encouraging them to try farming and raising cattle. But after three years of contentious relations with the military and an Indian Bureau administration who disagreed with his methods, Clum resigned; he often referred to his work among the Apaches as the finest and noblest work he had ever done. Clum founded the Tombstone Epitaph in May, 1880, and helped organize a committee to end lawlessness in the town. In December of that year his wife Mary died shortly after giving birth to the couple's daughter Belle, who died the following summer. Their two year old son, Henry Woodworth, was raised by Clum’s parents in Washington, D.C. John Clum would marry two more times; his second wife, Belle Atwood, was the mother of his only other child, Caro Kingsland Clum, born in 1883 in Washington, D.C.
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