Pearl Hart, The Wild West's Most Notorious Woman Bandit

   

Pearl Hart stroked her pet wildcat as she leaned back on the bunk in her cell in the courthouse in Tucson, Arizona Territory. It was 1899, and she was the most infamous woman in America. Pearl and her male companion had held up a stagecoach, disarmed the driver and passengers, and stolen their money and guns. They escaped on horseback, but were captured after a long manhunt in the remote high desert. Her story made newspaper headlines, for in an era when a woman’s role was primarily domestic, Americans were simultaneously shocked and thrilled by the concept of a real woman bandit.
 
Journalists and cameramen flocked to the jail, seeking interviews and photographs. They found her a walking contradiction: a petite, attractive young woman who could alternately act like a street ruffian or a feminine ingenue. She dressed in rough cowboys’ clothing and carried a pair of six-guns. Pearl Hart talked tough, smoked cigarettes, drank liquor, used morphine, and had sex with countless men. At the same time, they saw that she was extremely bright, well-spoken, and a voracious reader. She could knit, sew, and write poetry, yet also shoot straight with a heavy Colt’s revolver. Americans had never seen or heard of anyone like her.
 
The public interest in Pearl Hart grew so intense that Cosmopolitan magazine sent two correspondents to seek an in-depth interview. Even in 1899, Cosmopolitan was the country’s most popular women’s publication. The journalists met a friendly, talkative woman in her late twenties, with her long brown hair tied up in a bun. She wore a man’s dark-colored shirt, open at the neck, and trousers held up by suspenders. Pearl loved publicity, and despite the fact that she had been charged with stage-coach robbery and faced a long prison term, she had no qualms about telling her story.
 
     “”When I was but sixteen years old, and while still at boarding school, I fell in love with a man I met in the town in which the school was situated. I was easily impressed. I knew nothing of life. Marriage was to me but a name. It did not take him long to get my consent to an elopement. We ran away one night and were married. I was happy for a time, but not for long. My husband began to abuse me, and presently he drove me from him. Then I returned to my mother, in the village of Lindsay, Ontario, where I was born.
 
     Before long, my husband sent for me, and I went back to him. I loved him, and he promised to do better. I had not been with him two weeks before he began to abuse me again, and after bearing up under his blows as long as I could, I left him again. This was just as the World’s Fair closed in Chicago, in the fall of 1893. Instead of going home to my mother again, as I should have done, I took the train for Trinidad, Colorado. I was only twenty-two years old. I was good-looking, desperate, discouraged, and ready for anything that might come. “
 
Pearl continued on in detail, describing her adventures and misadventures on the Arizona frontier. The two correspondents, scribbling furiously, wrote it all down, oblivious to the fact that they were helping create one of the most enduring legends of the American frontier. For although Pearl Hart was the West’s most notorious woman bandit, her true story has long been lost in the mists of the past. Her personal history is thoroughly obscured by legends, many of them created by Pearl herself.
 
For the next century, newspaper reporters, magazine writers, and historians repeated, and even invented, countless wild tales about her: she was the West’s first woman stage robber; she was the West’s last stage robber; she was the daughter of a wealthy Canadian family; she was a virtuous schoolgirl in Phoenix; she performed with Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show. Even her identity has been the subject of controversy: her real name was Mrs. Frank Hart, Pearl Bandman, Caroline Hartwell, Pearl Taylor, Mrs. E. P. Keele, Mrs. Earl Lighthawk, and Pearl Bywater. She was born in Canada, Ohio, and Kansas. Her husband was Brett Hart, Frederick Hart, Frank Hart, William Hart, James Taylor, Dick Baldwin, Harry Boardeman, Joe Boot, and Calvin Bywater.
 
But most of that is not true. The tales she spun in the Tucson jail have confounded authors, researchers, and historians for the last 120 years. Although Pearl Hart has been featured in hundreds of magazine articles and books, not one of them comes close to an accurate depiction of her life. But now, modern digital newspaper archives and genealogical data banks have provided the key to unraveling the mysteries of Pearl Hart’s career. Her authentic story is alternately romantic, exciting, and disturbing. For the truth is far more fascinating—and instructive—than the myths spread by popular writers, casual researchers, and deliberate fictioneers.
 
