The Bird Cage Theatre

The Bird Cage Theatre in Tombstone, Arizona was opened on 26 December 1881 by William J. "Billy" Hutchinson. Hutchison, a variety performer, originally intended to present respectable family shows like that he'd seen in San Francisco that were thronged by large crowds. After the Theatre opened, they hosted a Ladies Night for the respectable women of Tombstone, who could attend for free. But the economics of Tombstone didn't support their aspirations. They soon canceled the Ladies Night and began offering baser entertainment that appealed to the rough mining crowd.

Once inside, customers could buy a drink at the long bar. The bar was made in Pittsburgh, PA, shipped on the Star of India around the tip of south America to Mexico, then by wagon train the rest of the way. There's a 45 caliber bullet hole with the bullet still intact in one of the posts in the bar. 

Across from the bar hung a painting of Fatima, a buxom belly-dancer in an exotic Oriental outfit. The painting was given as a thank-you gift from Fatima to the Bird Cage Theatre for helping her to start her career. It is still hanging on the wall across from the bar. The canvas has six bullet holes and a knife slash in it. 

The main hall contained an orchestra pit and a 15' x 15' stage about 5' above the main floor. The stage was lit by a row of gas jets along the front side. There were 14 cages or boxes on two balconies located on either side of the main hall. These boxes, also known as cribs, featured drapes that patrons could draw while entertained by prostitutes. A dumbwaiter at the end of the bar was used to hoist up the whiskey, beer and cigars to the male customers in the cribs.

Between acts, the dancing girls in short dresses and low-cut necklines served drinks and offered sex. Beer was 50 cents on the main floor and $1.00 in the cages. The ladies received a percentage of all the drinks they sold.

In the basement, a poker room was the site of the longest-running poker game in history. Played continuously 24 hours a day for eight years, five months and three days, legend has it that as much as $10,000,000 changed hands during the marathon game, with the house retaining 10%. Some of the participants were Doc Holliday, Bat Masterson, Diamond Jim Brady, George Hearst and Adolphus Busch of the Busch Brewery. The basement also had two more ornate and expensive bordello rooms with more high dollar escorts. Josephine Sarah Marcus worked as both a performer and escort in the bordello room. That is where she met Wyatt Earp and they began their love affair. She eventually became his third wife and they were together for over 47 years.

The Bird Cage Theatre operated continuously, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, for 8 years, from 1881 to 1889. It's reputation prompted the New York Times to report in 1882 that "the Bird Cage Theatre is the wildest, wickedest night spot between Basin Street and the Barbary Coast". More than 120 bullet holes are found throughout the building.

One of the first acts at the Birdcage was Mademoiselle De Granville (real name, Alma Hayes), also known as the "Female Hercules" and "the woman with the iron jaw". She performed feats of strength, specializing in picking up heavy objects with her teeth. Other acts included the Irish comic duo Burns and Trayers (John H. Burns and Matthew Trayers), comic singer Irene Baker, Carrie Delmar, a serious opera singer, and comedian Nola Forest. Lizette, "The Flying Nymph", flew from one side of the theatre to the other on a rope. One of the more elaborate acts featured "The Human Fly" in which women dressed in theatrical tights and brief costumes walked across the stage ceiling upside down. This act lasted until one of the clamps supporting the performers failed and she fell to her death.

Entertainment included masquerade balls featuring cross-dressing entertainers like comedians David Waters and Will Curlew who appeared in outrageous female costumes, sang vulgar ballads and performed outlandish antics, bawdy skits. Each evening entertainment began with a variety show at 9:00 p.m. and lasted until 1:00 a.m. or later. When the stage show ended, the wooden benches where the audience sat were stacked on the side. The orchestra performed and the audience danced and drank until the sun rose. Miners could drink and dance all night if they chose.

In March 1882, miners in the Grand Central Mine hit water at 620'. The flow wasn't at first large enough to stop work, but constant pumping with a 4" pump was soon insufficient. The silver ore deposits they sought were soon underwater. Hutchinson sold the Birdcage to Hugh McCrum and John Stroufe and they sold it again in January 1886 to Joseph W. "Joe" Bignon and his wife, Matilda "Big Minnie" Quigley.

Bignon had managed the Theatre Comique in San Francisco and performed as a black face minstrel and clog dancer. He refurbished the building and renamed it the Elite Theatre. He hired new acts interspersed with the bawdy entertainment the miners were used to. Matilda was 6' tall and weighed 230 pounds. She wore pink tights, sang, danced, played the piano, and sometimes acted as madam to the prostitutes in the cribs and bouncer.

The large Cornish engines brought in by the mine owners kept the water pumped out of the mines for a few more years, but on 26 May 1886, the Grand Central Mine hoist and pumping plant burned. When the price of silver slid to 90 cents an ounce a few months later, the remaining mines laid off workers. Many residents of Tombstone left and the Bird Cage closed in 1892.

