Mattie Blaylock
Celia Mattie Blaylock was raised on the small Iowa farm where she was born in 1850, brought up in an atmosphere of Sunday school and Biblical strictures before running away in the company of her sister in 1868.
Although both girls were skilled seamstresses they found it difficult to make ends meet. Sarah, the sister, returned home before a year had gone by, where her parents considered her to have disgraced the family, although they did take her back in. Celia began using the alias Mattie and by 1872 court records in Fort Scott and Dodge City indicate that Mattie had taken up prostitution.
Mattie probably met Wyatt Earp sometime between 1871 and 1873, by the 1880 census she appears in government documents as his wife. Earp led a wandering life and by 1879 was headed to Tombstone, Arizona where Mattie joined him. Sometime between 1876 and 1879, Mattie began to suffer from severe headaches for which she took laudanum, a medication to which she was soon addicted.
After the Gunfight at the OK Corral, Mattie left Tombstone, believing that Wyatt would contact her at some point to arrange a place and time for them to be reunited.
No word ever came from Wyatt. Mattie drifted to Colton California and from thence to Pinal City Arizona, attempting to make a living from prostitution in mining towns where the mines had stopped producing and the miners had moved on. With few potential customers and those few having little money, making a living was nearly impossible. In 1888 Mattie died, the coroner’s report designated her death a suicide by laudanum poisoning. She was buried in Pinal City.