On May 30, 1899, history was made when Pearl Hart, disguised as a man, held up a stagecoach in Arizona and robbed the passengers at gunpoint. A manhunt ensued as word of her heist spread, and Pearl Hart went on to become a media sensation and the most notorious female outlaw on the Western frontier. Hailed by many as “The Bandit Queen,” her epic life of crime and legacy as a female trailblazer provide a crucial lens into the lives of the rare women who made their mark in the American West.
My guest, New York Times bestselling author and Old West historian John Boessenecker shares incredible stories from the life of Lily Davy (aka Pearl Hart) and her equally fascinating sister Katy Davy. His book is called “Wildcat: The Untold Story of Pearl Hart, the Wild West’s Most Notorious Woman Bandit”.
More information can be found on John Boessenecker’s author’s page: https://www.harpercollins.com/blogs/authors/john-boessenecker-202012295846868
Transcript (Note – this has been transcribed through an automated transcription software and isn’t 100% accurate. The best place to get the entire story is from the book itself!)
Welcome everyone, to another episode of the Most Notorious podcast. I’m Erik Rivenes. Thank you again for hanging out with me. By the way, this episode contains especially sensitive themes and listener discretion is advised. I am very pleased to reintroduce this week’s guest, New York Times bestselling author, John Boessenecker.
He is one of the leading authorities on crime and law enforcement in the old West. He’s the award-winning author of nine books, including one you might remember from a few years ago, Texas Ranger, The epic Life of Frank Hamer The Man Who Killed Bonnie and Clyde. He returns today to talk about one of his latest page turners: Wild Cat, The Untold Story of Pearl Heart, The Wild West’s Most Notorious Woman, Bandit.
Great to have you back. Thank you.
Thanks so much for having me.
Pearl Heart is someone, I assume you came across in in previous research, what a life she had. What was the process like bringing her back to life inthis book?
Well, I first heard about her back in high school, which would be in the late 1960s.
I’ve been a western buff since I was a kid. and anybody who reads about the Old West sooner or later is gonna run across Pearl Heart. She’s the most famous woman outlaw of the old West. I’ve wanted to do a book about Pearl Heart for years, and in the old days before the internet, it would’ve been impossible to track somebody down without having access to digital newspaper sites.
In the old days, I’d go to a library or a research facility like the Bancroft Library at the University of California in Berkeley, and I’d spend the whole day reading newspaper microfilm, searching, researching my various projects, and then while looking for news stories about people I was researching, I’d find other things by accident and gradually compile a lot of information.
But you cannot do that when you’re. Researching an individual like Pearl Hart, you’re looking for a needle in a haystack. And so if it wasn’t for the, what I call the wonders of the internet, this book would’ve been impossible and we would’ve never known Pearl Hart’s. True story. Right,
Exactly. So like many of the, the criminals we’ve covered on this show, Pearl Heart, Born Lily, Davy and her brothers and sisters had very harrowing childhoods.
Can you tell us more about Pearl Heart’s
early life? Yes. If you go on Wikipedia, for example, and you read about Pearl Heart, the person that they describe is a fictional character. It’s not Pearl Hart. My research led me to find Pearl Hart’s real name by checking. Digital newspaper sites, census records, Canadian genealogical records.
She always said that she was born in Lindsay, Ontario, Canada. And I started by looking at the census records and then by looking at some of the real facts we knew about Pearl Heart. And that led me to the family of, and Anna Davey in Lindsay Ontario. And that opened up the floodgates to information about the family.
And not surprisingly, a woman who later turned out to be a notorious stage robber in the southwest, you know, was, she was clearly not a graduate of Harvard University. She obviously came from some kind of tumultuous background. And when I began researching the Davy family, It was just absolutely shocking.
The horrible trauma that Lily, who, which was Pearl’s real name and her sisters and brothers, grew up with her father, Albert Davy was sort of what we call today a lumber jack and the Canadian North Woods. He married this very kind woman named Anna Duval. She was from a French Canadian family.
Albert Davey was from an English Canadian family, and he was a heavy drinker lazy gambler and just perverted sexually. You know, as I did my research, Albert Davy, one of the most notorious incidents that I found published in the various Canadian newspapers in the 1870s when Pearl was very young.
Lily, I will call her. She was born in 1873 and when she was very young, her father tried to rape a teenage school girl in the remote woods outside of the town they were living then in, in rural Ontario, Canada. And he was tearing the girl’s clothing off. She’s screaming. Her father is far away working in a field and didn’t hear her screams.
And, but before he could consummate this rape the girl’s dog, which had been out running around through the woods, hurt her cries for help and charge forward it’s teeth ning and just ripped into Albert Davey and bit him and, and Davey fled. It’s just an incredible story right out of a novel except it actually happened.