The building was not opened again until it was purchased in 1934. The new owners were delighted to find that almost nothing had been disturbed in all those years. It has been a tourist attraction ever since, and is open to the general public year-round.

Mary Katharine Horoney ~ "Big Nose Kate"

Maria Katalin Horony, daughter of Dr. Miklos Horony and Katharina Baldizar, was born on 7 November 1850 in Pest, Hungary. In 1860, Dr. Horony, his second wife, and his children left Hungary for the United States, arriving in New York in September 1860 aboard the Bremen.

The Horony family settled in the predominantly German area of Davenport, Iowa in 1862. Dr. Horony and his wife died only three years later, in 1865, within a month of one another. Maria and her younger siblings were placed in the home of her brother-in-law, Gustav Susemihl, and in 1870 they were left in the care of attorney Otto Smith.

At age 16, she ran away from her foster home and stowed away on a riverboat bound for St. Louis, Missouri. She later claimed that while she lived in St. Louis she married a dentist named Silas Melvin with whom she had a son, and that both died of yellow fever. No record has been found to substantiate marriage, birth of a child, or the death of either Melvin or the child.

Kate Elder, the name she was using by then, eventually found work as a prostitute in a Wichita, Kansas dance hall and sporting house owned by Bessie Earp, Wyatt Earp's sister-in-law. It was here that she probably met Wyatt Earp. According to researcher Glenn Boyer, Kate was a favorite lover of Earp’s for a while, but he cast her off before she met Holliday.

She then moved on to other dance halls and saloons, including one in Fort Griffin, Texas, where in 1876 she met John Henry “Doc” Holliday, the man who would become the love of her life. Kate charmed him with her dark good looks, intelligence, and fiery temper, and she, in turn, was smitten with him. Kate told Bork, the historian, that the two were married that year at Holliday’s home in Georgia, though Bork and Boyer believe the marriage was a common-law one, and never made official.
Kate also introduced Holliday to Earp, a move she regretted in her later life, according to Boyer and historian Jan MacKell. "The Earps had such a power I could not get Doc away from them," Kate said. And despite her relationship with Holliday—and his disapproval—Kate continued to work as a prostitute, sometimes for Bessie Earp (the wife of Wyatt’s brother James).

Doc & Kate

Kate's association with the famed sometimes-lawmen, sometimes-outlaws gave her a number of colorful stories. For example, in Texas, Holliday apparently got into a fight after a card game and a little too much to drink one night. The fight turned deadly, and Holliday ended up being arrested and held in a nearby hotel. That's when Kate set the hotel on fire and helped Holliday make his escape. Kate also admitted to Boyer that when she and Doc were in Las Vegas, New Mexico, she held up the local lawmen with a six-shooter—in her nightgown.

When Holliday and the Earp brothers moved to Tombstone, Arizona, Kate and Doc temporarily split and she moved to Globe, a little over 180 miles away, where she eventually bought a hotel. They stayed in contact through letters until he convinced her to move to Tombstone.

She had a front-row seat for the Gunfight at the OK Corral in 1881. The 30-second gun battle, which actually took place down the street from the paddock it was named after, was the culmination of months of tension between a group of cowboys known for murder and cattle rustling and the Earps, who served as the town’s lawmen. The brothers made Holliday a temporary policeman for the fight, which ended with three of the cowboys dead (the Earps and Holliday were wounded).

Kate and Doc's relationship was stormy and often violent. According to witnesses, she once tried to shoot him in his sleep, firing bullets into the mattress, only for him to wake, grab the gun from her hands and hit her over the head with it. Yet the two were said to be "like newlyweds" the next day. In another incident, she got him briefly arrested on false murder charges. But she always came back, eventually.

After the Gunfight at the OK Corral, Holliday, worried for her safety, told Kate to return to Globe. (The Earp wives were sent away for a time as well.) They didn’t see each other for several years, during which time Kate ran her hotel and traveled around Arizona. Things changed in 1887, when she heard that Holliday was in the final stages of tuberculosis in Glenwood Springs, Colorado. Kate reportedly went to stay at the nearby ranch of her brother Alexander Haroney, so she could visit Holliday during his final days.

Throughout their relationship, Kate was her own woman, refusing to give up her work or her independence. But Doc's death left her a changed woman. She gave up life as Big Nose Kate and became Mary, a mine cook.

In 1888 Kate married George Cummings, believed by biographers to be a "meal ticket marriage". By 1898, she had left him because he was a drinker. She spent the next three decades as the housekeeper of miner John J. Howard, who named her as his heir. She was 80 years old when he passed away and he wasn’t able to leave her much.

She applied for space in the Arizona Pioneers Home in Prescott, which had just begun to admit women. While her application gave only sparse details of her background, other residents of the home recognized Mary K. Cummings as Big Nose Kate, the wild Hungarian beauty who had reigned over the dance halls and saloons of the Wild West. It was at the Pioneers Home where she finally had the chance to share her side of the story with Dr. Bork, who described her as "a trim, well-spoken little old lady and, like a lot of them, seeking respectability in old age."