Pearl Hart was a woman far ahead of her time. She was self-reliant, adventurous, unconstrained by convention, and sexually liberated. Those attributes were extremely rare for a woman in the nineteenth century. Then, few women worked outside the home. They dressed modestly, raised children, cooked, cleaned, and managed the household. In rural America, they helped tend the family farm and often labored next to their fathers or husbands in the fields. In urban areas, there were more opportunities for employment for women: as domestic workers in middle- and upper-class homes, as seamstresses in dress shops, and as mill girls in factories and textile mills. And despite such work obligations, women were still expected to marry, bear children, and be the bedrock for moral, religious, and familial stability.
 
In the American West, most pioneer women and girls came to the frontier with their fathers, brothers, and husbands. Yet in frontier boomtowns, the first female arrivals were often prostitutes. As the lyrics of a popular song of the 1849 California Gold Rush proclaimed:
 
“The miners came in forty-nine,
The whores in fifty-one;
And when they got together.
They produced the native son.”
 
In that era, there were no welfare subsidies, no unemployment benefits, and no job security. For poor, uneducated, and unskilled women, prostitution often provided the only means of survival. Because of the huge gender imbalance on the frontier, prostitutes in the West were not held in the same disrepute as those in the East. Yet the life of a so-called fallen woman was brutal and debilitating. Many died of alcoholism, drug abuse, and violence. But many more left the profession, married, and led stable and respectable lives thereafter.
 
Among the most notable examples are Josephine Marcus Earp and Allie Sullivan Earp, the wives, respectively, of Wyatt Earp and his brother Virgil. Both lived to old age, dying in the 1940s after leaving memoirs of their famous husbands. Modern research has revealed that both Josephine and Allie had been frontier prostitutes in the 1870s, and their husbands were fully aware of their pasts.
 
Myths about women in the Old West abound, and Hollywood has been the leader in creating them. Beginning in the 1920s and ’30s, a staple in Western films has been the cowgirl: a woman who rode and dressed like a man, wore blue jeans, boots, and a cowboy hat, and often sported a six-shooter hung low from a cartridge belt. That was a screenwriter’s fantasy, for cowgirls did not exist in the Old West. The term first appeared in the 1880s and was used to describe female performers in Wild West shows. In that era, women on horseback wore skirts and rode sidesaddle. For a woman to ride like a man astride a horse was considered sexually suggestive and highly improper.
 
Prior to 1900, women almost never wore men’s trousers. In fact, most communities had laws against cross-dressing, and women who ventured out in male attire were subject to arrest. Split skirts first became popular for female bicyclists during the bicycle craze of the 1890s. But split skirts for horsewomen were virtually unknown before 1900, and such attire continued to be scandalous until the 1920s. That is why the American public was shocked by widely published photographs of Pearl Hart, wearing men’s clothing and armed to the teeth with a Winchester rifle and a brace of revolvers.
 
Most Western filmmakers have been almost clueless about how women looked, dressed, and acted in the real West. Since the 1920s, any Western movie can be immediately dated by the hairstyles of its actresses. In Westerns made in the 1920s, the women wear 1920s hairdos; in Westerns made in the 1970s, the actresses sport 1970s hairstyles, and so on. Unlike depictions in fiction and film, American women in the late nineteenth century did not exhibit long hair draping over their shoulders. A woman was expected to keep her hair up or wrapped in a bun, for it was considered immodest for a woman to display her flowing locks. Only her husband or her family were allowed to see her with hair to her shoulders, and then only when she was at home or preparing for bed. Thus originated the expression let your hair down, meaning to relax and be oneself. And in the real West, women—even prostitutes—wore demure Victorian clothing, without the cleavage so often seen on screen.
 
Contrary to Hollywood films, there was not a single female gunfighter in the history of the Wild West. That is not to say that women did not participate in gunplay. Nineteenth-century newspapers are filled with accounts of women—from common prostitutes to upper-class matrons—shooting each other as well as men. Love triangles and domestic disputes were the most common cause of such female violence. Television and movie Westerns also frequently show supposed saloon girls drinking, gambling, and rubbing shoulders with men in bars. Such depictions are wildly inaccurate. Women in a saloon or gambling hall generally worked in a brothel situated upstairs. Respectable women were not allowed in saloons. If a woman stepped into a saloon or a card parlor, she would be immediately branded a prostitute and could never again show her face in polite society.
 
The vast majority of women in the nineteenth century did not have sexual relations outside of marriage. They did not smoke, and they certainly did not use opium and morphine. They did not wear men’s clothing, ride astraddle, or carry six-shooters. Pearl Hart broke all these taboos and then some. She swore, smoked, drank, robbed, rode hard, broke jail, and used men with abandon. The Old West never saw another woman like her.
 
