The story of Georgie Clifford shows how opiates, sex trafficking plagued the Old West

WARNING: This conversation may not be appropriate for all listeners.

If you thought you knew what the Wild West was really like think again. Arizona State University history professor Eduardo Obregón Pagán's new book shows just how difficult it really was.

Pagán just came out with "Tumbleweed Underworld: A Saga of Morphine and Mayhem in the Arizona Territory" and, in it, tells the story of Georgie Clifford, a beautiful young woman he happened to see when he was at the Arizona state archives looking through photos of the prisoners in the notorious Yuma Territorial Prison.

“And as you can imagine, the pictures were of hardened men,” Pagán told The Show. “So they’re either glaring at the camera or smirking or something like that. Then I turned the page, and there is this pretty young woman there, who had this look of shock. She had what I characterize as that kind of thousand-yard stare.”

He had to know her story. So, Pagán started investigating and found a tragic tale of trauma, opioid addiction and sex trafficking in pre-statehood Arizona. He came into The Show's studios recently to explain more about it — beginning with her family’s arrival in the mining town of Clifton, where Minnie Eichler, her name by birth, found herself at the center of a sexual assault trial that put her mother’s boyfriend behind bars.

Eduardo Obregón Pagán

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EDUARDO OBREGÓN PAGÁN: Immediately he was arrested. The mother, when she found out, she got him arrested. He was arrested, he went to trial. And Minnie had to not only withstand the sexual assault, but she also had to withstand being in this room full of men, asking her very private questions.

But she was a strong young woman, he was convicted, and what I surmise at that point is the parents then, they kind of go into emergency mode. They realize, OK, everybody knows in this small town our daughter has been raped. We need to do something to make sure she marries well.

And so the dad convinces his employer, who was the most eligible bachelor in Clifton. Now, he was about 40 years old. And so they kind of work out this deal where he marries Minnie. Now, Minnie’s 13 years old and he’s 40, so just keep that — I know. Keep that age gap. Now, I should say this, it was not uncommon for men in their 30s to be marrying young girls around 16. But this age gap was really pushing the limits, as you can imagine.

My only guess is that being forced into this marriage with a man as old as her father and then to become a mother was just a very difficult fit for her. I think she just wanted to be a young girl like all her other friends. And she eventually uh left the relationship.

There were lots of men who were willing to pay her a lot of attention. Eventually, Minnie’s mother convinces her to join the Double Decker, which was the finest gentlemen’s club in Prescott. It was just right behind Whiskey Row today. And to work there as a very high-class prostitute.

And as a gentlemen’s club. They had all the wines and everything that a man would want: the finest cigars, but even opioids, right? Even morphine, cocaine, heroin, whatever it is that you wanted.

So she worked there for a couple of years. And then she gets arrested in 1893. She’s found in an opium joint, and this is the first time the name of Georgie Clifford enters into the record. And then from there, we’re able to trace her.

When she was raped at the age of 12, it was extremely common to treat what was collectively termed women’s issues with morphine. Not only morphine, but heroin and cocaine, they were used as commonly as we use ibuprofen today, or acetaminophen. She was prescribed this, and I suspect that that’s when she started down this path of addiction.

LAUREN GILGER: So, tell us more about that unrestricted opiate industry at the time, like of the Old West. I think we kind of have a sense of an opium den at the time, right? But it was, as you said, prescribed, but then criminalized later on.

PAGÁN: Yeah. I would say this is one of the the biggest finds of my research was that what most people had in their medicine chest was far more dangerous and far more deadly than any gunslinger in a Western town.

And opioids — and we’re talking now morphine, which is synthesized from opium, but also opium was available. So opium, morphine, heroin — which was synthesized from morphine — widely available, completely unrestricted. And often any of the patent medicines that you could buy to treat sore throats, hay fever, upset stomach, you name it — I kid you not, you name it — were often infused with either morphine or opium. And so, it was widely, widely used.

