They Seldom Get Rich

After the trip has left Lees Ferry and the boats glide slowly downstream to pass under the huge span of Navajo Bridge, all the friends and well-wishers stand atop waving goodby to the boats below.... Regardless of how the trip is taken, something of this great canyon will come out with you. And though the river's course has not changed noticeably in the last hundred thousand years, it has been known to change the course of a human life in just those few days. Men have lost themselves and found themselves on this ancient muddy highway. They've used it as an escape through the canyon of life, only to discover life, and go on to live it as if it were a privilege.... "As a man thinketh, so shall he be," and a man deep in these rocks of ages has reason to think of something besides himself; to think and wonder and ask why about a lot of things. He has time to get his soul all washed and polished, like the granite in the gorge; see with his eyes a thing of beauty beyond verbal description, and to feel in his heart a desire to create something... something that will last for even a particle of time. In the distance is heard the roar of the first rapid... Badger! Your heart pumps up a little faster.... Then the boatmen throw back their heads and start to sing a lusty river song... "Rapids Ahead! Yippi-yiooooooooh!"... to a tune that is familiar to you, "Riders in the Sky," so you join them. And as the boat is swung stern first into the raging torrent... the... song splashes through the spray with roaring water its sole accompaniment, and you are initiated...!

If Tombstone knew what was going on.... The pressure of excitement kept mounting until the afternoon of October 26, when the Earp brothers concluded that they must attempt to disarm the defiant outlaws or clear out of the country.... It was then that the grand march to the OK Corral, where the outlaws had announced their determination to await the coming of Tombstone's marshals, got under way. Wes Fuller didn't like the sound of Doc's cheerful whistling as he marched to battle, and cleared out; but the other five were ready and waiting. It started out with a line-up of five against four; but Billy Claiborne lost interest after firing a couple of shots, and Ike, pleading to be spared, fled without drawing. That left three outlaws, all reckoned among the best pistoleers in the Tombstone region. Yet in less than a minute some witnesses asserted that the duration was a mere fifteen seconds they were all dead. They had all scored hits before they went under, though. Billy Clanton had given Virgil something to remember him by. Tom McLowry had wounded Morgan Earp before Doc blasted him. Frank McLowry had put a crease in Doc himself before Holliday sent a slug through Frank's heart....

In the year 1905, an old man showed up at a boarding house in Quincy, Illinois, and introduced himself as De Estine Shepherd.... He was, he said, the owner of a rich gold mine somewhere in the vicinity of Tucson, Arizona. He was ill, but seemed to be plentifully supplied with money. He grew steadily worse and was soon at the point of death. Again he told the landlady about his mine in Arizona, and gave her a rough map. He also told her of a trunk stored in a boarding house in Tucson, and that the trunk contained, a bag of amalgam, a quart whiskey bottle full of gold dust, and a detailed map of his mine. "Marry me, be my widow, and inherit it all. You have been good to me, and I have no one else to leave it to."

The marriage took place in St. Mary's Hospital, in Quincy, Illinois, December 29, 1905. Shepherd died the following day and was buried in Graceland Cemetery.

Rare photo of the Navajo Yeibichai ceremony by J. H. McGibbeny in July, 1953. McGibbeny worked among the Navajo for years and is one of the few nonIndians ever to photograph this sacred ritual.