Richard Gird: The Man Who Made Tombstone Possible

By George Self and Claude, an AI assistant from Anthropic

A Man Who Had Already Mapped Arizona

Richard Gird was born March 29, 1836, near Cedar Lake in Herkimer County, New York, to John and Laura (King) Gird, one of eleven children. His father, a native of Trenton, New Jersey, had trained as a teacher before becoming a prosperous farmer and dairyman with a large personal library; his mother was the well-read daughter of a Massachusetts physician. At sixteen, Richard wanted to join his eldest brother Henry, who was prospecting in El Dorado County, California, but his father refused to advance the fare outright: "Then you will never get there, for I certainly shall not let you have the money." Richard appealed instead to his mother, who interceded for a $1,500 loan. He and two farmhands headed west by way of the Isthmus of Panama. The crossing cost him considerably: he contracted malaria on the isthmus and spent months recovering in the Russian River Valley, where he and Henry started a stock farm and he dabbled in real estate.

In 1858 he sailed to Valparaiso, Chile, with a close friend, Thomas J. Bidwell, tried prospecting along the Andes without success, and found work supervising construction of the first railroad in South America. Back in California, he joined the Colorado River gold placer rush in 1861, arriving near Yuma. After a brief partnership running a ferry at Ehrenberg, he organized a prospecting party into Apache country and opened the first trail to the site of present-day Prescott. He claimed, with some justification, that he brought the first assaying and civil engineering equipment into central Arizona.

In the fall of 1864, after a trip to San Francisco, Gird returned to Arizona as a lieutenant under King Woolsey in a militia campaign against the Apache. He never wrote about what he saw there, but he came away with a vow he did record: never again to take part in the "slaughter of defenceless and undisciplined savages." His most consequential early achievement came the following year, when the Arizona territorial legislature commissioned him to prepare the first official topographical map of Arizona Territory, published in 1865 by Britton and Company in San Francisco, with colored geological sections prepared in collaboration with Professor Josiah D. Whitney, State Geologist of California. That map would prove useful in ways he could not yet anticipate. Over the following decade he ran a real estate firm in Prescott, then returned to California to design hydraulic pumps with his brother-in-law, a partnership that collapsed in 1871 and left him $25,000 in debt with sixteen dollars in his pocket. He borrowed enough from Thomas Bidwell, his old Chile companion, to mount a fresh prospecting expedition into Mohave County; when that failed too, he took the assayer's job at the McCrackin Mine instead, and worked his way back from there, surveying the Signal townsite along the way.

By January 1878, Gird was forty-one years old, experienced in every aspect of western mining, and working as mining engineer and assayer for the Signal Mining and Milling Company in western Arizona. His career had taken him to four continents and across a dozen mining districts. What happened next would overshadow all of it.

The Piece Nearly the Size of a Hen's Egg

Al Schieffelin was working as a miner at Signal when his brother Ed arrived from a long prospecting season near Camp Huachuca in southern Arizona, carrying ore samples from the hills soldiers had told him would yield nothing but his tombstone. Al showed one of the samples to Gird. Gird later recalled the moment in specific terms: "The piece was nearly the size of a hen's egg." He recognized it on sight as coming from a particular geological formation he knew from his territorial map work.

Gird proposed a partnership on the spot. Ed had almost no money. Gird agreed to fit out the traveling rig himself and cover the expedition's costs in exchange for an equal share. There was no written agreement. The three men, Ed and Al Schieffelin and Richard Gird, left Signal on February 14, 1878, in an old blue spring wagon pulled by Ed's mule Beck and Gird's mule Mollie, with Al's bay mare tied behind.

The Journey South

Their route ran down the Big Sandy to Bill Williams' Fork, then to Wickenburg, across to Hayden's Ferry on the Salt River, through Tucson (where they spread their blankets in a corral), then southeast to Pantano and down the old Butterfield stage route toward the San Pedro River. The journey was not without incident. Somewhere along the way, a loaded rifle discharged accidentally inside the wagon. The ball passed through Gird's coat and shirt without touching skin.

