Blonde Marie

Soon after the prospector’s pick turned up pay dirt a boom town sprang up overnight. As Mark Twain quipped, “Wherever there was a rumor and a hole in the ground someone built a town around it.” First to arrive were the whiskey peddlers. Next came the card sharks and tinhorn gamblers. Following on their boot heels were those charming specimens of Eve’s flesh that included, Crazy Horse Lil, Frenchy Mustache, the Dancing Heifer, the Galloping Cow, the Little Lost Chicken and Snake Hips Lulu. One assumes these were not the names their parents gave them. Their presence was not merely tolerated it was welcomed. The fancy clothes, pianos, decorum of these establishments added a touch of refinement to towns like Tombstone.

For class, none could touch the mysterious and elegant madam from France, Marie L’etang aka Blonde Marie. She was always a madam, not a working girl. All her girls were attractive and French. She rotated them elsewhere after a brief stay in Tombstone. She often went to France and returned with fresh “prime choice.” The most popular were redheads and blondes because they could charge more for their services. Only the wealthy men of Tombstone could afford her establishment.

Blonde Marie was somehow connected to a ring of crime bosses with headquarters in San Francisco with ties in Paris. During the mid-1890s she wound up her affairs, took her money and returned to France where its assumed she spent her remaining days living in luxury.