It’s documented both in the newspapers and in court records. Albert Daffy was sent to the penitentiary for attempted rape and was also sentenced to be flogged, which is something Canadian law did provided for back then. He served a prison term. He comes out of prison and continues to abuse his wife and daughters.
And their childhood was clearly very traumatic.
Yeah, it certainly was. So, at the point when all this happened we had Lily, her younger sister, Katie they had an older sister
as well.
Yes. She was the oldest. There were nine kids total. One brother died at age 10. The rest of them all lived in two very late adulthood.
Her sisters lived up until the 1950s. And I’m getting ahead of myself here, but I give anything to interview her sister, Katie Davey, who had a career that rd that of Lilly, also known as Pearl Heart.
So one of the, the pivotal moments in their young lives, which had to have been incredibly traumatic for them, was an assault that took place on their mother while their father was away, right?
Yes. And briefly what happened was the, as I’ve mentioned, the father was very abusive. Canada had a kind of dowry law that protected the marital property, rights of women, and most parts of the United States of women, you know, didn’t have equal rights under the law. They did under the criminal law, but not under civil law.
And after a lot of poverty, they had finally bought a home in a village in the north Woods of Ontario. And Albert Davy wanted the money. He was just a horrible drunk and just a scoundrel, as I’ve said. And Anna refused to sell their home. So he beat her and tried to get her to sign the deed over, and she still refused.
And so finally she took the children with her to a village in Eastern Ontario where she had friends and they let her stay in this ram shackle old shack next to a river. And living with her were all of her younger children. She had, I believe about seven of them at the time, including the older girls, Snia, Lily and Katie.
At that time, Lily and Katie were in their early teens and neighborhood boys came around and they believed that the girls were prostitutes. And apparently they were, because the court testimony that came out later showed that their brother, or one or both of their brothers, Henry and Willie, had been stealing things in the neighborhood.
And that the two daughters, Lily and Katie had been accused of Hoing or prostitution. And so one night, these four rowdy Canadian in their late teens, early twenties, all of ’em drunk as a skunk, approached the home at night. They apparently thought it was a brothel, and they threw rocks against the windows.
And it turned out that Lily had already gone back to Lindsay, the, the town she was born in and leaving her sister Katie, with the younger kids present. And the short version is these four broke into this ram shackle hut. They repeatedly gang raped Anna. At that time she was pregnant with her ninth child.
It’s just a horrific incident. And finally Katie ran for help and a courageous farmer who lived probably a quarter to a third of a mile away, ran up and he struck one of these thugs over the head with a rock. He beat up another one and made them all flee. And then Anna, to her credit, went with the neighbor to the local Canadian constables swore out warrants.
And all four of these men, young men, A couple of whom were from fairly prominent families were all convicted of rape and sentenced to lengthy terms in the Canadian penitentiary. So this was one example of a horrible trauma suffered by the Davy girls and the Davy brothers. It’s, yeah,
it’s just terrific beyond words.
So Lily and Katie seemed especially close. Their, their best of friends and they leave home at, at what
age do they leave?
The first time that they ran away from home, lil was 13 and Katie was 11 and they were just joined at the hip and this sort of trauma I point out in my book not just then, but to this day, children that are abused from the same family.
That abuse and trauma binds them together because they each know that each other, their siblings are the only people that they can trust and rely on. And that’s exactly what happened in the Davy family. So all of the Davy family remained close for the rest of their lives until they final Sister’s finally died in the mid 1950s.
They were still living within a few blocks of each other. But in this case, this would be in the late 1880s Katie and Lily began running away from home and they’d dress like boys. And this is something that comes up later in Pearl Heart’s life when she repeatedly dressed like a man. And the reason that they dress like boys.
Was they wanted to avoid unwanted sexual advances because they would board freight trains. They pretend to be young hobos and they’d take off and go to various cities, you know that the family at this point had moved into the US and settled in Rochester, New York. And the, the girls were repeatedly in trouble with the police.
They’d go home and they’d be abused by their father. I believe they were sexually abused cuz they were all the girls were sexualized at a very early age into escape this kind of abuse. They dress like boys jump on a freight train. At first they went to Hamilton, Ontario. Another time they escaped by train to Buffalo, New York and their longest trip.
They ended up first in Chicago and finally in Windom in Minnesota. And it was during
their time in Windom, Minnesota that they were for the first of many times, written about in newspapers.
Yes, that’s true. And, and in this case by this time when they went to Windom, Lily, or Pearl is in her mid teens, She’s about 15, Katie’s two years younger.
And Lily claimed that she was engaged to this flashy Canadian guy who had moved back to Calgary Alberta, Canada. And so she and Katie jumped onto a freight train, again, dressed as boys, and they wanted to beat their way back across the Midwest. To try to find Lilly’s supposed fiance who was actually like a saloonkeeper in his early thirties.
