The American frontier of the late 1800s is called the Wild West for a reason.
And the women of the Wild West were often just as unruly and bold and fearless as their
more famous male counterparts.
Here's the truth about the Wild West's female outlaws.
Beautiful, refined, intelligent.
Etta Place was a triple threat when she met Harry Longabaugh and Robert Leroy Parker,
the outlaws known as The Sundance Kid and Butch Cassidy, respectively, at a San Antonio
brothel around 1900.
Sadly, many of the details of Place's life have been lost to time.
Some historians suggest Place and another famous lady linked to Longabaugh and Parker,
Ann Bassett, might have been one and the same person.
Much of what's been written about her is conjecture and hearsay.
Rumor was she often held the get-away horses while Longabaurgh and Parker robbed banks,
trains, and stagecoaches.
She might have even fended off an entire posse on her own.
What is known though, according to the book, Red Light Women of the Rocky Mountains, is
Place became not only Longabaugh's companion and lover but also an accomplice to his and
Parker's life of crime.
Shortly after meeting the two men, she fled with them to Argentina and even participated
in a bank robbery there.
Legend has it that Longabaugh and Parker were eventually shot dead by the Bolivian cavalry.
It's possible that Place, too, was killed in the same operation.
Either that or she returned to the American West to work as a sex worker until her death.
Or a teacher.
Or a soldier in the Mexican-American War.
Either way, props to the Outlaw Queen.
Don't let the facial hair fool you.
Eleanor Dumont was, in her early years as a blackjack dealer in mid-1800s San Francisco,
as feminine as they came.
Dumont dressed well and kept her hair piled high.
Born in New Orleans in 1828, she moved to California when she was 21 and quickly earned
a reputation as a crafty card player.
Perhaps too crafty.
She was eventually fired from the Bella Union saloon on suspicion of card sharping.
Basically, she cheated at cards.
No matter.
Dumont had a bunch of cash with her when she skipped town for Nevada City.
There she opened up her own saloon, Vingt-et-un, named for her favorite game.
Soon, miners were flocking to her tables.
And they did their best to seduce her, too.
Dumont though, would not be won, not until she'd left Nevada City for Carson City where
she purchased a ranch and fell in love with a man named Jack McKnight.
But McKnight was a swindler.
He sold the ranch and pocketed the profits.
So Dumont shot him dead.
Dumont's later life is a sad study in gradual decline.
Having grown a pronounced line of hair on her upper lip, she suffered the indignity
of being nicknamed "Madame Mustache."
Worse yet, her card playing abilities deserted her.
One night in 1879, she took a bottle of red wine and a dose of morphine and walked alone
out of town.
She was found dead the next morning.
Mary Katherine Horony was often called "Mrs. Doc Holliday" because of her long-standing
relationship with the dentist-turned-gun-slinger, but she was much more than just outlaw arm
candy.
She was a force all her own.
"My sweet, soft Hungarian devil."
Horony was born around 1850 in what was then the Kingdom of Hungary.
However, her family moved to Mexico where Horony's father served as the personal surgeon
to Emperor Maximilian.
When the emperor's government collapsed, the Horonys packed up and moved to Iowa.
Soon, Kate was orphaned, and then after losing her husband and son to yellow fever, ended
up as a sex worker in Dodge City.
That's where she met Wyatt Earp who, in 1875, introduced her to Doc Holliday.
She and Holliday fell head over heels in love.
Such was Horony's devotion that when Holliday was arrested for stabbing a man over a card
game, she set fire to a shed to create a distraction.
Then she threatened to shoot Holliday's jailer if he didn't free him.
Spoiler alert: Holliday was set free.
The pair eventually ended up in Tombstone, where Holliday took part in the infamous gunfight
at the O.K. Corral.
Horony wasn't in Tombstone at the time.
Holliday, concerned about her safety, sent her away, and their love affair petered out.
Horony died at age 89 in the Arizona Pioneer Home.
Pearl Hart, nicknamed the Arizona Bandit, robbed stagecoaches the way some people write
emails: Like it was her job.
And really, it was her job.
Starting in May of 1899, desperate for money to send home to her young son, Hart, she and
her lover Joe Boot decided to hold up the Globe to Florence coach.
