| Photograph Information |
Photographer's Comments |
Camera: Sony DSC-F717
Location: Superior, Arizona USA
Date: Jan 21, 2006
Aperture: f/8
ISO: 100
Shutter: 1/640
Galleries: Black and White, History
Date Uploaded: May 9, 2008
Viewed: 361
Comments: 1
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The Magma Hotel - Superior, Arizona USA
This picture preserves a tidbit of Arizona's fading past. The Magma Hotel is a now fallen remnant of lost history. It has since collapsed since this picture was taken.
The Magma Hotel stood in the dilapidated and crumbling center of downtown Superior, Arizona.
Superior is a classic example of the heritage of Arizona's mining past. Though once elegant, this hotel stood unoccupied since the early 80s before its inevitable collapse.
Superior was a booming mining town founded back in the wild west of the 1880s. Those times are long gone. The last mine closed there more than 20 years ago.
The Ballad of Mattie Blaylock... or
The Seamy Side of Wyatt Earp
In front of the Magma Hotel there used to be a bronze plaque dedicated to the memory of Mattie Blaylock. She committed suicide near Superior in a town called Pinal City. The plaque is gone now, removed after the collapse.
You've probably never heard of her but she was the common law wife of Wyatt Earp for years. Everyone has heard of him. He is one of the most famous figures ever from Old West.
But there was a seedier side to the Old West that we rarely read about but where Wyatt played his part. It is not the place of romantic lore we'd like to think.
You see, Wyatt unceremoniously abandoned Mattie! And Mattie came back to this area after his abandonment of her to return to her former profession of prostitution that she was in when she had met Wyatt in Kansas. She and Wyatt had spent several months near here in a town called Pinal City on their journey to Tombstone from Dodge City, Kansas.
Nine years after that journey, on July 3, 1888, Mattie took a lethal dose of the drug laudanum together with alcohol near here. She is buried in the cemetery at Pinal City, now a ghost town, located just west of Superior, Arizona. |
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