And you know, the, you know, and of course this was an age in, in which it wasn’t uncommon for a 15 year old girl to marry a 30 year old man. That was true in the Anglo community. It was true in the African American community. It was true in the Latino community. So it’s just a social thing that today you go to prison for doing something like that.
And in the 19th century it was still considered odd, but it wasn’t illegal. And we know that through many historic unions in American history of very young women marrying much older men. So that was something, not the scandalous as the other things I’m gonna talk about, but in any event, They leave in the winter and they, the railroad is blocked because of huge snow blocking the train tracks that would bring them farther west than Minnesota.
And so they ended up getting stuck in Windom. And a young journalist sees the two girls in tears where he sees a band of young ruffians abusing these two young boys. So he thinks at the Railroad Depot in Wyndham. So he rescues them, takes them to a nearby hotel. The hotel keep, and his wife are very compassionate.
They bring these two boys in and they get them cleaned up and everything. But, and then they take them to church a few days later. And couple of the people at the church are impressed. That these two boys are so well behaved. They’re studying the Bible. They’re not goofing around in church, and especially the son of the hotel.
Keep, think this is a little odd. They’re not like acting like all the other boys in town. But in any event they are very well received in Windom. Unknown to the people in Windom, the two young boys are stealing various items, ping various things. And finally, after a, a week or two in the hotel, the hotel keeper’s son goes upstairs to tell them something in their little room in the hotel, and he sees Lilly undressing and he blurts out.
You’re not a boy, you’re a girl. And that creates an uproar and eventually it ends up in newspapers all over the Midwest. They’re photographed. In their urchins clothing. I even got a wooden engraving of that photograph, which is published in some of the newspapers in the Midwest because the whole idea of two girls running away dressing like boys and escaping from an abusive home on the back of a railroad train box car is something that might be common in a Hollywood movie, but in the real reality of 19th century America, that was a highly unusual,
It’s interesting. They were interviewed by reporters on many occasions, and you put down on paper some of the s slang that they were using, and their, their speech was filled with profanity and s slang that we associate with 19th century New York. Lots of Dems and dees.
Exactly. And, and in some ways the Davy girls just to summarize their character, all of them were extremely attractive and which is something that you know, led them, helped lead them into a life of prostitution.
They learned to use their sexual allure to manipulate men. They used it for financial survival in an era in Canada. Back then, there were no laws requiring children to attend school. Those laws weren’t enacted until about 1890 when it was really too late for the Davy girls because they were already in their mid and late teens at that point.
And so these girls were at the same time in addition to their good looks. All of the children, both the boys and the girls, were extremely intelligent. And it’s just sort of a tragedy when you think if those girls were born today, They’d have ended up as doctors and lawyers and, you know, Lord knows what else they would’ve had successful lives given how intelligent they were, this innate intelligence.
And so what the Davy girls were able to do, they had this natural brilliance. They would just, and they were excellent actresses. And we’ll see that later as we talk about what happened with both Lily and Katie. So they were able to for a purpose of, of survival, they were able to assume different personalities.
So in the same breath, they could pretend to be a gorgeous young woman, girl on Janu or a Boy Street, Rian, and they could instantly turn on their street slang and turn it off depending upon the circumstances. And so at first, They would turn on the street slang when they were trying to convince everybody in Windham that they were really boys.
And then when their, the jig was up and everybody knew that they were runaways from Rochester, New York and what their real names were and everything, then they suddenly acted like innocent young school girls. Yeah.
So they are sent back east, right? Closer to their mother?
Yeah. The chief of Police of Rochester, New York He sends a wire to Minnesota and says, The authorities out there, both in Chicago and Minnesota, would do us a favor if you kept the Davy girls and don’t send them back. And so what happens is today we have the s pca, the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in the 19th Century. There were no social programs, there were no social welfare, no social workers, no laws protecting children.
You know, there was no Child Protective Services. But what they did have was a huge charity, the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children. And it had chapters all over the United States and they ran homes for abused children. And so workers from this organization placed the girls into a home in Minnesota, but they continued to act up and finally they were kicked out of the home.
So they made their way back to Chicago and both of ’em were quickly arrested. Katie punched out a police officer in the Chicago courthouse, and finally they were put into. A home for airing women. That’s airing E R R I N G, airing women were generally prostitutes or sneak thieves who had aired in their ways.
And this, these were you know, like reform schools reformatories to try to improve their behavior. And so they were locked up in this home in Chicago, and the girls instead tied sheets together, climbed out the window from the second or third story of this big building and escaped they were eventually recaptured and finally sent back to Rochester.
And then they just had, you know, just one misadventure after another. What happened was that Lily, aka Pearl and her older sister, married a pair of brothers in Rochester, and it turned out that one of ’em was a notorious thief. They got mixed up with another thief who was shot dead trying to burglarize a home in upstate New York.