 
 
Excerpted from Wildcat: The Untold Story of Pearl Hart, the Wild West’s Most Notorious Woman Bandit by John Boessenecker, 2021.
 
 
The True Story of Pearl Hart, Straight-Shooting, Poetry-Writing Woman Bandit. By John Boessenecker. LitHub, November 11, 2021.

The bandits had been waiting for three hours for the stagecoach to pass. At 5 p.m. on May 30, 1899, it finally rattled down the track in Kane Spring Canyon, Ariz., and the duo made their move. Stepping out from behind a roadside bush and armed with six-shooters and Winchester rifles, they ordered the driver to stop, forcing him and his three passengers to alight.
 
Lining them up on the ground, the robbers went through the victims’ pockets, helping themselves to hundreds of dollars, firearms and jewelry. When one of the passengers resisted, the smaller of the bandits — wearing blue overalls and coarse boots that were clearly too big — laid down the law: “Cough up, partner,” he gruffly said, “or I’ll plug you.”
 
Those were the only words the thief spoke the whole time — because she was afraid of being discovered as a woman. The heist over, Pearl Hart, “The Bandit Queen,” rode off into notoriety.
 
In “Wildcat: The Untold Story of Pearl Hart, The Wild West’s Most Notorious Woman Bandit” (Hanover Square Press), out Tuesday, author John Boessenecker reveals just who the real Pearl Hart was — and it’s not who many historians believe her to be. Contrary to popular accounts, Pearl Hart wasn’t born in Kansas, nor was she the daughter of a wealthy Canadian family. She didn’t perform with Buffalo Bill Cody’s famous Wild West Show and she certainly didn’t go to boarding school.
 
No, “Pearl Hart” was born Lillie Naomi Davy on April 19, 1871, in the lumbering community of Lindsay in Ontario, Canada. Her father, Albert Davy, was a violent alcoholic who had served time for the attempted rape of a 14-year-old girl at knifepoint and who, Boessenecker suggests, likely abused his own daughters, too.
 
Like her husband, Anna Davy could neither read nor write. Between 1867 and 1885, she would give birth to nine children — Lillie being the third — and struggle to make ends meet, a situation compounded by her husband’s drinking and abuse. He once served 15 days in jail for kicking Anna and their children out of the family home and forcing them to live on the street, begging for food.
 
Later, Anna was gang-raped by four men at their shanty house, with her kids in the next room. She was five months pregnant at the time.
 
With an absent father and “no food, no job, no money and no choice,” Lillie Davy and most of her siblings took to petty crime and were habitually housed in juvenile correction facilities. One brother, 10-year-old Henry, would take his younger sisters and even their toddler brother on his burglaries. Lillie and three of her sisters, meanwhile, all worked as prostitutes. She even took her pseudonym, Pearl Hart, from a madam she had known in Buffalo. In “Wildcat,” Boessenecker explains that Lillie Davy was already working as a prostitute from as young as 13. When she was 15, she tried and failed to elope with a 36-year-old carpenter.
 
But then, marriage never really suited her.
 
As both Lillie Davy and Pearl Hart, she was married many times, sometimes officially, sometimes not. She left some husbands because they were just as abusive as her estranged father. Others, like Earl Lighthawk (who was also one of her sister Katy’s former lovers), she married using a pseudonym, as did he, as they were both still married to other people. In an argument over Hart’s infidelity, Lighthawk later shot himself in the head but survived, and the couple later welcomed a baby daughter, Saphronia Millie, in 1906.
 
Boessenecker also maintains that Hart had two more children, a boy and then a girl, and it’s believed that she sent them away to live with one of her sisters in Ohio.
 
Lillie and Katy ran away from home to avoid their “worthless wretch” of a father, cutting their hair short and wearing boys’ clothes not just to avoid detection but also to avoid the sexual advances of men while they were traveling. When they were caught committing crimes, the idea that two young girls in disguise could be capable of such things immediately caught the eye of the press: “On the Warpath — the Notorious Davy Girls Make Trouble for the Police” was one headline.
 
