John Clum (1 September 1851-2 May 1932) was the Republican Mayor of Tombstone, Arizona from 1881 to 1882 and the publisher of The Tombstone Epitaph.
Biography[]
John Clum was born in Claverack, New York in 1851 to a Calvinist family of German and Dutch descent. He attended Rutgers before being forced to return to the family farm by financial difficulties, and he joined the US Army in 1871 and served in the Signal Corps, being sent to Santa Fe, New Mexico as a weather observer. In 1872, President Ulysses S. Grant gave the Dutch Reformed Church charge of managing the San Carlos Apache reservation in Arizona, and Clum was selected by the Church - to which he belonged - to serve as an Indian agent on 26 February 1874. He treated the Apache as friends, establishing a tribal police and a tribal court; he also encouraged them to peacefully farm and raise cattle, and his lenient approach and incorruptability angered the US Army. He oversaw the relocation of the Chiricahua Apache to the San Carlos reservation in 1876, and, on 21 April 1877, he peacefully captured Geronimo, the only government agent to do so without force. He left his post as an Indian Agent on 1 July 1877, and he and his wife then settled in Florence; Clum then bought the Arizona Citizen newspaper and moved it from Tucson to Florence. In 1877, he moved to the boomtown of Tombstone and bought The Tombstone Epitaph, which became the mouthpiece of the local Republican Party. In 1880, he helped organize a Vigilance Committee to end lawlessness in Tombstone, and that same group aided in his election as Tombstone's first Mayor in 1881. While he failed to convince Wyatt Earp to become a deputy, he convinced Virgil Earp to do so. His friendship with the Earps led to him becoming a target of the Cochise County Cowboys after the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, and he was nearly assassinated while travelling out of town to spend Christmas with his parents and son in Washington DC. On 1 March 1882, he sold the Epitaph and left Tombstone, and he became Postal Inspector of Alaska in 1898 and established a territorial post service there. From 1900 to 1909, he served as Postmaster of Fairbanks, and he left Alaska in 1909 to work for the Southern Pacific Railroad. He died in Los Angeles, California in 1932.