And when the officers searched his pockets they found notes that he had written to Katie and Lily Davy, and had a photograph of the sisters in his pockets. So these girls were, at this point, were associating with very dangerous spells, right?
And along with their association with various criminals, they continue working as prostitutes.
And Katie’s ambitions included running her own business. She became
a madame. Yes. Katie was actually 17 when she opened her own brothel in the Red Light District of Buffalo, New York. It was known as the hooks because it was near the Eie Canal where the big hooks were used to unload barges. And this is a very rough neighborhood.
And she opened a brothel in rooms above a very popular and notorious saloon. And while Katie was opening her brothel Lily is up in Hamilton across the river in Canada. And she’s hanging out with a bunch of thieves, this gang of street Rs, and she’s dressed like a boy. And at this point she’s fairly notorious.
So the judge convicts her of Crossdressing, which was illegal back then. Most communities, most states in, in the US as well as the in Canada, had laws that prevented men from dressing like women and vice versa. So she gets sent for three years to a reformatory in Ontario, and she finally gets released and makes a beline for Buffalo, where she meets Katie, who’s running her brothel.
And Katie is also getting to be fairly notorious at one point. A guy had been pestering her and was like, I don’t, I don’t want to call it stalking, cuz that term didn’t exist back then. But she heard a noise at the door of her brhel and she had a little peephole so she could look out and see if it was a police officer or a customer.
All hookers need to discern the difference, obviously. And she sees an eye in the peephole, so she immediately grabs her knife and stabs the customer in the eye and the guy flees and he’s so humiliated. He’s from a good family. He’s so fu humiliated to be caught trying to enter a brothel that he never has her arrested.
He goes away. Nobody knows what happened to the guy after she stabbed him in the eye. But Katie was a pretty tough customer herself. Oh,
no doubt. Yeah. So there are some questionable men that come in and out of, of both Lilly and Katie’s lives, and one of these men for Lilly is, is kind of a near do well
pianist.
Yeah, that’s right. And his name is Dan Bandman and he’s actually comes from a very prominent family. His father is a well known engineer who does did engineering work for both railroads and mines in South America. They send their son Dan to an engineering school, which he has no interest in it.
This is in New York. His uncle also named Daniel Bandman, is one of the preeminent Shakespearean actors in North America. At the time, and so this is a very prominent family, but Dan Bandman is the black sheep of the family. He finally drops out of this technical school he’s attending. I don’t know if you wanna call it a college or not, but today it would be a college.
And he takes to the saloon circuit playing the piano in cheap brothels and honky tonk saloons. And he ends up in Chicago at the time of the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893. And by all accounts, that’s where Lilly Davy, who at some point has taken up the alias of Pearl Heart, and they supposedly are married.
However, there are no records of Lily Davy marrying Daniel Bandman anywhere. So they were probably just had a common law relationship.
So, at what point does Lilly decide to go west and what propels her to hop on a train and leave her family behind?
Well, it turns out that Dan Bandman is no different than Lilly’s father.
He’s a drunk he’s abusive. He beats her. He also gets her addicted to opium. And she always said later and blamed she had a opium habit and a morphine addiction, and she blamed that on Dan Bandman. And there’s no reason to doubt her at all because Bandman himself had a very checkered career. So what happens is, at this point when she was in Buffalo.
With her sister Katie. And whether you know Lily also worked as a prostitute in Buffalo was unclear. She probably did. At that time, the most famous, or at least the most notorious madam in Buffalo was a woman named Pearl Hart, who wa ran a brothel also above a saloon that was owned by her lover, who was also named heart.
That’s where these prostitutes would always take the name of their pimp as their last name. And she eventually committed suicide. And that is the best that I can do as far as figuring out where Lily got the name Pearl Hart, because after that point, after she leaves Dan Bandman in about 1894 she adopts the name Pearl Hart and used that ever.
Ever after and never to save her family from disgrace. She would never connect her name with the Pearl Heart name. And so what happens is, as she decides to head west, a chapter in my book is called Go West, Young Woman. Go West, which is the old hore advice, go west, Young man, go west. And she followed that advice.
She ends up in southern Colorado by her own account. She’s working in a brothel. There she has no money, no skills. You know, she wants to get away from this abusive husband. At some point she had two children. She always said that Bandman was the father of the children. And she said that she had returned them to her mother, who by that time had moved to Toledo, Ohio.
And she said that the mother raised her children. And there’s, you know, a lot of unclear evidence about exactly who the children were. And I kind of deal with that in my book. But then she leaves Southern Colorado and goes to Phoenix, which in 1894 is really a frontier town. I mean, the Southern or the southwest, New Mexico and Arizona are still territories.