It was the kind of notoriety that would follow Lillie Davy — or Pearl Hart — for her entire life as she traversed the country with assorted rascals and reprobates, including Charles Dean, a streetcar brakeman by day and burglar by night, and pianist Dan Bandman, who not only robbed her of her life savings but was so abusive that Hart tried to kill herself “three or four times during their relationship.” While she appeared to revel in her celebrity, regaling scores of interviewers with her tales of adventures, all Hart ever wanted, according to Boessenecker, was “total obscurity.”
 
But that was never an option, not after the events of May 30, 1899.
 
While she was in the silver mining town of Globe, Ariz., working in what was euphemistically called a miners’ boarding house (a k a a brothel), Hart received notice that her ailing mother was suffering with heart disease and close to death back in Kansas City. Desperate to see her but without the means to get home, Hart hatched a plan with her lover at the time, a former shoemaker from Chicago who went by the name of Joe Boot: They would hold up a stagecoach.
 
Hart, disguised as a man, led the ambush, robbing the driver and three passengers of $469, some pistols and a gold watch. She was arrested before making it back to Kansas. But her mother, Anna, wouldn’t die for another 16 years.
 

When Hart was finally tracked down and arrested a week later, she was remanded in Pima County Jail in Tucson, where her fame had preceded her. Visited by a succession of reporters, photographers and adoring fans, she was even given a bobcat by an admirer, which she was allowed to keep as a pet.
 
She also met and fell in love with another inmate, Ed Hogan, but when her bobcat bit him, he picked it up and hurled it onto the stone floor, killing it instantly. As an apology, Hogan agreed to help Hart escape and having cut a hole in the wall of her cell, they pair made it as far as the local rail depot, boarding a freight train to New Mexico before being apprehended.
 
Though Hart was returned to prison, the jailbreak merely served to enhance her status as a national folk hero and feminist icon. “Pearl Hart was a women far ahead of her time,” writes Boessenecker. “She was self-reliant, adventurous, unconstrained by convention and sexually liberated. These attributes were extremely rare for a woman in the 19th century.”
 
It’s a view reinforced by Hart’s own brand of feminism. When she was arrested for the stagecoach robbery in 1899, for example, she told the court in Tucson that she would “never consent to be tried under a law she or her sex had no voice in making.”
 
It didn’t work.
 
Though one of the victims refused to give his name and press charges, likely because he had recognized Hart from one of the many brothels he had visited, the others went ahead. Hart was sentenced to five years imprisonment; Boot, her co-conspirator, was given 30 years.
 
She would serve her sentence as the only female resident among 260 prisoners at the infamous Yuma Territorial Prison, a “repulsive hellhole” on the banks of the Colorado river. She arrived by train, accompanied by lawmen and smoking a large cigar, and immediately became the “supreme object of desire” for the rest of the prison’s inmates.
 
Despite the conditions, Yuma would prove to be a transformative experience for Pearl Hart. When she was granted early parole in 1902 — largely because of an outbreak of smallpox in the prison — she had not only weaned herself off a chronic morphine addiction but also become a skilled seamstress. She’d learned to read, write and compose poetry. Meanwhile, her sister Katy enjoyed success of her own, writing a play about Hart called “The Arizona Female Bandit.”
 
America was shocked and thrilled by the idea of a female outlaw. Newspapers clamored for interviews with Hart, while Cosmopolitan, a new magazine at the time, was obsessed with her, often sending reporters to try to get quotes out of her. She was regularly portrayed as daring and devious, romantic and free-spirited, even though the reality of Hart’s gritty existence was anything but.
 
It’s one of the reasons there are so many “falsehoods and folklore” about her life, as Boessenecker calls them. Visit her Wikipedia page and you’ll essentially be reading the life story of someone else. There, you will see she was born “Pearl Taylor” and that she died in 1954, under the name “Pearl Bywater.” According to Boessenecker, she actually died 20 years earlier at her daughter’s home in Los Angeles, later being interred in Rose Hill Memorial Park, under her married name Lillie Naomi Meyers.
 
While Hart herself certainly embellished her story in interviews, it’s also true that Hollywood has never really been accurate in its portrayal of women in the Old West. There were, for instance, no such thing as “cowgirls” in the Old West,” as the term was only ever used to describe female performers in circus shows. And, contrary to what you might have seen on the silver screen, there wasn’t a single female gunfighter back then.
 
That’s what really marks Pearl Hart’s story as remarkable: She led a life at odds with societal norms and convention.
 
