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 Obregon Pagan 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.
Eduardo Obregon Pagon is the Bob Stump Endowed Professor of History at Arizona State University, Tempe, and author of Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon: Zoot Suits, Race, and Riot in Wartime L.A. He has published in such journals as Pacific Historical Review and the Journal of Social Science History.
"Tumbleweed Underworld offers a rare and deeply human history of addiction in the nineteenth-century American West. Centering the life of Georgie Clifford, a sex worker and morphine addict, Pagan uncovers how misogyny, violence, and medical uncertainty shaped women's lives and choices in a volatile frontier society. The result is a haunting portrait of life on the margins."-Jacqueline D. Antonovich, Muhlenberg College "Excellent history and excellent storytelling...Pagan's incredible sleuthing allows him to follow Minnie's/Georgie's tortuous younger years along with those whom she encountered, wedded, bedded, and befriended, who, in turn, often abused her and certainly almost always fed her addictions, as she amazingly always moved forward and hoped for better."-Sarah Deutsch, Professor of History Emerita, Duke University