The Apache Wars were only completed a few years earlier. The numbers of Rian’s outlaws in the both states are overwhelming. Keep in mind, the Lincoln County War and Billy the kid, only ended 12 years before the gun fight at the, Okay. Corral only took place 12 or 13 years before. And the operations of the huge gangs of Outlaws that were involved.
In the Lincoln County War and in the so-called Tombstone Wars, the cowboys, curly bill brochures that was all something that wasn’t that far in the past. And those outlaws were all supplanted by legions of cattle thieves. Gun fighters fugitives from justice from all over the country would go to these two territories.
And because of these problems, that’s one of the principle reasons why Arizona and New Mexico did not even become states until 1912 because they were considered to be so isolated, so and so lawless. So in 1894, Phoenix is a wide open, rough, and tumble town. It’s a mixture of the old style adobe homes, wood shacks, and brick and stone.
Modern buildings that are sprouting up and eventually make it into the metropolis that it is today. But it was nothing like that in the 1890s. And so in Phoenix, she then becomes a very well known Lady of the night works in the so-called houses of Ill fame, and ends up in the newspapers, off and on for using opium and morphine, getting into fights with people, that kind of thing.
And probably not too uncommon a life from the many, many other prostitutes that were in Phoenix at the time. And she’d also go back and forth and sometimes she would work as a prostitute in gay alley in Tucson and then would go back to back to Phoenix. So she worked both places, but primarily in Phoenix.
And it was during her, her time in Arizona that she taught herself to shoot and she became quite an expert at, At shooting. At shooting at Targets at least.
Yes. By within a few years, she goes down to Mammoth, which is still is a remote mining town in Central Arizona. And she either buys or steals or trades something or other for a gun and a revolver and by a number of accounts, she practiced with it and became a good shot.
And then while she’s in Mammo, she meets this guy who called himself Joe Boot, Nobody’s ever been able to figure out, but it ain’t Joe Boot. And she says that he formally was a, a, a shoe, a cobbler, a shoe repair guy in Chicago, and he claimed to be a minor in Mammoth. Although the local journalists all said he was just sort of a saloon lounger, kind of a hanger on in, in Bordellos and in red light districts.
And so the two of them become sexually involved. And the one thing about Joe Boot, he’s very handsome, he’s diminutive, he’s only five four, but he treats her well. He never beats her. He doesn’t have the strong personality that some of these other men that she’s been involved with has, or or I should say had, but the two of them become close and they eventually move up to globe.
Which is a bigger, more prosperous town in Mammoth, and she continues to work there as a prostitute. Now she claimed later that the two of them got a mining claim and were working as minors. It was exhaustive work, but she was actually, I think she was actually mining her customer’s pockets for money rather than mining for any kind of riches in the soil.
And it’s while she’s hanging around, Joe Boot or Joe Boot is, is hanging around her that she receives word that her mother is ill and she becomes desperate. Well, that’s what, what she says later on she becomes desperate to see her mother, but she doesn’t have the money to get to her. And her mother is in Kansas City at this point.
Yes. Several of the family members, it settled in Kansas City and the mom was there as well, living with her sister Katie. And that’s a whole nother story. And she Pearl, I’ll call her Pearl, just to be clear now, because that’s the name she used. Pearl Hart later claimed that her mother was deathly ill and she needed the money to go back and either she claimed that she was in Toledo, Ohio, which she may have been, but I think she was probably in Kansas City at the time.
The problem is when Pearl Hart tells these various stories later on, and she told a lot of stories, most of them had about 25% truth and about 75% Balone. So you have to take a lot of what she says with a grain of salt because she was always trying to protect her family members from the disgrace. That would come if it became general knowledge, what her real name was.
So in any event whether you know, her, her mother lived another 10 or 12 years after that. So whether she was really deathly ill or not is debatable, but she and Joe Boot decide you know, the only way to get enough money to get out of Arizona territory is to steal it. And that’s what they decide to do.
Right. So this infamous event in Arizona history happens at the end of May, 1899. What, what, what’s the plan for holding up the stage coach and whose idea is it?
The facts seemed pretty clear that this was Pearl Hart’s idea to rob a stage coach. She’d already lived such a reckless life doing so many dangerous and also adventurous things robbing a stage coach as almost inevitable in some ways.
Whereas Joe Boot by most of the accounts, and these are from, not to get ahead of the story, but from journalists who, who later met the pair, said that the woman was plainly the boss between the two of them. So it was probably Pearl’s idea to hold up a stagecoach. And at that time there were, you know, very few railroads in Arizona territory.
There was the Southern Pacific, which ran through the southern part of the territory in Atlantic Pacific. Which ran through the northern part of the territory. And those just went directly across into New Mexico, both of ’em. So the towns and cities were primarily connected by wagon roads and stage coach roads.
And so there were still stage coaches used all over Arizona. And one of the things if you read about Pearl Hard online, and you know, until my book came out, 99%, or at least of her background is completely wrong. But one of the most common myths about her is that she pulled the last stagecoach robbery in the old West, which isn’t even close.