They made camp at the old Brunckow Mine adobe, an abandoned structure that Gird described as having served as a smugglers' cover. Within twenty-four hours of arrival, he had set up an assay furnace in the fireplace. He had sold his button balance (a small precision scale used to weigh the bead of pure metal, called a button, that remains in the crucible after smelting ore) to the McCrackin company before leaving, so he improvised a new one from a polished steel rod with two divergent scratched lines, calibrated against small reference beads of known weight that he carried with him. It was precisely the kind of practical problem-solving that made Gird indispensable to the venture.

An Immense Button

Gird's account of the actual discovery differs subtly from Ed Schieffelin's, as might be expected when two men remember the same event decades later. In Gird's version, he was working at his assay furnace one afternoon when Ed came in with a collection of float samples, including one water-worn piece that Gird recognized immediately as horn silver. He put it through the furnace while it was already hot, "getting an immense button." He valued it later on an apothecary's scale in Tucson at $2,200 per ton.

The next morning Gird went out with Ed, and together they followed the float up the gulch to find the ledge that would become the Lucky Cuss mine. In his 1907 account, Gird was precise about what this moment meant: it was, he wrote, "the real discovery of the mines now known the world over as the Tombstone mines." The ore was there. He had now confirmed it.

How the Mines Got Their Names

The naming of two of Tombstone's most famous mines came directly from Gird's experience in those first weeks of discovery.

When another prospector named Oliver Boyer, whom Gird described plainly as "a desperado who later killed a man," jumped one of their claims, Ed Schieffelin suggested simply letting him have it. Gird refused. He strapped on his revolver, walked to the claim, and methodically kicked down Boyer's corner monuments while Boyer sat on a nearby boulder whittling a stick and watching him. Gird resurveyed the claim and rebuilt each monument. "That was the beginning and end of all the contention that we ever had in the Tombstone District," he later wrote. The mine took its name from the episode: the Contention.

The Tough Nut got its name from a different kind of difficulty. An ore vein does not run straight and level underground; it angles, dips, and shifts direction, and a prospector reading the surface rock has to figure out which way the vein is trending so he knows where to sink a shaft. With this particular ledge, working out that direction from what was visible at the surface was, in Gird's words, "extremely difficult." It was, he said, "too tough a nut to crack."

When Gird asked Ed how much he thought they might receive for their discoveries, Ed "ridiculed the idea" of $50,000.

Building the District

Once the claims were staked, Gird became the operational center of the entire enterprise. He surveyed and connected all of the original claims and established the regulations for the Tombstone Mining District. He served as the district's first postmaster from December 2, 1878, to May 3, 1880, which placed him at the center of all official communication in the camp during its most explosive growth years.

His largest undertaking was the quartz mill at Millville on the San Pedro River, about nine miles west of Tombstone. He traveled to San Francisco to supervise the mill's fabrication at the Fulton Iron Works personally, turning down an offer of the General Superintendency of the Signal Company to do so. The Millville mill was operational by approximately June 1, 1879. Gird also built a sawmill in the Huachuca Mountains to supply timber for construction. He married Nellie McCarty, of Brewer, Maine, on January 3, 1880, and brought her to Millville that same month, making their home there, working from the mill rather than the town on the hill.

His Superintendent's role at the Tombstone Mill and Mining Company meant that the day-to-day running of the mines fell to him. When Ed Schieffelin could not supply sufficient ore for ten stamps and left to go prospecting again, Gird placed Gus Barron in Ed's job. Barron was soon supplying ore for thirty stamps.

What He Thought of the Schieffelins

Gird's 1907 account of the discovery, published in Out West magazine, contains the most candid character sketches of all three partners. He was not unkind, but he was honest.

Al Schieffelin he described as "a fine character, naturally brave, generous to a fault, and one who never failed a friend." Ed was more complicated: "somewhat self-conscious, given to personal display, ever worrying what others might be thinking of his goings and comings," but "at bottom, in all affairs of life, was honorable and true."

On the question of technical competence he was blunt. Neither brother had any knowledge of mining or milling, but "I did," he wrote simply. "Ed for a while attempted to superintend the mine, but in a short time he gave it up."

The Sale and an Unusual Act of Generosity

The Schieffelin brothers sold their interests in the mines relatively early, and in Gird's assessment "greatly against my advice." He held on. In March 1881, he sold the majority of his interests for $600,000. By that point the brothers had already sold, and they had received far less for their shares than Gird received for his.

