Hoptown and China Mary
Near Tombstone, Arizona
The gunfighters get the legends, but Tombstone had another community that helped keep the boomtown running, its Chinese quarter. In the early years only a handful of Chinese people lived here, but in the eighteen eighties the community grew to several hundred, many of them crowded into a few blocks, a district the townsfolk called Hoptown. The name, so the story goes, came from the way residents seemed to hop in and hop out of the maze of alleys and tunnels that honeycombed the block.
The Chinese of Tombstone ran laundries and restaurants, grew and sold vegetables, and worked as laborers, cooks, and household servants, filling jobs the mining town could not do without. Presiding over it all was a formidable woman remembered as China Mary. She ran a general store, brokered nearly all the Chinese labor in town, and personally guaranteed that the workers she placed would neither cheat nor steal.
She also controlled the quarter's opium dens and its houses of prostitution. Powerful, shrewd, and widely respected, China Mary was in many ways the real boss of Hoptown, and she was laid to rest in the Chinese section of Boothill.