The West last stage robbery hold up of a horse drawn stage, took place in Nevada in 1916. There were scores of stagecoach robberies after the turn of the century, because that’s how most rural. Communities in the Western United States were connected, was by stage coaches, not there were no automobiles and railroad trains only ran between major population areas and they’d, you know, if they happened to go through a rural area, that was only because that rural area was between, you know, Salt Lake City in Reno or between Tucson and El Paso.
That was the only reason why there were railroad tracks in most of Southern Arizona and Southern New Mexico is because the railroads connected Tucson with El Paso. So in any event, at that point, there was a stage road that ran from globe south to the little community of Riverside, which is on the San Pedro River in Central Arizona.
And this stage coach then continued on to Florence. Arizona, which had a train depot. And so the principle method of travel and transport between Globe, which is a wealthy mining town and the outside world was this stage road which ran to Florence. Today, that road is almost inaccessible. You could hike it, but you can’t get in there on foot.
It’s been long abandoned. And this would be in the country that would be northeast of Riverside. And this is a spot where when Pearl and Joe Boot came to globe from Mammoth to the south, they took that road. They, they paid a guy, It’s a long story, but they paid a, a young guy to drive them with all their tents and gear and everything up to globe.
And they passed up that road. And that’s where Pearl realized this is an ideal place to hold up a stage coach.
So the stage
arrives as they predicted it would, and correct me if I’m wrong, but there was no one on the stage riding shotgun and the passengers were not openly armed. They had guns tucked away, I think, in the seats or something when Joe and Pearl popped out and started waving their, their weapons at
them.
That’s correct. The the Wells Fargo and company would have a shotgun messenger to guard the Wells Fargo express box whenever it had more than a few thousand dollars in cash or gold. And in this case, they knew that the stages from globe would bring treasure down to be shipped to the mint in San F.
But they’d also be crazy to hold up a stage with a shotgun messenger because these guys that were shotgun messengers were very dangerous. I mean, among the men who rode shotgun in Arizona territory were Wier Morgan ip, their youngest brother Warren ip. The first Wells Fargo man killed the line of duty was Andy Hall, who was a veteran of the Powell Expedition down the Colorado River in 1869.
One of the great adventures of the old West and Andy Hall was the first man among the first, the first group of men to run the white water of the Grand Canyon. I used to do a lot of river running, and I’m telling you that , it takes a lot of skill to be able to run these heavy rapids in the Grand Canyon, and these guys did it in 1869.
So this is the kind of. Man, that road shotgun for Wells Fargo in the Wild West. And Pearl and Joe knew that and they knew to rob a stage that maybe had less cash, but it was a lot safer than getting blown away with a couple barrels of double O buckshot.
So they chose this, this particular stage. For that reason, the passengers, which included a guy named Oscar Neal, they were pretty compliant, right?
No one put up a fight. I think Pearl would would later say that they all seemed really scared and she sounded pretty proud of that.
Yes, they, they stopped the stage. I think there was also a Chinese passenger on the stage, which kind of goes against all our beliefs, that there was all this strict segregation all over the west.
When, if you read about stage robberies, Chinese passengers were very common on stages that were robbed in the Old West. So in any event yes, they stopped the coach, the several of the passengers were armed. They took away their pistols. They stole money from the passengers and the driver, I believe they got some money from the express that was being shipped and possibly from the registered mail, but it wasn’t a very good hall.
And, but they did get, you know, under a thousand dollars and Pearl later. Said something to the effect, Why do all these men carry guns if they’re too afraid to use them? And that’s exactly what happened. These men all surrendered their guns very quickly. Now they were covered. Pearl was armed with two pistols, Joe Boot with a pistol and a rifle.
And both were Dr. Masked and both were, you know, both of them dressed in men’s clothing. And it wasn’t until after the robbery one of the passengers was a bicycle salesman and he later swore out a warrant charging Little Pearl with the robbery. So it’s very clear that this guy was a patron of one of the brothels that Pearl worked in, and he knew his little pearl.
And identified her even though she was wearing men’s clothing. He identified her from her demeanor and her voice, but he was too humiliated to say any of that. So you kind of have to deduce that from reading the newspaper accounts and the court records.
Right. . So one of the passengers, the guy I mentioned, Oscar Neil had, had lost a lot more money than the others had.
So he, along with Sheriff, w e Truman, form a two person posse with the intent to hunt Pearl and Joe boot down.
That’s correct. And they, they go to the scene, they interview people in this little village of Riverside. They interview the stage passengers. Sheriff Truman is an excellent officer. He’s a very good tracker.
