From Claverack to the frontier

 

Postal Inspector John P. Clum, atop a mule, talks with miners in Nome, Alaska, in 1898. Clum, who grew up in Columbia County, N.Y., ran a newspaper in territorial Arizone before heading north. Photo courtesy of The Tombstone Epitaph

 

By PAUL POST
Contributing writer

HUDSON, N.Y.

Like so many teenagers of his era, John Clum was eager to see the latest Western movie when he went to Hudson’s old Walter Reade Theater on a summer day in 1956.

But this film was special. “Walk the Proud Land” was making its world premiere, and its star, Hollywood legend Audie Murphy, played the hero with whom Clum shared a name: Columbia County native John Philip Clum, who left Claverack as a young man, went west and led an adventure-filled life as colorful as that of the fictional Indiana Jones.

John Philip Clum (1851-1932) captured Geronimo and became the first mayor of Tombstone, Ariz., where he founded The Tombstone Epitaph, now the oldest continuously run newspaper in the state. He also was a close friend of Wyatt Earp and was working in his newspaper office when the infamous OK Corral gunfight broke out just blocks away in 1881.

Later, after surviving an assassination attempt near Tombstone, Clum went to Alaska around the time of the Klondike gold rush and established a postal system there, traveling throughout the remote wilderness territory by foot, horseback or dogsled.

“John Philip Clum helped civilize the West and Alaska,” said Mark Boardman, the Epitaph’s current editor. “He was not a frontiersman. He wasn’t the type of guy who would blaze trails and start up a town someplace. He was the guy who would come in afterwards and offer something that would make a difference.

“In Tombstone’s case, that was primarily the Epitaph, although his work as mayor also had a big impact,” Boardman explained. “In Alaska, those little towns were already there, but by giving them the ability to communicate with other towns and states, he gave them a status and ability they didn’t have before.”

 

Hometown pride of the ‘50s
“Walk the Proud Land” debuted on Aug. 1, 1956. In Hudson, John Clum, now 85, said he and other members of his family were invited to attend — even though he didn’t think he was a descendent of John Philip Clum.

“The film’s staff contacted all Clums to see if we had ancestral connections,” he recalled. “Our family was invited to the premiere, but our history wasn’t complete enough to prove a direct connection.”

But at 17, it was a thrill to have the same first and last names as a famous character portrayed on the silver screen. Clum said the Walter Reade Theater at the corner of 7th and Columbia streets was the largest of Hudson’s three movie houses at the time, with more than 800 seats.
“It was the place to go,” he said. “My first boss played piano for silent films there when he was a teen.”

The Register-Star, the local daily newspaper, ran big feature stories beneath banner headlines telling about John Philip Clum and the new film released by Universal International Pictures. One of the film’s co-stars, portraying Geronimo, was Jay Silverheels, already famous for his role as Tonto in the long-running television series “The Lone Ranger.”

A historical photo accompanying the Register-Star stories showed Clum holding a rifle, wearing a wide-brimmed cowboy hat, boots and gun belt, surrounded by a group of loyal scouts at the San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation in southeastern Arizona, where he founded a first-of-its-kind tribal police force charged with keeping law and order among the native population.

The Apache called him “Nan-tan Betun-nay-ki-aye” or “the captain with the high marble dome” — a reference to Clum’s high, balding forehead.

The movie, based on a biography written by Clum’s son Woodworth, deals almost exclusively with his role as the San Carlos reservation’s Indian agent — effectively its civilian administrator — from 1874-77.

President Ulysses S. Grant had created the San Carlos reservation less than two years before Clum arrived, and those first years were marred by corruption, violence and disputes between the reservation’s white military and civilian overseers. Clum’s effort to establish a form of limited self-government for the Apache people within the reservation — including a tribal police force and court system — was considered a success and a model for other Indian reservations.

 

From Claverack to the West
John Philip Clum was born in Claverack on Sept. 1, 1851. He was raised on his father’s farm and educated at Claverack College, a quasi-military academy for boys that operated from 1779 until 1902. Its alumni included Martin Van Buren of Kinderhook, who became the eighth president of the United States, Stephen Crane, author of the Civil War novel “The Red Badge of Courage,” and several other government and business leaders of the era.

Clum then went to Rutgers College, where he played football and founded a rowing team while pursuing studies for the ministry. But with little money, he was forced to leave after one year and came back to his father’s farm. He found the small operation couldn’t support him, though, so at age 20 he landed a job with the federal War Department’s newly formed meteorological service. He headed west to Santa Fe, N.M., as a weather observer in September 1871.

At the time President Grant established the San Carlos reservation in 1872, the federal Office of Indian Affairs had become plagued by corruption, so the government delegated responsibility for managing Indian reservations to charitable organizations run by various Protestant denominations. The Dutch Reformed Church, to which Clum had belonged back in Claverack, was put in charge of San Carlos.

