Mattie's Grave

We've been searching for Mattie's grave off and on for the past year or more. And today, with a modicum of Good Luck, we were able to find it. The desert grave of Mattie Blaylock Earp, the second 'wife', (common law, that is) of Wyatt Earp, famed Western gun fighter/law man depending on who you talk to. She died in the little mining town of Pinal City, Arizona on July 3, 1888 and is buried in the Pinal City Cemetery.

The cemetery is a hard place to find. It's been looted a number of times so the location is written about and passed along by mouth, but even so, one expanse of Sonoran Desert looks suspiciously like another and even when you think you've found the right rutted patch of road to follow to the grave sites, you're never quite sure. Bill and I thought we'd found the 'right place' on a trek we took on Valentine's Day, but never discovered the graves. Turns out we were only maybe a quarter mile or less away from them, but until this afternoon, we hadn't found it.

We participated in a town clean up today. About forty active participants took part in driving their trucks and utility trailers around town picking up trash and yard clippings and old household items people couldn't get to the dump on their own. The dump stayed open for five hours, taking all the stuff we hauled in for free. It was a LOT of work and we filled eight drive off dumpsters in that time. Bill and I hauled six loads with our trailer, manhandling old harvest gold sofas and chairs from the Seventies, rolls of carpet, piles and piles of prickling mesquite and other thorny waste and many, many tires to the dump. When we finished, they gave us participants a picnic and the mayor cooked us hotdogs. And then we got to talk to some of the townspeople who "know things".

We started telling one couple how we'd finally found the old silver mining town of Pinal City, out by the Arboretum. They said they hadn't been able to locate it, but had we ever found Mattie's Grave. We laughed and said, no, we'd been searching for it off and on since last year. We described a peak we thought it was on, just east of the Arboretum. The couple said no, that wasn't it, and proceeded to tell us where it was located. Now, I'm sorry but I'm not going to repeat it for I guess this pioneer cemetery has been looted enough, so you're going to have to search this out on your own. Turns out when we tried the second time this past February we were very close to finding it. We just didn't get quite close enough.

The town story is that since looters had disturbed Mattie's original grave, townsfolk had dug her up and deposited her elsewhere, in a quiet undisclosed location. But they've made a fine effort of decorating up the grave that's still in the Pinal City Cemetary. There's a nice wrought iron cross with "BLAYLOCK" written out on it and a wooden post with a mounted picture of Mattie and a sweet poem, testifying to her hard life and addiction to laudanum before she died in her mid-Thirties. And if you look real close, you'll see what Bill and I were excited about when we viewed the picture on the computer this evening. Not orbs, exactly, but a ray of light emanating down from Mattie's picture over the poem. If that's not a Sign that she's pleased we found her, I don't what is.

There's other graves there too and I have yet to look over the other pictures I took up there. But if any more spirits show up in them, I'll post some more here. For now, here's Mattie's resting place and I'm pleased to have found it. It's like: Bill and I are beginning to think Superior is welcoming us aboard by slowly letting us have access to some of its long held secrets.