Mattie Blaylock - Meets Wyatt Earp

Meets Wyatt Earp

Celia may have met Wyatt as early as 1871 and perhaps as late as the fall of 1873. She continued to work as a prostitute during their early years together. In the 1880 United States Census Mattie is listed as Wyatt's wife though there is no record of a legal marriage.

She was said to have suffered from severe headaches, and while in Tombstone, Arizona she became heavily addicted to laudanum, a commonly used opiate and pain killer of the day. It is not known exactly when Earp and Mattie Blaylock ended their relationship. At some point during late 1881 Earp began a relationship with Josephine "Sadie" Marcus, who had been the common-law wife of Johnny Behan. Tombstone diarist George W. Parsons never mentioned seeing Earp and Sadie together and neither did John Clum in his memoirs. Frank Waters wrote The Earp Brothers of Tombstone in which he told tales of terrible, public fights between Sadie and Mattie Blaylock and how the affair was a public scandal. However, Waters' book has been criticized as extremely biased for its negative portrayal of Wyatt Earp and for including details not mentioned in Addie Earp's original manuscript.

Following the March 18, 1882 assassination of Morgan Earp, Wyatt Earp, his youngest brother Warren, and a posse of other deputies took the law into their own hands and began a vendetta. They hunted down some of the outlaw Cowboys they believed responsible for maiming Virgil Earp and killing Morgan. In early April, Wyatt left Arizona for New Mexico and then Colorado.

Mattie left Tombstone with other Earp family members for Colton, California. She apparently expected to receive a telegram from Earp telling her where to meet him, but it never arrived. Instead, he went to San Francisco in late 1882 and took up with Sadie Marcus. Blaylock finally left Colton for Pinal City, Arizona Territory, a town that Mattie and Earp had stopped in for a couple of months in 1879 on their way to Tombstone. When the pair had been there three years earlier, it was a booming silver town. Upon Mattie's return, however, the silver boom had died down there and the bulk of the town's itinerant population had moved on. Mattie had planned a return to prostitution in Pinal City, but with most of the prospective clientele gone with the silver, making a decent living there proved difficult.