Hart, dressed as a man, walked away from the robbery with $418 in cash.
It would have been $421, but Hart felt bad for the passengers and gave them each $1 so
they could purchase something to eat in town.
The law caught up with both Hart and Boot and they were sent to jail.
Hart then charmed some guards into helping her escape, but she was caught soon afterward.
Boot was sentenced to 30 years.
Hart though, was acquitted.
This infuriated the judge, who sentenced her to seven years for stealing the stage coach
driver's pistol.
Then, awkwardly enough, Hart got pregnant in prison and, as a way to save face, the
governor of Arizona pardoned her in 1902.
Her life afterwards is hard to pin down.
Some say she became an actress, others a player in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show.
Still others say she settled down with rancher Calvin Bywater and became, in the words of
her neighbors, "soft-spoken, kind, and a good citizen in all respects."
Before Sally Scull became one of the most feared wives on the frontier, she was simply
Sally Newman, born in 1817 in Illinois.
Six years later, her family moved to Texas where Sally got her first taste of just how
brutal life in the Wild West could be.
She once watched impressed as her mother chopped off the toes of a Native American man who'd
slid his foot under their cabin door.
Young Sally would go on to shame a neighbor for not confronting another native invader,
demanding he give her his gun.
If he couldn’t deal with the intruder, she would do it herself.
In 1833, after witnessing his heroics in a war with local tribes, Sally married Jesse
Robinson.
Robinson got out alive after 10 years of marriage.
Her next three husbands, George Scull, John Doyle, and Isaiah Watkins, were not so lucky.
All died under mysterious circumstances.
Scull became so famous for her dead mates that mothers often used her as a threat to
reign in their naughty children, saying, "You better be good or Sally Scull will get you."
No one knows exactly how Scull died, although legend has it her fifth and last husband killed
her for her money and buried her in a shallow grave.
Others say she moved to El Paso and spent her last years writing her life story.
Belle Starr didn't seem destined to be an outlaw.
She was born Myra Maybelle Shirley in Carthage, Missouri to wealthy parents and what seemed
like a prosperous future.
But then the Civil War wiped out her family's fortune and they moved to Texas to start over.
Belle, who'd worked as a scout and spy for the Confederacy during the war, soon took
up with the wrong crowd, the James-Younger gang to be exact.
Not to mention that she began associating with the criminal Jim Reed, who would eventually
become her husband.
Reed was an inveterate horse thief and bank robber.
He dragged Belle all over Texas, California, and the Indian Territories, evading the law,
murdering men, and, in general, getting into trouble.
As a young mom, Belle aided and abetted her husband, but there's little proof that she
actively participated in his crimes.
It wasn't until Reed's death in 1874 when she took up with Sam Starr, a part-Cherokee
outlaw, that her life as the Bandit Queen truly began.
"Now I'll tell you who I am.
My name is Belle Starr."
She and Sam claimed a 1000-acre ranch in Oklahoma and often played host to Jesse James and other
wanted men.
She stole horses, ran liquor, and spent a short time in jail for horse theft and boot-legging.
In 1886, Sam Starr was killed by a rival, and Belle lost her taste for crime and went
straight.
But someone apparently held a grudge; in January, 1889, she was ambushed and murdered by unknown
assailants.
Pearl de Vere got her start as a sporting woman in the late 1870s.
Born in Chicago and raised in Indiana, she moved west to make a buck off the backs of
lonely men.
De Vere arrived in Denver under the guise of one Mrs. Isabel Martin.
Denver treated de Vere well until the Silver Panic of 1893, when she decided to take her
chances on the boom town of Cripple Creek.
She set up her own brothel in the town's red light district and soon began doing very good
business.
Catering to Cripple Creek's well-to-do, she made sure the young women in her employ were
healthy and looked after.
De Vere's family back in Indiana believed she was working not as a madame but as a dressmaker,
and she did try to attain at least a level of respectability, marrying mill owner C.B.
Flynn in 1895.
But when a fire swept through town, taking her brothel and his mill with it, the marriage
effectively dissolved.
Flynn moved to Mexico; De Vere remained in Cripple Creek and opened up another entertainment
establishment, one she called the Old Homestead.
