TWPS NEWS 

First Annual Preservation Society Fandango Raises $10,000

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Saving the significant pieces of our collective history all depends on good folks like you, donating not just money but also any expertise and resources you may have that can help further the cause. We’ll need archaeologists, geologists, park rangers, historians, truck drivers, website programmers—whatever you do for a living, someday, sometime, your knowledge may be just what the preservation society needs. We want your active involvement! Without your help, we won’t be able to keep the lessons of the Old West from being forgotten.One lesson that was almost forgotten, and could easily be lost, if we don’t step in now....Mattie Earp’s Cemetery.

In March 1959, Earp researcher John Gilchriese and author Frank Waters peered over a handwritten inquest just discovered at the courthouse in Florence, Arizona. The scrawl confirmed Mattie’s suicide: death by laudanum mixed with whiskey, on July 3, 1888. Before that moment, no one had known the fate of Wyatt’s second wife after she boarded that train to visit his family in Coloma, California. Wyatt officially left her in 1883 for Josie, who remained his companion until his death. Celia Ann Blaylock, who he called Mattie, dropped off the radar.On that spring day, though, the two set out to find the site of Pinal and the graveyard where her body was buried.  “It was impossible to locate the graveyard unaided; U.S. Highway 60-70 between Florence and Superior bisects the desert between the ghost town and its ghostlier graveyard,” wrote Frank Waters, in 1960’s The Earp Brothers of Tombstone. “Fortunately we found a friend with a pickup to drive us up the wash and across an unmarked stretch of weathered rock and cacti. There it was; no more than that. Graves from which the picket fences to keep out coyotes had been long torn down. Graves whose headstones had been removed for resale. Graves overgrown with brush and cacti. Graves from which even their ghosts had fled….”This cemetery is all that remains of Pinal today—scattered stone piles, a couple headstones cracked in the ground and a few graves protected by family members with cactus guards that keep coyotes (and humans) from desecrating the sacred ground.What mysteries lie beneath the brush? Are other graves marked, yet unseen? The preservation society hopes that its first project will be to restore this historic cemetery.

Together we can help preserve America’s historic West.

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For Immediate Release
Contact: Ken Amorosano 505-286-0100
ken@twmag.com