Church leaders got in touch with Clum, who accepted a commission as Indian agent and went to work at the reservation in August 1874, when he was 22. He found an almost impossible situation, rife with abuse, as military commanders and civilian agents kept money that was supposed to feed and house the Apache, whom soldiers sometimes killed and tortured just for sport.

“He was a bit cocky and had ideas that he was going to reform the reservation he encountered,” said Jeane LaPorta, the Claverack town historian. “He didn’t like what he saw, the poor conditions. He was going to change the way they operated.”

As the idealistic Clum fought to give the Apache people dignity and self-respect, he constantly butted heads with military leaders who saw them as enemies — and settlers to whom the Apache were no better than vermin.

“He was continually fighting against forces over which he really had no control and over which he would not be able to win,” said Boardman, the Epitaph editor. “I don’t think Clum was liked very much. The Apache were warriors. They fought and they killed. It was just part of their culture, and it had been that way for centuries. Some of their cousins, the Hopi and Navajo, had become peaceable over time. The Apache didn’t. They were ready to fight for any reason and they definitely did attack settlements.

“If settlers had their choice, I think the Apaches would have been wiped out or moved back to Florida way earlier than they were,” he added. “Anybody who was sticking up for the Apaches would have been considered an enemy — a turncoat against his race even.”

 

Frontier news editor
Clum’s surprise April 1877 capture of the legendary Apache military leader Geronimo — at gunpoint, but without a shot being fired — gave the Army a black eye.

But 10 weeks later, disillusioned and fed up with superiors who disapproved of his methods, Clum resigned and moved to Florence, Ariz., where he bought and ran the weekly Arizona Citizen newspaper, which he later relocated to Tucson before selling his interest in it in 1880. The most exciting years of Clum’s Western odyssey, though, were just over the horizon.

Tombstone, where silver had been discovered in 1877, was a mining boomtown in what was then the territory of Arizona, long before it became the 48th state in 1912.

“John was attracted to it like everybody else,” Boardman said. “There was money, opportunity, a chance for him to make a great new life so he went for it. Like so many others — the Earps, the (Cochise County) Cowboys — he was there because he thought, ‘I’m still a young guy, I can have a huge impact,’ and he did in a relatively short period of time.”

Clum began publishing the Epitaph on May 1, 1880 and organized a Vigilance Committee to end lawlessness, an effort that helped him win election as Tombstone’s first mayor in 1881. That fall, on Oct. 26, Clum was hard at work typing up stories in the Epitaph office when the brothers Wyatt, Virgil and Morgan Earp and Wyatt’s friend Doc Holliday walked down Fremont Street en route to the most famous gun battle in the history of the old West.

Virgil Earp, who was the town marshal and deputy U.S. marshal, led the four lawmen into a confrontation with several members of the Cowboys, a group of cattle rustlers and horse thieves. The result was about 30 shots fired in half a minute, leaving three of the Cowboys dead.
Almost humorously in retrospect, Clum didn’t actually see the gunfight but was no doubt among those first on the scene immediately afterward.

“Clum himself said, ‘I was so busy putting the newspaper together I didn’t even notice what was going on. By the time the guns had gone off I realized something was going on and then it was all over,’” Boardman said. “What a great story: a newspaperman so engrossed in writing that he doesn’t cover the biggest story of all time for his area. Supposedly, he didn’t get out the door until after the whole thing was done. It only lasted about 30 seconds.”

Clum’s close friendship with and support for the Earps made him a target. In mid-December, unknown assailants tried to shoot and kill him as he rode in a stagecoach en route to catching a train east toward Washington, D.C., where he planned to spend Christmas with his parents and son.

Assassins did kill Morgan Earp and seriously wounded Virgil.
The environment was so dangerous that Clum sold the Epitaph on its second anniversary and left Tombstone, setting the stage for more adventures years later in Alaska.

In film and television
Although “Walk the Proud Land” gave Clum the most recognition by far, he was prominent enough in Western lore to be represented in numerous movies spanning 60 years, from “Frontier Marshall” (1934) to the 1994 movie “Wyatt Earp” starring Kevin Costner. On television, he was featured in a 1970 episode of “Death Valley Days” called “Clum’s Constabulary,” and he was also part of the 1955-61 series “The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp” with Hugh O’Brian in the title role.
Clum never went back to Claverack before his death on May 2, 1932 in Los Angeles.
A historical marker in a park at the corner of routes 9H and 23B in Claverack mentions Clum and “Walk the Proud Land.”

LaPorta, the town historian, said she believes Clum’s early upbringing figured prominently in shaping his character and fame as an early civic leader in the West.

“How much of Claverack did he take with him? It was his foundation, his background, his church and education. I like to say he brought some of it with him,” she said. “During the early years of our country, Claverack was a crossroads between Manhattan, Boston and Albany. Claverack played a role in John Philip Clum’s view of the world, his progressive thinking and formation.
“He was an upstanding person,” she added. “He had ideals, he was young and he was going to change things. That part came through in that movie.”