Bork and Boyer note that as she recounted her tales, she added or changed details for propriety’s sake—such as recalling her common-law marriage to Holliday as an official one, and listing her birthplace as Iowa because she never actually became a U.S. citizen. She died on 2 November 1940, days before her 90th birthday.

Josephine Marcus & Wyatt Earp

Josephine Sarah Marcus, daughter of Carl-Hyman “Henry” Marcus and Sophie Lewis, was born in 1860 in New York City. She was the common-law wife of Wyatt Earp, the famed Old West Lawman and gambler.

Her parents had immigrated from the Posel region in Prussia (current day Poland), arriving in New York around 1850. But Henry Marcus struggled to make a living in New York City and read about the growing city of San Francisco. When Josephine was 7 years old, he moved his family there, traveling by ship to Panama via the Isthmus of Panama, before catching a steamship to San Francisco. They arrived while the city was recovering from the disastrous earthquake of 21 October 1868.

When Marcus had difficulty finding work, the family moved in with his oldest daughter and son-in-law in a working-class tenement. Josephine ran away, possibly as early as age 14, and traveled to Arizona, where she had an "adventure". Much of her life from about 1874 to 1880 is uncertain; she worked hard to keep this period of her life private, even threatening legal action against writers and movie producers. She may have arrived in Prescott, Arizona as early as 1874. There is some evidence that she lived in Prescott and Tip Top, Arizona Territory under the assumed name of Sadie Mansfield, and worked as a prostitute from 1874 to 1876, before becoming ill and returning to San Francisco. The name Sadie Mansfield was also recorded in Tombstone. Researchers have found that the two names share extremely similar characteristics and circumstances.

Later in life Josephine described her first years in Arizona as "a bad dream". What is known for certain is that she traveled to Tombstone using the name Josephine Marcus in October, 1880. She wrote that she met Cochise County Sheriff Johnny Behan when she was 17 and he was 33. He promised to marry her and she joined him in Tombstone. He reneged but persuaded her to stay. Behan was sympathetic to ranchers and certain outlaw Cowboys, who were at odds with Deputy U.S. Marshal Virgil Earp and his brothers, Wyatt and Morgan. Josephine left Behan in 1881, before the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, during which Wyatt and his brothers killed three cowboys. She went to San Francisco in March 1882 and was joined that fall by Wyatt, with whom she remained in a common-law marriage for 46 years until his death.

Josephine and Wyatt moved throughout their life together, from one boomtown to another, until they finally bought a cottage in the Sonoran Desert town of Vidal, California on the Colorado River, where they spent the cooler seasons. In the summer they retreated to Los Angeles, where Wyatt struck up relationships with some of the early cowboy actors, including William S. Hart and Tom Mix. Josephine Earp and her relationship to Wyatt became known after amateur historian Glenn Boyer published I Married Wyatt Earp, based on a manuscript allegedly written in part by her. Boyer's book was considered a factual memoir, and cited by scholars, studied in classrooms, and used as a source by filmmakers for 32 years. In 1998, reporters and scholars found that Boyer could not document many of the facts he wrote about the time period in Tombstone. Some critics described the book as a fraud and a hoax, and the University of Arizona withdrew the book from its catalog.

Wyatt Earp was the last surviving Earp brother and the last surviving participant of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral when he died at home in the Earps' small rented bungalow in Los Angeles, of chronic on 13 January 1929 at the age of 80. Charlie Welsh's daughter Grace Spolidora and his daughter-in-law, Alma, were the only witnesses to Wyatt's cremation.

Josie, who was of Jewish heritage, had Earp's body cremated and secretly buried his remains in the Marcus family plot at the Hills of Eternity, a Jewish cemetery in Colma, California. They are buried near her parents and her brother Nathan. When she died at age 83 in Los Angeles on 19 December 1944, her remains were interred alongside his. She was the last surviving member of her immediate family. She was penniless when she died.

Sid Grauman (Grauman's Theater) and William S. Hart (cowboy actor and long-time friend of Wyatt Earp) paid for her funeral and burial. Although she was never active in her Jewish faith, her service was conducted by a rabbi.

In 1957, the Tombstone Restoration Commission looked for Wyatt's ashes with the goal of having them moved to Tombstone. They contacted family members seeking permission and the location of his ashes, but no one could tell them where Wyatt was buried, not even his closest living relative, George Earp. Arthur King, a deputy to Earp from 1910 to 1912, finally revealed that Josephine had buried Wyatt's cremated remains in Colma, California, and the Tombstone Commission cancelled its plans to relocate his ashes.

On 8 July 1957, thieves excavated the Earp's grave in an apparent attempt to steal his cremated remains, but unable to find them, stole the simple, 600 pounds grave marker. The stone was eventually returned but a new, more elaborate marker was erected later on. Their grave site is the most visited resting place in the Jewish cemetery.