Prostitute's Crib

This exhibit is a replica of a prostitute’s crib. The display is intended for adults.

In Tombstone in the 1880s, a crib was a one-room shack rented by the week to a woman who lived and worked in it. Dozens of them stood in town. Prostitution was a legal profession in Arizona until after World War I. Women working this way were required to hold a business license and to have a weekly medical examination.

The exhibit describes Tombstone’s “soiled doves,” including some of the wives and girlfriends of the Earps and of Doc Holliday. The woman the tour names here is Mattie Earp.

Mattie Earp was Celia Ann Blaylock, born in 1850 in Johnson County, Iowa. She was working as a prostitute by 1873. She and Wyatt Earp lived together as husband and wife, including their time in Dodge City, and she came to Tombstone with him. In Tombstone she used laudanum, opium dissolved in alcohol, which was then a common pain killer. The gunfight tour places the break in their household in 1881: Josephine Marcus left Sheriff Johnny Behan for Wyatt, and Wyatt left Mattie.

Mattie went back to prostitution. She went first to Globe, Arizona, and then to the mining camp of Pinal, where she worked in a crib, drinking and still using laudanum. On July 3, 1888, she took a lethal dose. The coroner ruled the death a suicide by opium poisoning. She was buried at Pinal.

Tombstone was no longer a tent camp by the time these cribs were part of daily business. Between 1879 and 1880 the town grew to nearly 6,000 people. The license and the weekly examination are what made the work a regulated trade rather than a secret one. The room on the guide map is a replica, built so an adult visitor can see the one-room rental the tour describes. It is not an 1881 crib moved onto the grounds, and it is not the room in Pinal where Mattie died.

She did not die in Tombstone, and this room is not a claim that she lived on the corral grounds. It is a replica of the kind of crib she worked in at the end of her life. Doc Holliday’s companion, Big Nose Kate, was staying at C.S. Fly’s boarding house at the time of the gunfight, not in a crib on this spot. That house is the next part of the same story, at C.S. Fly’s Boarding House.

This stop is marked on the O.K. Corral Guide Map. The other stops are listed on the Exhibits page.