Everyone knows about the Wild West town of Tombstone, Arizona, its marshal, Wyatt Earp, the gunfight at the OK Corral, and perhaps even the town’s newspaper, appropriately named the Tombstone Epitaph. But film artists and presenters might be surprised to learn that the newspaper’s founder and editor later went on the road with his own platform audio-visual show.

That’s right. During the heyday of Burton Holmes and a few other predecessors, this larger-than-life character also gave what was then known as illustrated lectures—going “on the road,” at least part of his AV career.

Chris Borden

We have retired film artist Chris Borden to thank for uncovering this little known facet of John Philip Clum’s life when Chris recently visited Tombstone. A tip of our TAC sombrero to Chris.

Despite his un-western name, Clum had an amazing life on the frontier: Besides his Tombstone portfolio, he was a renowned Indian agent, an attorney, a pioneering U.S. Post Office official that brought regularly delivered mail to the Alaskan outback; and a horticulturist who helped pioneer California’s citrus and dates crops.

John Philip Clum

A New Yorker, he attended Rutgers and played in the first intercollegiate football game between his school and the College of New Jersey, later Princeton.

Leaving college before his graduation, he was appointed an observer sergeant in the Signal Corps in the War Department’s newly formed meteorological service.

He was stationed in Santa Fe in 1871 to record atmospheric conditions six times daily and telegraph his findings to Washington. It would be the beginning of the U.S. Weather Service. In his spare time, he started a school where he taught English, the first school of its kind in the territory.

Clum was appointed Indian agent in 1873 at the San Carlos Indian Reservation in the Arizona Territory where he treated the Indians humanely, and encouraged them to take up peaceful farming and raising cattle. He also employed Indians as tribal police and appointed four chiefs as court judges.

The Indians liked what was happening and they made the balding Clum a full brother of the Apaches, giving him the name of Natan-Betunnykahyeh (Chief-With-the-High-Forehead).

In 1876, the government forced the Chiricahua Apaches to move from their Dragoon Mountains Reservation to San Carlos. All returned except the marauding Geronimo and his band of Indians.

Clum and his Apache troops caught up with Geronimo in New Mexico, and forced him to surrender peacefully—without a shot fired. It was the only time in Geronimo’s life that he was captured—except 10 years later in his final surrender.

A 1956 movie, Walk the Proud Land, starring Audie Murphy as John Clum, told the Geronimo story fairly accurately.

After leaving his Indian agent job, he studied the law and became an attorney. In 1879 he bought the Tucson Citizen, but soon sold it to move to Tombstone to start the weekly Epitaph. The first issue appeared in 1880.

The fight between Wyatt Earp and his men and the Clanton gang took place the next year. The Epitaph sided with Wyatt, who became Clum’s lifelong friend. Clum was at Wyatt’s funeral when he died a half-century later. 

Later in his career, Clum was appointed Postmaster Inspector for the Alaska Territory with a mandate to establish post offices in outlying territories.

On his way north on the Queen in 1898, he was accompanied by a photographer from the Keystone View Co. of Chicago who photographed the Klondike gold rush in 3-D stereo views. Clum provided the commentary for 100 slides in a Keystone boxed set entitled, A Trip to the Klondike Through the Stereoscope.

Clum continued to lecture, sometimes in Alaska, but more often when he spent the winters in the States. He left the postal service in 1911 at age 60 and was hired to promote the Southern Pacific Railroad. He took his collection of hundreds of magic lantern slides on the road in a show called Road of a Thousand Wonders.

In 1915 alone, he gave 803 illustrated lectures in the railroad’s auditorium at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco.

The next year he was on the road again with his lantern slides giving five different titled shows, including Bits of Scenic and Romantic California and Memories of the Dreadful Chilkoote Pass.

After World War I, Clum settled down in Southern California where he died in 1932. At the funeral, a young man unknown to any of the mourners, “stepped forward, and in the language of a proud and appreciative people, gave an Apache farewell,” reported the Tombstone Epitaph.

Today, Tombstone is the destination for thousands of visitors, and a few of Clum’s many heirs who also take their own images on the road. Just like Clum.

Tombstone, Arizona