Mother then abandoned Carlotta.
The Reno Evening Gazette of February 21, 1925, ran a small, unusual item signed by Carlotta Crabtree Cockburn of Room 618, 68 Post St., San Francisco. It was not a news brief or a traditional advertisement; it was a desperate plea: “WILL MY MOTHER, Annie Crabtree, who lived in Tombstone Ariz., during the years 1879-80-81-82-83, and later in Phoenix communicate with me?” Carlotta wrote. “I need my mother’s help now more than I ever did.” The plea was met by a ghostly silence from her mother, who had abandoned Carlotta in life and was unable to help from the grave.
In 1880 a young, tall, attractive woman—only in her middle teens—arrived in Tombstone on the arm of her 23-year-old lover. Annie Leopold had come to Arizona Territory from California, where she had been living with her parents and younger brother. A footloose miner named Jack Crabtree had been living with them too. Jack was about 5- foot-9-inches tall, slender but well-built. In Tombstone, a booming mining town, Jack introduced Annie as his wife. Annie Leopold not only was known as Mrs. Crabtree but also was pregnant. There is no evidence she ever married Jack, but she followed in the tradition of many women and took the last name of the man with whom she was living.
Jack Crabtree was the younger brother of the famous actress Lotta Crabtree, whose career had begun in the California gold fields in 1855 at age 8. He was raised in mining camps while his charming sister performed for miners grateful for entertainment. Jack appears to have been a rebellious young man, gambling, drinking and hanging out with the sporting crowd.
Annie gave birth to a girl on March 19, 1881. They named her Carlotta. Before the child was a year old, Jack was gone. Unknown to Annie, Jack had traveled east to join his mother and famous sister Lotta. Annie, alone with the child, decided to place Carlotta with a neighbor, Mary, while she went looking for the wandering Jack. Although Mary was not a trained nurse, she found employment nursing and caring for the ill.
Mary had had her own difficulties with men, having been married to one Mike Killeen, who had deserted her and her three children in Virginia. After the children died of “black diphtheria,” she had gone to Tombstone in 1880 and joined her husband. Killeen got into a deadly fight with “Buckskin Frank” Leslie, a scout and saloon man, and Mary took the winner, Buckskin Frank, as her lawful wedded husband. Frank’s gun sported several notches—one may or may not have been for the woman Molly, whom he had killed on his remote ranch. It would appear neither Mary nor Annie had very good taste in men. Mary eventually split from Frank, remarried and ended up running a gas station in Indio, Calif.
In early 1882, Mary promised to look after Carlotta while Annie went to Tucson in search of her wayward husband, Jack. After four months passed with no word from Annie, Mary went to Tucson. Neither Jack nor Annie could be found, so Mary left the baby girl with Ed Bullock, Jack’s business partner from Tombstone. Bullock eventually legally adopted Carlotta.
The abandoned daughter of Jack Crabtree and Annie Leopold became Mrs. Carlotta Cockburn (after marrying Robert Cockburn in about 1902) and was one of the contestants in the Lotta Crabtree will case in 1926. Carlotta was trying to establish that Jack Crabtree was her father and that she was therefore entitled to part of the $5 million estate of Lotta. Jack had preceded Lotta in death, denying he had a daughter.
Some testimony from the Lotta Crabtree will case indicates that Annie, buxom and plump, surfaced in Phoenix with a gambler named Jack Raab. Born about 1860, Raab was a cooper by day and a sporting man by night. Those who knew him said he had a companion known as Annie, but no one seemed to know her last name; they just remembered Jack and Annie.
Annie eventually migrated north, probably after she split from Raab, if indeed she had been the Annie on Raab’s arm. Her next partner was David Argyle, a well-known gambler who had ties to San Francisco and Seattle. The couple settled in Seattle. Although his occupation has been listed as typesetter or printer in census records and directories, he was also the proprietor of Argyle and Company, a poolroom, and a gambling house called the Totem Club. The Los Angeles Times of December 16, 1904, reported: “David Argyle, the first gambler to be tried in Kings County under the law making it a felony to operate games of chance, was acquitted by a jury in the Superior Court this morning. The jury was out for eighteen hours and took thirty-six ballots.” Annie might actually have married David. Henry, Annie’s brother, said she and David were married in Los Angeles in 1888. Her obituary lists them as married. They had a foster son, Frankie Argyle, who went to live with her brother’s family in San Francisco after her death.
Annie died of phlebitis in 1909 at about age 43. She was, according to her obituary, placed in a “square oak casket” and buried in Seattle’s Lakeview Cemetery. Approximately a year later, her remains were disinterred, and Lakeview has no record of her burial. Annie Leopold appears to have been somewhat of a lost soul in life, forever searching for love and security. Even in death her eternal rest was disturbed, and this writer has not yet located her final resting place.
David drifted back to San Francisco, and his obituary appears in the Oakland Tribune of December 24, 1919, under the headline “David Argyle Dies in San Francisco.” The obit begins, “SAN FRANCISCO, DEC. 24, David Argyle, sporting man widely known throughout the United States, 60 years old, died of heart disease at his house at 1465 Van Ness Avenue yesterday. Argyle was one of the passengers on the first steamer to Nome, being dispatched there by Joe Harvey and Frank Daroux.”
It is not known if Annie had ever searched for the daughter she had abandoned back in the early 1880s. Annie had been dead for 16 years by the time that daughter, Carlotta Crabtree Cockburn, made the plea in the Reno Evening Gazette. Carlotta clearly needed Annie’s help if she hoped to gain a piece of Lotta Crabtree’s $5 million estate. But it was much too late. Carlotta was unable to prove that Jack and Annie were married, and the probate court did not accept the living arrangements that resulted in the birth of Carlotta. In June 1928, the Massachusetts Supreme Court upheld the lower court’s verdict. Carlotta was denied any portion of Lotta’s large estate, and the money went to a variety of charities as originally provided in the will. Carlotta and her husband lived for many years in Los Angeles County. He died in 1952; when she died is uncertain.
Famed lawman Wyatt Earp testified in the Lotta Crabtree will case, as did many other prior Tombstone residents. The focus of the depositions was to establish whether or not Jack and Annie were married and if Annie did indeed give birth to Jack’s child. The consensus in the depositions was if you said you were married you were accepted as married. Louis V. Leese, who had run a hotel in Tombstone in 1890, stated in his deposition, “The custom was that the man would go and take a woman and live with her for a certain time and he would call her his wife.” A man named Lincoln, who owned a saloon and gambling house in 1882, stated in his deposition: “If a man come along and introduced a woman as his wife, there were no questions as to whether she was not. The fact of it is it was nobody’s business and the chances are he would get himself in trouble by making any investigation.” What makes Wyatt Earp’s testimony so interesting is that while living in Tombstone he was with a woman known as Mattie Earp, although no proof of marriage has ever been located. After Wyatt left Tombstone he took up with Josephine Marcus, with whom he lived in matrimonial style for about 40 years. Prior to her relationship with Wyatt, Josephine had been living with Cochise County Sheriff John Behan. When Wyatt gave his testimony about cohabitation in Tombstone, no one questioned his own background or that of his wife.
Annie was only about 15 when she took up with Jack Crabtree. By the time she was 17 she was alone with a baby. If it were not for the Lotta Crabtree will case, her story would most likely have gone untold. Her liaison with Jack brought Annie Leopold’s story to the surface—a story shared by other women who will go forever unnoticed.
Originally published in the June 2007 issue of Wild West. To subscribe, click here.
