Mattie Blaylock
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Celia Ann (Mattie) Blaylock (1850 to July 3, 1888) was the romantic companion of Old West lawman and gambler Wyatt Earp.
She was born in Wisconsin, but was raised in Fairfax, Iowa. She ran away from home at the age of sixteen, and made her way down into Kansas by first working as a prostitute in Scott City, then later in Dodge City. She and Wyatt Earp are believed to have met in or around late 1873. Like most of the women associated with the Earp brothers, she worked off and on as a prostitute during their early years together, and the two are believed to have never officially married. By 1879, however, she was at the very least Wyatt Earp's common law wife.
She was said to have suffered from severe headaches, possibly migraines, and while in Tombstone, Arizona she became heavily addicted to laudanum, a commonly used pain killer of the day. She was at first oblivious to Wyatt Earp's affair with Josephine Marcus, but later did have at least two heated altercations with his new girlfriend and later wife. Following the March 18th, 1882 assassination of Morgan Earp, and the earlier assassination attempt on Virgil Earp, she left Tombstone in route to Colton, California with the rest of the Earp family, leaving Wyatt Earp and Warren Earp behind to carry on what would later be dubbed the Earp vendetta ride. There, she waited for a telegram from Wyatt Earp for her return to Tombstone, but it never came. She left Colton and moved to Globe, Arizona, where she returned to prostitution. On July 3, 1888, she took a lethal dose of laudanum, and her death was ruled suicide.
