Tumbleweed Underworld : A Saga of Morphine and Mayhem in the Arizona Territory

Georgie Clifford appears briefly in the annals of American history as an 1894 inmate of the Yuma Territorial Prison, one of two female prisoners among hundreds of hardened, violent men. A denizen of an Old West underworld of prostitution and narcotics, she had been convicted of murder for giving a lethal dose of morphine to a client. Telling Georgie's story in Tumbleweed Underworld, Eduardo Obregón Pagán exposes a dark underside of the turn-of-the-century American West, where attorneys, soldiers, doctors, miners, well-off women, and Chinese immigrants were caught up in the country's first opioid epidemic.

Georgie Clifford began life as Minnie Eichler in the small mining town of Clifton, Arizona Territory. After being raped by her mother's boyfriend, and testifying in the subsequent trial, Minnie fled Clifton, taking with her a taste for the morphine given her for her trauma. Tumbleweed Underworld follows Minnie through brothels, mining camps, and logging towns, through shifting personas and deeper dependency, to the trial in Flagstaff, Arizona, that ultimately landed her in prison. The story continues after her release and sees Georgie descend into a true addiction hell—in and out of jail cells, cribs, ditches, and the state asylum—before finally recovering and finding a measure of redemption in reconnecting with her family.

This moving tale of a young woman's years-long struggle with trauma and addiction puts a human face on the nexus of unrestricted opiates, sex trafficking, addiction, and the lack of effective treatment in the Old West. It also gives substance to the global story of opium and its derivatives, the beginnings of the pharmaceutical industry, the rehabilitation efforts of reformers, and the nascent government attempts to control both drugs and sex in the early twentieth century.