GILGER: So when did it turn? When did it become something that was criminalized and then obviously impacts Georgie’s life?

PAGÁN: So here’s the curious thing. The first addict of morphine was the very chemist who synthesized morphine from opium, Friedrich Sertürner. He was a German, and he became the first morphine addict that I can tell. And he began sounding the alarm that this is a very dangerous chemical, very addictive.

But people really didn’t catch on until about the 1920s, and that’s when you have this global effort to try and cut back on the trade, cut off the inflow of these drugs in the United States. And so we’re dealing with a period just about a century long, where these powerful addictive substances were freely used and completely available.

GILGER: So, you also in this book, because you’re looking at the opiate trade at the time and sort of the impact of this on Georgie’s life, but also the sex trade. Obviously, she was a prostitute, if a high-end one in Prescott at the time. But you refer to prostitution as sex trafficking, which you admit I think is sort of anachronistic. But I wonder, why did you make that choice?

PAGÁN: So, to this day, there’s this underlying assumption that women entered into the sex trade or into prostitution at will. And what I discovered in Georgie’s life was, as a matter of fact, no. She was coerced into it and kept there against her will, and opioids were actually used to keep her there.

And so prostitutes very commonly used morphine as a way of as a form of birth control. Morphine in particular is what fueled the sex trade. So this is why I use the term sex trafficking, and there was some evidence that they were actually traded.

Again, I follow Georgie’s life, and she goes from this very high-class brothel to being homeless and living underneath a train trestle in Benson. And stealing food. So she’s now homeless at this point, so this is over a decade of just her addiction and a number of things.

Nobody wants that life. And I’ve, and I, part of my research was listening to modern reformers today who work in the sex trafficking industry and and really trying to help women get out. There’s a reason why women just don’t step off when they’re abused or something goes wrong, and they just say, “OK, we’re done.”

There’s a reason why that doesn’t happen: It’s because control is a very significant part of the modern traffic. And I found those elements also in Georgie’s life, and Georgie was not unique.

GILGER: So, what’s so interesting about this character here — Georgie Clifford, who was a real person — is that her life and these sort of terrible things that happened to her don’t seem to be that out of the ordinary. She doesn’t seem to be out of the ordinary, especially in this sort of pre-statehood Arizona.

What kind of light do you think sheds on what we think about the Old West? Like the Wild West, this sort of romanticized vision of what a territorial Arizona was?

PAGÁN: Yeah, great question. So my reconstruction of the Old West or the Wild West based on my last book on the Pleasant Valley War but also this one, of course it’s very different than what Hollywood portrays, very, very different.

We as a country have wrestled with opioid addiction since the beginning. So one statistic that is commonly used is that after the Civil War, it’s estimated about 400,000 veterans came back addicted to morphine. It was widely used during the Civil War.

And so you’ve got a nation that’s already wrestling with addiction. And this epidemic that we talk about now, it’s not new, it’s been going on for over a century, and the international efforts and national efforts to try and stop the trade have not worked.

Now, I’m not trying to advocate for anything differently, but I can just stand back and look. We’ve been at this for over 100 years, and it’s the same problem and the same approaches: cutting off the supply. And so the question I began to ask myself was, “Well, why?”

And and I think the answer is pretty clear, the demand is very high. In the modern times, it was the overprescription of prescribed drugs — and it was often for chronic pain — that got a lot of middle-class people hooked on opioids, right?

And the same thing was the case in the 19th century. Again, it was an escape from pain — emotional pain, physical pain, all those kinds of things.

GILGER: Amazing the lessons we don’t learn from our own history, right? We’ll leave it there.

Eduardo Obregón Pagán, ASU Bob Stump Endowed Professor of History, author of the new book “Tumbleweed Underworld: A Saga of Morphine and Mayhem in the Arizona Territory.”

Eduardo, thank you very much for coming in. I appreciate it.

PAGÁN: Thank you, my pleasure.