“The vast majority of women in the nineteenth century did not have sexual relations outside of marriage,” writes Boessenecker. “They did not smoke, and they certainly did not use opium and morphine. They did not wear men’s clothing, ride astraddle or carry six-shooters. Pearl Hart broke all these taboos and then some. She swore, smoked, drank, robbed, rode hard, broke [out of] jail and used men with abandon.
 
“The Old West never saw another woman like her.”
 
 
The wild life and death of the Old West’s feminist bandit, Pearl Hart. By Gavin Newsham.  New York Post, October 30, 2021. 

Lindsay native Pearl Hart became a media sensation in America’s West in 1899, shocking the public as a smoking, drinking, drug-abusing woman who robbed a stagecoach disguised as a man and armed to the teeth.
 
She was a trailblazer in the truest sense of the word, one-of-a-kind, just as her name suggests.
 
So it’s easy to understand how she captured the imagination of best-selling author John Boessenecker who recently released Wildcat: The Untold Story of the Canadian Woman who Became the West’s Most Notorious Bandit, a biography of Hart.
 
The life-long Western enthusiast and award-winning historian had just the right balance of research skill and dogged determination to take on the project, diving into territorial records and genealogical data for countless hours, assembling the puzzle pieces of a life lived with one foot in the spotlight and the other firmly in the shadows.
 
When researching another book in 2012, Boessenenecker came across the story of Hart, and was immediately intrigued.
 
 
“This would be a great book if I can figure out who she is,” he remembers thinking, but turns out, Hart and her family had done a fine job of hiding her birth name.
 
“That was the hardest part was figuring out her real name.”
 
He connected some dots after finding records of Hart’s sister and brother with the last name Davy before discovering her birth name had been Lillie. The author then decided to call the Lindsay branch of the Kawartha Lakes Public Library to see if he could track down more information.
 
 “They promptly sent me a big fat file, because they had figured out years earlier who Pearl Hart was and I felt like an idiot for putting in all this work when I could have just called this library in Lindsay,” Boessenecker recalls with a laugh.
 
“They were extremely collaborative,” he adds, which is why they get a special shout-out in the acknowledgments of his book, noting their research, “proved crucial to uncovering the real life of Pearl Hart,” alongside an acknowledgment to the Olde Gaol Jail (now museum) whose role was in providing jail register information on Hart’s ne’er-do-well father Albert Davy.
 
“That opened up the floodgates, when I figured out her name was Lillie Davy,” he says.
 
Hart was born in Lindsay to Albert, an abusive criminal who she described as a, “worthless wretch,” and mother Anna, her only stabilizing influence, and eight other siblings.
 
“They grew up in abject poverty,” says Boessenecker, adding that the children were put to work on the family farm young, and took to stealing and, in the case of the girls, prostituting themselves by the time they were in their early teens. 
 
“This was clearly a matter of survival, they had no marketable skills.”
 
At 13-years-old, Pearl (then Lillie), ran away to Buffalo with her younger sister Katy to escape their abusive father.
 
Poring over court documents from the time that detailed the trauma the Davy children suffered at the hands of their father went a long way in understanding the person young Lillie would become, says Boessenecker.
 
“When you read that, you understand what made Pearl Hart.”
 
“She was definitely a child of circumstance,” says Boessenecker.
 
By the time the girls ran away, they were already tough as nails, intelligent and adapted to do what they needed to do to survive including dressing as men to avoid unwanted sexual advances and stealing.
 
 “It shows that Pearl Hart didn’t just come out of nowhere, she had many years of experience that led up to the stagecoach robbery,” he says.
 
“They were survivors and made the most of what they had.”
 
The day that put ‘The Bandit Queen’ in the history books was May 30, 1899 when she, disguised as a man, held up a stagecoach in Arizona and robbed the passengers at gunpoint. The ensuing ‘man’ hunt and subsequent capture and discovery of Hart’s gender turned her into a national sensation – even Cosmopolitan did a spread of her -  and the most notorious female outlaw on the Western frontier.
 
“The public was just stunned by her arrest,” says the author.
 
“This was headline news all around the country.”
 
And although Hollywood may tell you otherwise, Boessenecker says the West had not seen the likes of Hart.
 
“That’s what makes her so unusual, there was no such thing as a cowgirl in the Wild West,” he says of the time where most women were at home.
 
“A woman that robbed a stagecoach? Unheard of.”
 
The whole thing reads like something out of a movie complete with a prison escape and hung jury – thanks to her well-practised use of her feminine wiles to sway a fellow inmate and the all-male jury respectively - before Hart was ultimately sent away to Yuma Prison for her role in the crime.
 
