Thomas Pynchon has called Tombstone, Arizona, the “American Camelot,” and its first knight errant was prospector Edward Schieffelin, whose lucky strike made him fabulously wealthy, though he subsequently lost it all in other ventures that weren’t quite as fortuitous. Soon after Schieffelin’s death by heart attack in 1897, an article in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle recalled the town’s auspicious beginnings and told tales of some of Tombstone’s most colorful figures.