“It was a piteous scene and remarkable in the extreme,” the Journal-Miner observed. Harrison Yarnell (for whom Yarnell, Arizona is named,) stood before Judge Frank O Smith a broken man. He was applying for admission to the Pioneers’ Home in Prescott—something reserved only for the destitute. “I’ve tried hard to keep from this,” he told the judge, “but I’ve fought my battle and I’m through.”
At the very least it was bitterly ironic. His namesake mine, which he founded, had yielded $12,000,000 worth of gold at that point. "All the money, however, went back into the ground in an attempt to find the big deposit of gold which he believed was to be found within a space of five miles square around the Yarnell mine,” the Hassayampa Miner described; but it was his attempt to solve one burning mystery that took his last dollars.