After being released from prison, Hart’s life once again became a mystery as she changed her name and essentially disappeared. Bessenecker however was able to piece together, with some help from Hart’s great, great niece, the remaining years of her life when she turned it all around, ultimately living with her daughter and helping raise her grandbabies first in Hawaii, then Los Angeles.
 
“She dies as a matronly, lower-middle class grandmother,” he says.
 
Beyond telling the fascinating, if dark, tale of Hart’s life, Boessenecker says he hopes people reading the book will truly understand the importance of having safety nets in place for children, so those suffering abuse and trauma have a place to go, something Hart never had.
 
“I think today, the time borne lesson of the book is the importance of the protection of children.”
 
Wildcat: The Untold Story of the Canadian Woman who Became the West’s Most Notorious Bandit, was released this month and is available in most book stores as well as on Amazon. The San Francisco author has penned 10 other books, including Texas Ranger: The Epic Life of Frank Hamer, the man who Killed Bonnie and Clyde, which went on to become a New York Times Best-Seller.
 
Untold story of Lindsay's infamous female stagecoach robber Pearl Hart subject of new book. By  Barbara-ann Maceachern. The Star November 16, 2021.
 

When it comes to the Old West, writer and Wild West expert John Boessenecker thinks most published accounts are at least misleading. He blames it on the lazy research practices of the 21st century.

 “I kind of cringe when someone tells me they’re writing a book about the Old West,” he said last week during a phone call from his home near San Francisco. “Because a lot of time their research involves googling Wikipedia entries. In the old days, you went to state library archives and sat at a microfilm machine until you were nauseous. Your eyes got blurry and the librarians kicked you out at five. The way I see it, if you haven’t had a run-in with a rat in the basement of a courtroom records archive in west Texas, you aren’t doing research.”

 Boessenecker spent two full years researching his latest, Wildcat, big hunks of which are set in Arizona. The just-published biography retells the life of infamous Wild West outlaw Pearl Hart, unraveling the mythology of this gun-toting, pants-wearing, slutty, and foul-mouthed woman who worked as a prostitute and held up a stagecoach in the late 19th century.

 “So much of what we thought we knew about her came from oral histories and from made-up stories about Pearl’s life in the wilderness,” said Boessenecker, who first read about Hart in high school in the late 1960s. “Then in 2012, I wrote a biography of Bob Paul, one of the great lawmen of the Old West and the sheriff of Pima County. In researching that book, I discovered that Pearl Hart had been locked up in the Pima County jail and that Bob Paul was trying to get her off morphine. I was as hornswoggled as anyone by Pearl’s story and by the ones made up by 1890s yellow journalists. Which was pretty much all journalists back then.”

 Intrigued, Boessenecker dug deeper into Hart’s life before and after her infamous stagecoach stick-up. He discovered a 19th-century feminist who didn’t care much for “a woman’s place” in proper society.

 “She rejected all expectations of women, at a time when there was no context for doing so. Women were expected to marry and have babies and do chores — not run a brothel or rob a stagecoach. But if you’d called her a feminist to her face, Pearl would have had no idea what you were talking about.”

 Boessenecker isn’t certain where Pearl got her gumption.

 “Clearly she was desperate to escape an abusive father and a life of poverty,” he said. “She was bright and attractive but there was a lack of opportunities. When you combine that with her incredible courage, where she runs away from home and dresses like a boy, escapes from the institution in Chicago, you have to think there’s something in her character that’s more than just an abused, defenseless young woman. She stood up for herself and engaged in misadventures that would have done in a lesser woman. Or a lesser man.”

 Boessenecker estimates he’s been collecting information on famous and obscure lawmen since he was 13 or 14.

 “You acquire a lot of useless information about gunfights and lynchings,” he said, “but you also get a broad view of what lawlessness looked like back then. Arizona was wild and untamed, but so were a lot of other places, as it turns out.”

 He doesn't think people are intrigued by the Wild West because of Hollywood movie westerns.

 “People were obsessed with the Old West in the 1860s. Americans like a story about bettering themselves, and that’s what the Settlement Period was about. It held out promise for the future, that any working man could succeed, have a new life, get 180 acres and a mule. The story of that pioneering spirit is still imbued in the American character.

 There are all kinds of misconceptions about the old days, Boessenecker says. “There’s this kooky idea that the Old West wasn’t violent. I and others have debunked that with research that shows how the homicide rates were astronomical. In the 1860s in Arizona, your odds of getting killed were greater than those of infantrymen in Vietnam.”

