Built from wooden timbers and adobe in 1880, the Grand had all the upscale trimmings you might find in Tucson or Flagstaff or Phoenix: carpets from Brussels, France, black walnut baluster rail, walnut furniture, rare oil paintings... Cowboys, being the transient souls that they were, called this place home when visiting the Tombstone area. After nights on the hard, snake and scorpion covered hills of Arizona you can imagine that this was heaven on earth to them.
Now, Kate's story is an amazing one. She was born in Pest (Budapest), Hungary in November of 1850. She was the daughter of a doctor, Michael Haroney, and his second wife, Katarina Baldizar, and was the oldest of the seven children. Unfortunately both her father and mother died when she was just 14, and the children were placed in foster homes.
Before her parents passed away, Dr. Haroney, in 1862, became the personal physician of Maximillian, the French-controlled Mexican emperor. By this time Kate had accomplished an education expected of someone with her families influence, and she could speak Hungarian, French, Spanish and English fluently. One might expect great things from this young lady. (I had a girlfriend in high school who's parents were from Czechoslovakia and Germany. She was fluent in those languages AND French, Spanish, Latin and English. She was a straight "A" student and we expected she would end up as a translator at the United Nations. Last I heard she was a bar maid in Las Vegas. Stories aren't that far apart, eh?)
With the death of her parents, however, Kate began to fend for herself rather than languish in foster care. She stowed away on a steamship bound for St. Louis, Missouri in 1867. She enrolled herself in a convent school in St. Louis, and a year later she married and had a child. Tragedy strikes Big Nose Kate again when both husband and child die.
By 1874 Kate has found her connection to history by working as a prostitute in a "sporting house" owned by Wyatt Earp's brother's wife, Nellie "Bessie" Earp, in Wichita, Kansas. From there it was to Fort Griffin in Texas where she met up with the true love of her life, "Doc" Holliday. Ol' Doc got cross-wise with the law there in Fort Griffin and, after allegedly burning down a hotel as a distraction to break Doc out of jail, the two of them lit out for Dodge City back in Kansas where they met up with Wyatt.
Staying for a couple of months in the Dodge House Hotel on Front Street, Doc's major source of income was from faro and poker games, though he did ply his trade as a dentist from time to time. Hearing amazing stories of opportunity from their friend Wyatt Earp, they moved onto the now booming town of Tombstone in the Arizona Territory. (Arizona didn't become a state until 1912.)
It was there, in 1881, that the gunfight at the OK Corral took place. In later years, Kate was able to get her rememberances of that historic event down on paper, and they are now part of the legend.
After the shoot out and manhunt that followed, she went with Doc to Glenwood, Colorado where he died of "consumption." We now know it was tuberculosis, a very common ailment back then. (Interestingly enough, tuberculosis is becoming a problem again today as more foreigners who've never been vaccinated move to America and spread the disease here again. Hospitals are VERY adamant about Granpa staying up to date on his TB shots before starting a single day at work.)
But Kate's life doesn't end there. She marries again, he dies of alcoholism, she moves back to Arizona, works as a housekeeper, and at the age of 80 becomes one of the first women allowed in the Arizona Pioneer's Home in Prescott. There she becomes a patient's advocate and ministers to her fellow residents, too. Big Nose Kate dies at the age of 90 in November of 1940, just before World War II. What an amazing span of life! From before the Civil War to just before World War II!
Somewhere along the way she took up the name Kate Elder - and, yes, the 1965 John Wayne movie, "The Sons of Katie Elder," took its name from her. Kate was, in fact, like the mother in that movie, extremely well liked by everyone in the community, who were all aware of her honesty and her poverty and her capacity for love and compassion.
Big Nose Kate's Saloon? Well, there's never any evidence that she owned it or actually worked as a "soiled dove" while in Tombstone. Sure sounds good on the marquee though, huh?
Prostitution was legal in Tombstone and, believe it or not, the city turned over the money collected for the licenses to prostitute to become the sole source of financial support for Tombstone's schools! Although considered to be a profession of sin, large contributions helped to build area churches, and during times of illness, the parlor houses not only housed the sick, but the girls provided their care.
Big Nose Kate. What a lady!!
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