And so they start they get on the trail. Of Pearl and Joe Boot and they start tracking them down the San Pedro River. And eventually it turns out that the two of them Pearl and Joe are trying to make the Railroad depot in Benson, Arizona, which is east of Tucson. And they hope as soon as they can get there, if they can get on a railroad train, they’ve got a straight shot back to Kansas City where she’s claimed later that she wanted to rejoin her mother and leave this life of recklessness behind.
And so the posse to even recruit Latino rancher that owns one of the ranches on the way, he’s an excellent tracker who’d actually been involved in a gun fight with the gang of Geronimo Miranda, who was a notorious Bandido in Arizona territory. And it was a fatal gun fighter, which they killed Miranda.
And so Joe Boot and Pearl Hart are faced with some pretty tough ombres who are after them. And finally after this manhunt of about a week of tracking them on horseback down toward Benson when they get to, within about 10 miles of Benson, Pearl and Joe were exhausted. And they would would stop each night and camp out and they’d go into these remote villages to get food and water and that kind of thing.
And then they would continue south. And so finally the Posse catches up with them and they’re exhausted and they’re sleeping in the sage brush. And they sneak up on them and capture them both without firing a shot. Pearl later claims she put up a big fight. Sheriff Truman said she really didn’t, that she was sound asleep when they grabbed her.
Yeah. . And so they are taken into custody in a famous law man named Bob Paul kind of takes her under his wing and reporters become endlessly fascinated with her. She’s been written about in papers before, but never quite like this. And stories about her circulates in these newspapers
across the country.
The stories just hit the wire services and this becomes an absolute sensation. I mean, the first the first headline is in the Tucson Star, the local newspaper banner headline. We have a woman Bandit. And this is just the beginning. The St. Louis newspaper, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, girl stage robber, caught the Washington DC times petite and pretty, but full of nerve.
The buffalo, her hometown paper and buffalo beauty, but a bandit. And even in Canada, the Ottawa Journal headlines, its report, A highway woman instead of a highway man. So but nobody connected Pearl Heart with Lily Davy. And you’d think that someone would’ve put two and two together and think, Hey, wait a minute.
This sounds kinda like that local girl who kept dressing like a man and traveling all over the Midwest and getting arrested and everything. Nobody ever connected it. So newspaper reporters, they find out she’s been locked up in the Pima County Jail in Tucson. And they rushed to see her. And yet Bob Paul, who’s one of the most famous lawmen of the old West, is the undersheriff of Pima County at this point.
He’s getting up in age. He’s almost 70, and very briefly, he was a gun fighting law man in the California Gold Rush. He helped break up the Tom Bell gang. He killed a number of dangerous outlaws. Eventually he became sheriff of CVEs County, one of the most populous counties during the Gold Rush era in the mining country.
Then he became a famous Wells Fargo shotgun messenger, and he’s finally sent to Arizona territory because after the discovery of silver in Tombstone in 1879, that attracts, you know, everybody. Bankers. It attracts everybody from William Randolph Hurst to Wyatt Urban and his brothers. And they all come there, including all kinds of robbers and outlaws.
And so Bob Paul is the guy writing shotgun when the Cowboys try to rob his stage. The Benson stage there’s a huge gunfight. The driver and a passenger are both killed by the Cowboys. The, and the Cowboys are the name given to Curly Bill Bros. And John Ringo and the clans and MCs. And this is the generic term for their gang.
And the Cowboys kill two of the men on the stage. Bob Paul shoots one of ’em through the gut with his shotgun, and this leads to this conflict that eventually results in the gun fight at the supposed gun fight at the OK Corral. It actually happened in an empty lot behind the Okay Corral and then WT Herb’s Vengeance Ride.
Where he kills a number of the cowboys who have ambushed wounded. One brother killed his other brother Morgan. And so these events, Bob Paul played a prominent role. He was a close friend of Wyatt ip. He’s the one that recommended the IP brothers be hired as shotgun messengers for Wells Fargo.
He’s the one sent later to Colorado territory to try to, or the state of Colorado actually, to try to bring the IP brothers and Doc holiday back to stand trial for supposed murder of some of these cowboys in Arizona. So this is his background and he’s used to a lot tougher characters than Pearl Hart.
And he has daughters who are the same age as her. They’re in their twenties. He’s very sympathetic toward her. He doesn’t wanna put her in the jail, so they have a. Kind of a locked room in the courthouse, next to the staircase toward the back of the courthouse. And he puts her in that room. He has a doctor come every day and give her morphine cuz she’s addicted to opium and addicted to morphine.
And so he has her get a dose of morphine every day so she doesn’t go into withdrawal. And he allows her to have all kinds of visitors. And so people come in, they bring the new fangled brownie, Kodak brownie camera. He allows them to take photos of her wearing all of her cowboy clothing, holding her pistol and rifle, and even allows her to have a pet wild cat that somebody brought in for her.