 Boessenecker has a theory about why, in the bigger history picture, Pearl Hart is largely forgotten.

 “She started out loving the spotlight that came with being a lady outlaw. But after she got out of Yuma prison, she became more reclusive and began to hide herself and her story. She got her family to help her with that.”

 

It didn’t help that when he wrote Duel in the Sun, author Niven Busch changed Pearl’s last name to Chavez, the same name used in the popular movie based on Pearl’s lawless life.

 “If they’d used her real name and been more true to Pearl’s story,” Boessenecker said, “she’d be better known today.”

 Instead, when it came to women of the Old West, one heard stories about Annie Oakley and Belle Starr.

 “And neither of those women ever robbed anyone in their lives,” Boessenecker sighed.

The New Book Wildcat Tells How Outlaw Pearl Hart Roughed Up the Old West. By Robrt L. Pela. Phoenix New Times, November 10, 2021.

Boessenecker’s new biography of Pearl Hart, plus a new dual bio of Geronimo and Sitting Bull, new histories of train robbing and the Western mail service and a new Old West heroine.

 
In recent years, John Boessenecker has published outstanding biographies and histories on subjects we have come to expect from the San Francisco-based historian: Frank Hamer, Wyatt Earp and the Cowboys, Bob Paul and Wells Fargo. But, with the recent Wildcat: The Untold Story of Pearl Hart, The Wild West’s Most Notorious Woman Bandit (Hanover Square Press, $28.99), he has outdone himself by rewriting the history of one of the most legendary women of the American West, and established a new model for writing Western women’s, family and criminal history. The life and times of Lillie N. Davy, aka Pearl Hart, make a heartbreaking, larger-than-life tale of family poverty, child abuse and frontier survival but also an enlightening and inspiring story of a woman and her family’s determination to survive, live, love and thrive, no matter the odds. As Boessenecker writes, “to understand Pearl Hart, one must know where she came from, how she grew up, and how her childhood affected her adult life.”
 
What I find remarkable about Boessenecker’s biography of Pearl Hart is the detailed research he did on her life, her siblings and her parents. He credits both Hart’s great-grand-niece Renee Gallagher for sharing the heretofore unknown family archive, including rare photos, and Arizona historian Jean Smith for generously sharing her research on Hart. Boessenecker’s style of synthesizing the information from Gallagher and Smith with the available public record, primary sources, newspaper accounts and secondary materials resulted in one of the most intriguing Canadian-American family history biographies published in recent years.
 
In fact, to U.S. historians of the 19th and 20th centuries who teach Mark Twain’s classic novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—still one of the most important novels published in American history on rural poverty, child abuse, alcoholism and the criminal justice system—I would recommend Boessenecker’s Wildcat be immediately added to their course syllabi.
 
For historians interested in the Gilded Age/Progressive era topics of family, poverty, frontier childhood, criminal justice, prostitution, marriage, abuse and women’s history, Wildcat should be considered a theoretical model for future monographs. Hart’s life story, now out of the shadows, should be studied, and—ironically, because she was so reclusive in her last years—held up to represent the challenges women faced across North America in the 19th and much of the 20th century.
 
Boessenecker continues to surprise us by pulling back the curtain on assumptions and legends about Western events and characters to reveal new facts, interpretations, perspective and context. From his first book, Badge and Buckshot: Lawlessness in Old California, to his latest prior to Wildcat, Ride the Devil’s Herd: Wyatt Earp’s Epic Battle Against the West’s Biggest Outlaw Gang, the intrepid author’s arc of publishing reminds me of two venerable historians of the West: the late Richard H. Dillon and Robert M. Utley. Like Dillon and Utley, Boessenecker does detailed and well-documented research. The questions he asks are fresh and reveal new perspectives, and his prose is literary and highly readable. So where will his research compass take him next? I am eager to find out, as I am sure most of his readers are, who he will write about next. In the meantime, I believe Wildcat should inspire other Western historians to flip well-known subjects and personalities on their heads and begin asking if we know everything we should about the topic, or if it is time to discover the truth behind our most legendary and mythic Old West men and women.
 
Notorious and Legendary. By Stuart Rosebrook. True West, November 2021.

“I shall never submit to be tried under the law that neither I nor my sex had a voice in making.”, Pearl Hart

Harlequin Books