The sale brought legal trouble from an old friend's estate. The heirs of T. J. Bidwell (the same companion Gird had prospected with in Chile decades earlier, and later borrowed from after the 1871 collapse), who had died in July 1880, filed a $300,000 lawsuit claiming that Bidwell and Gird had been equal partners in acquiring Arizona mineral properties at the time of Bidwell's death. The case was settled in Gird's favor in the first instance; on appeal he chose to end the matter by paying the Bidwell heirs $100,000.

What he did next was remarkable. With no written agreement ever having existed among the three original partners, and no legal obligation of any kind, Gird calculated the difference between what he had received and what the Schieffelins had received. He then divided that excess equally among all three of them, so that in the end each partner received the same total amount. "We somehow tacitly understood that we had an equal share or interest," he wrote, as if explaining something obvious. He offered no further comment on it.

After Tombstone

Gird used the proceeds to purchase the Santa Ana del Chino Ranch in San Bernardino County, California, a property of some 37,000 acres. "My intention was," he wrote, "as soon as I had made a fortune, to get out of it and settle down on a farm." What he built there was no mere retirement. Chino grew into a genuine agricultural empire: fine stud horses, 6,000 head of beef cattle, 800 horses, 200 mules, a 200-head dairy herd, a slaughterhouse and cold-storage plant in Los Angeles. He subdivided and promoted the Chino townsite itself, building out a narrow-gauge railroad, a newspaper, and the Chino Valley Manufacturing and Improvement Company, capitalized at $10,000,000. By 1888, Chino Ranch was the hub of the southern California cattle trade. Contemporary accounts described Gird in these years as quiet and modest, a man who neither drank nor smoked, "a silent but powerful force, steadily working out his ends in the face of obstacles."

Of everything Gird tried at Chino, sugar beets were the one experiment that truly paid off. His 1887 plots produced beets with an extraordinary 20 percent sugar content, among the richest ever grown. He partnered with Henry T. Oxnard to build the Chino Valley Beet Sugar Factory, which he christened on August 20, 1891; within a month it was processing 300 tons of beets a day, and by 1892 it had produced nearly eight million pounds of sugar, making Gird's name synonymous with beet sugar manufacturing in California.

It did not last. Financial backers pulled out in June 1893, just as the Panic of 1893 hit, and Gird's overextended empire began to unravel. He put the entire ranch up for sale in 1894; the buyer's money never came through, and by the summer of 1896 Gird could not meet payroll. A writ of attachment was served on what remained of his assets. He sold off the bulk of the ranch to a group of English underwriters and, on October 22, 1896, moved with his wife Nellie into a modest home on West 18th Street in Los Angeles. The railroad, the cattle, the racehorses, and the estate he had built all went under with him, throwing small farmers who had leased his sugar-beet plots out of their land and homes along with him. Chino blamed Gird for the ruin. Residents went so far as to remove his name from the cornerstone of a school building he himself had funded.

He stayed involved afterward in Mexican ranching ventures in Sonora, but never rebuilt his fortune. He died in Los Angeles on May 30, 1910, at age seventy-four, leaving an estate worth just $1,500, a fraction of the fortune he had once made and given away. The silver district he had helped bring into existence had by then been operating for more than thirty years, producing ore from mines he had surveyed, processed in mills he had designed and built.

The Partner Nobody Mentions

The standard telling of the Tombstone founding story centers on Ed Schieffelin: the lone prospector who defied the soldiers' warnings, found silver in the hills, and named his claim after the tombstone they said he would get. That story is true as far as it goes. But it omits the engineer who confirmed the find, funded the journey, improvised the assay equipment, kicked down a claim-jumper's monuments, built the mills that turned ore into bullion, and kept the whole operation running while the discoverer went wandering again.

Gird left one other detail out of his published account. He made no mention of John Vosburg, the Tucsonan who had grubstaked all three partners for $300 in supplies and equipment on their first trip south, and who received a one-quarter interest in ten claims in exchange. Vosburg's contribution is documented only in his own statement in the Arizona Historical Society's biographical files. Gird's silence on the point, like his tacit equal-share arrangement with the Schieffelins, tells you something about how he operated: he remembered obligations when it suited him, and apparently forgot them when it did not.

What is beyond dispute is that Tombstone as a mining district required both men. Ed Schieffelin provided the persistence and the discovery. Richard Gird provided everything else.