After a fabulously decadent party in June 1897, de Vere retired to her room, and finding
she couldn't sleep, took some laudanum.
She was found dead the next day.
Rose Dunn was born to a family of ne'er-do-wells.
Dunn's brothers introduced her to the Dalton Gang, a crime syndicate operating in Kansas
in the early 1890s, and to George "Bitter Creek" Newcomb, thereby sealing Dunn's fate.
She fell in love with Newcomb, who later joined the Dalton gang, and soon she was up to her
petticoats in crime and intrigue.
It was actually Newcomb who gave Dunn her nickname.
He called her the Rose of Cimarron in homage to her beauty and grace under pressure, and
she earned it.
Everything came to a head on the afternoon of September 1, 1893 when the Dalton gang,
holed up in a saloon, engaged in a gunfight with U.S. marshals in Ingalls, Oklahoma.
Dunn reportedly ran through a hail of bullets to deliver a Winchester rifle to Newcomb,
lying prone on the ground.
Some reports suggest she fired a number of shots before handing Newcomb the gun.
Can you say "relationship goals?"
Two years later, Dunn's brother's sold Newcomb out to authorities and the outlaw was killed.
Eventually, Dunn went on to marry a respected Oklahoma politician.
She lived the rest of her life in mundane respectability.
Like Etta Place, Laura Bullion found herself at the center of some of the Wild Bunch's
most nefarious deeds.
Born to outlaw Henry Bullion, she began her life of crime at 13-years-old when she first
met Ben Kilpatrick, the Tall Texan, and William Carver of Butch Cassidy and Sundance's lawless
gang.
She was welcomed into the bunch with open arms, forging signatures and taking part in
robberies, and the members dubbed her "the Rose of the Wild Bunch."
Shortly after the gang robbed the Great Northern train in July 1901, making off with $60,000,
Bullion was arrested with $8,500 worth of banknotes on her person.
She served two and a half years in prison.
The arresting officer who apprehended Bullion noted that she was "Cool, [and] shows absolutely
no fear."
She later moved to Memphis, Tennessee and lived under an assumed name as a seamstress
and housekeeper until her death at age 85.
As Wyatt Earp's common-law wife, Josephine "Sadie" Marcus was a witness to history and
often helped make it.
Marcus was a rebel from a very young age.
At 17, if her accounts of her youth can be believed, she ran away from home to join a
theater troupe.
Then, defying her parents' wishes yet again, she moved to Tombstone, Arizona to be closer
to her sweetheart, divorced ladies' man Johnny Behan.
It was in Tombstone that Marcus met Wyatt Earp, who was likewise attached.
Love like theirs could not be stopped by anything as inconvenient as having other partners,
and the two were romantically linked by the time the gunfight at the O.K. Corral threw
Tombstone into chaos on the afternoon of October 26, 1881.
"Oh my god."
Marcus stood by her man as he visited vengeance on the men he blamed for killing his brother,
Morgan.
Marcus' biographer describes her as an unforgettable beauty, a cross between Dolly Parton and Penelope
Cruz; Earp, who had been known for his wandering eye, remained with her for almost 50 years,
until his death in 1929.
Lillian Frances Smith was most known for being a rival of Annie Oakley's in Buffalo Bill's
Wild West traveling show, but like so many rebellious frontier women, she was not defined
simply by the famous people who surrounded her, or, indeed, the men who tried to capitalize
on her talent.
Smith got into sharp shooting thanks, in part, to her controlling and mercenary father.
He saw the potential to make money off his daughter's uncanny knack for shooting glass
balls out of the air, and soon Smith was on the road, entertaining audiences not just
with her gun play but with a fake Native American persona.
She joined Wild Bill Cody's troupe at age 14, and a few years later started calling
herself "Wenona" and passing as a so-called “Indian princess.”
Smith, who threw herself into the offensive role of a flirty and brash Indian with a drinking
problem, was the foil to the more Victorian and proper Oakley.
Smith was eventually forced out of the show, probably by a jealous Oakley, and she began
touring on her own, falling in and out of love with different men and taking her Indian
princess act to Hawaii, the East Coast, and the World's Fair.
When she died in 1930 at the age of 59, she was buried in full Sioux garb.
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