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Obituaries
Wilbur Fisk Higgins
Died: At Leavenworth, Kansas, March 15, 1881, Wilbur Fish Higgins, a native Penobscot, Hancock County Maine, aged about 37 years.
Mr. Higgins came to Prescott in 1874 as Chief Clerk of the Quartermaster's Department at Military Headquarters, and rsided here continuously up to last June, when he accompanied Col. Weeks to Fort Leavenworth, where he died. The malady to which he fell a victim, consumption, manifested itself some years since, but the progress of the disease was so slow as to create no apprehension of any immediate fatal result. Its course was, however, accelerated under the unfavorable influences of the climate in his new abode, and his friends have noted for some time past, with extreme sadness, the gradual ebbing away of his life. A few days before his death, deluded by a disease in which hope never expires, he expressed the conviction that he would shortly rally and it was his intention to return to Prescott with the coming spring.
Mr. Higgins had in this community a wide circle of friends, to whom the intelligence of his death brings the deepest regret. He endeared himself to all who knew him by such qualities of head and heart as are rarely the property of man. No one who ever came in contact with him, either in business or socially, without carrying away an abiding sense of his sterling worth. Holding, as he did at various times, positions of unmeasured trust and responsbility, no whisper of suspicion was ever breathed against his name. He united a singularly pure mind, a clear intellect and a warm, generous heart. he was a manly man and the world is poore for the loss of such as he. To his immediate friends his loss is irreparable, and though it may temper their sorrow to know that a noble spirit is freed from the thralldom of a body racked and shrunken with incessant pain, the longing and the regret that make men hunger for the dead and absent ones will
abide with them along into the hereafter.
Truly has it been written, Death loves a shining mark. Peace to his ashes.
[source: The Weekly Arizona Miner, Prescott, Arizona, April 1, 1881 edition]
George Orcutt