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.

John Clum was elected the first mayor of Tombstone in 1881, and became lifelong friends with Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp and his brothers, of later OK Corral fame. Clum’s friendship with the Earps and his outspoken support of business leaders made him a target for the lawless faction, and after an attempt on his life and the murders of his associates, including Morgan Earp, Clum wrote, “They were picking us off one by one. We could never put our hands definitely on those who were doing it. I decided to settle elsewhere.”

While serving as a postal inspector in Washington, D.C. in the late 1890s, Clum was appointed as special commissioner to Alaska Territory, "to examine into postal affairs.” Clum arrived in Skagway, Alaska on March 26, 1898, and named himself postmaster and Postal Inspector. Over the next five months he would travel 8,000 miles, equipping existing post offices and establishing several new post offices across Alaska. He carried everything he needed to create a post office: postage stamps, mailbags, postal locks, keys and postmarking devices.

The first post office he put in place was at Sheep Camp on the Chilkoot Trail to the Klondike gold fields, on April 4, 1898. Joseph G. Brown was named postmaster of the tent city at the upper limit of timber, on the Taiya (Dyea) River, described in 1898 as a “couple hundred tents straggled along the floor of the gorge,” and approximately forty wooden buildings which housed stores, saloons, two drug stores, a hospital, fifteen hotels and restaurants, and lodging houses too numerous to mention. The day before Clum had helped dig out survivors and victims of the terrible Palm Sunday avalanche just above Sheep Camp, which claimed over 65 lives.

Sheep Camp on the Chilkoot Trail, April, 1898. [E.A. Hegg photo]

Clum set up post offices in Canyon City and Pyramid Harbor, both on the Chilkoot Trail, in May, 1898. In June and July he traveled the Yukon River and organized post offices in Eagle, Star City, Fort Yukon, Rampart, Tanana, Anvik, and Koyukuk, and in August he added Valdez to the list of official Alaskan post offices.

In the spring of 1900 John Clum concentrated his efforts on Western Alaska and the Bering Sea, extending postal service to the Bering Sea coast, and establishing semi-monthly postal service between Nome and Point Blossom, near Kotzebue. Then, in the summer of 1900, finding that Nome Postmaster George Wright was absent ‘Outside,' Postal Inspector John Clum assumed charge of the Nome Post Office. With a gold rush in full swing, Nome was the largest general delivery address in the U.S. postal system. The mail was distributed from a 12' x 12' room manned by two shifts of eleven sorters each, running 24 hours a day, seven days a week. In his book, Alaska's First Free Mail Delivery in 1900, letter carrier Fred Lockley noted that the postal clerks had to use five filing boxes just to sort letters for people named “Johnson." Clum authorized his clerks to accept placer gold dust for postal transactions, and in July the intake exceeded $130,000. Clum found his old friends from Tombstone were also in Nome, Wyatt and Josephine Earp were running the Dexter Saloon and roadhouse, and George Parsons, a mining agent, librarian, and diarist, who wrote in August, 1900: “John Clum and I had an oldtimer with Wyatt Earp tonight at his place, a regular old Arizona time, and Wyatt unlimbered for several hours and seemed glad to talk to us who knew the past. It was a very memorable evening.”

On January 17, 1906, John Clum was appointed to be the second Postmaster of Fairbanks, preceded by Fairbanks founder E. T. Barnette, who had been appointed three years previously.

Old friends from Tombstone (left to right), Ed Eiechstadt, Wyatt Earp, and John Clum on the beach at Nome.

His daughter Caro, then 23, worked in the office as a postal clerk, and the following year a small mining town on the Chandalar River, which flows into the Yukon River a short distance below Fort Yukon, showed their gratitude for Clum’s work to bring mail to the mining towns by naming their town after his daughter.

As in Nome, Clum scouted around the Fairbanks area mine diggings for some color, but reportedly never found anything worth staking a claim. In 1908 he ran for public office, but lost to the very popular Judge James Wickersham. He left Alaska the following year, in 1909.

Political banner, “John P. Clum for Delegate to Congress, Independent Candidate,” Fairbanks, 1908.

Postal Inspector John Clum worked for the Inspection Service off and on until 1911. In honor of his retirement, his fellow inspectors surprised him with a gold and diamond locket with the U.S. Post Office Department official seal. Inside the locket were the names of his fellow inspectors, and a letter from the inspectors touting their admiration and respect for Clum, noting: ”We have ever found you genial, courteous and high-minded, faithful in the discharge of every duty assigned to you in the many years of your service, loyal in every respect to that which loyalty is due, marked with a calmness, serenity and certitude in action and urbanity in speech, that has made your name proverbial."

Clum spent the next several years touring the country and lecturing on the American west for the Southern Pacific Railroad. He retired for a second time in 1920 and moved to a farm near Los Angeles with his third wife, Florence. Clum lived quietly there, spending most of his time writing articles for various publications on the history he had seen first-hand.

John Clum died on May 2, 1932, at the age of 80, three years after he and George Parsons served as a pallbearers for their life-long friend, Wyatt Earp. As Clum's friends mourned his death, one noted that it was "a sign of the passing of the Old West.” ~•~