So she’s well taken care of. And mostly cuz Paul is used to the toughest outlaws that ever hit the old West. And he feels nothing but sympathy for this misguided young woman.
So she’s being held captive, but loosely in the sense that fellow prisoners are allowed to visit her. And one of the men she meets is a guy named Ed Hogan.
And she doesn’t seem especially smitten with him at first until he tells her he can break her out of there. Right?
Yes. And she’s given kind of she doesn’t have freedom but she certainly allowed all kinds of visitors, even two writers for Cosmopolitan Magazine, which even then was a fairly new but the leading woman’s magazine in the us.
And they come in and take all kinds of photos of her that have become iconic and they interview her and she gives her own fictional account of her life story leaving out her real family, leaving out all of her work as a prostitute. But she does have some, you know, some real statements that she’s included in her story.
But yes, the the jail has what’s called a trustee or a trusted prisoner who is generally a short time inmate who does, you know, odd jobs, cleans thing, know mops and cleans the, the jail and that kind of thing. And in this case, it’s this guy named Ed Hogan, who was kinda a bicycle thief and sneak thief and all around kind of yeah, useless character.
And whether it’s his idea, I kind of doubt it. Pearl was the one with the brain. She’s the one with the looks. She knows how to seduce men and manipulate them and everything. And so basically she gets Ed Hogan to break her out of the jail. Which isn’t the toughest thing to do because as I said, she’s not really in a jail.
She’s in a room in the back of the courthouse. So one night Ed Hogan sneaks in he’s got like a saw and a hatchet and he cuts a hole right through the la and plaster wall, which is just wood and plaster. And she climbs up onto a piece of furniture and then riles out the hole and the two of ’em jump a train and end up in Southern New Mexico.
And just to be
clear, Bob Paul is not directly responsible for her, right. Even though he’s accommodating her. Technically Truman as the sheriff, is the one responsible for keeping her secure.
Well, so in the jail in Florence, they don’t have any facilities or cells for a woman prisoner. And you keep in mind that in most of these frontier communities, there’s this huge gender imbalance.
You know, even I, I, I don’t remember the exact numbers, but Arizona territory at this time was still probably, you know, 60% male, maybe even 65% male. So women are much fewer. There’s a double standard. And people today like to say, Oh, women were mistreated in the 19th century in the west. But if you look at the way the court system and juries treat women, a woman had to commit a horrific crime like cutting her husband’s head off or something like that before she’d ever be sent to prison.
So women generally, if they stole things, they often weren’t punished or they, you know, might be sentenced to assist the sheriff’s wife in cooking for the jail inmates or something like that. But most jails in the western United States, which is what I know about, did not have facilities for women. And, and the reason is because women were as I said, they were treated differently.
They were idolized by many men. I mean, I could go off on this for an hour. The, there’s a, one of the famous stories of the California Gold Rush. In the early years of the Gold Rush in San Francisco it was 98% male. And when women would show up on Montgomery Street and downtown San Francisco, hundreds of men would pour out of the saloons with their hats off bowing just to get a site of a woman walking down the sidewalk.
And so women and not always, but as a general rule, women were treated much better. That’s why, you know, we have community property laws in California because the California legislature in 1850 decided to keep, and they may have had to do this because of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, but they decided to keep the community property laws to attract women to California.
If women come here. Half of everything their husband owns, belongs to them. And it’s another reason why women got the voting rights in the Western states, generally a lot sooner than they did in the Eastern states because they were trying to attract women to the west. So that’s kind of a long winded answer that most of the jails in Arizona had no facilities for women.
Women were rarely arrested for anything. And when they were, it had to be something pretty bad, like a murder or a stage robbery in this case. So Truman, all he did was he asked his buddy, Bob Paul, if you got room for a woman down there, Paul tells him, Yeah, I’ve got this room. I usually, occasionally for women, it’s not in the jail, but it’s in the courthouse, but we’ll keep the door locked.
And it obviously didn’t work. So whether it was anybody’s fault, it was men trying to be gentlemen, trying to make sure this woman is properly cared for and not locked up with a bunch of men in a jail. And so anyway, so Paul sends out wires she’s escaped. And another famous law man named Ed Scarborough.
Who was a famous gun fighter in El Paso. He was associated with John Wesley Harden and a very famous gun fighter in the annals of the old West. He’s a Deputy United States Marshall, and he puts two and two together and he sees a woman, he thinks his pearl heart in Southern New Mexico and eventually manages to capture her and Joe Boot, and he returns them both to the county jail in Tucson.
So now that she has been recaptured, they are not quite so accommodating. She’s put into a, a secure cell this time. And then she is tried for the robbery of Oscar Neil.
Yeah, they actually, so she’s brought to trial in Florence after she’s locked up in a regular jail, she’s given a jail cell, but all the male prisoners are in their separate cell, so she’s not sharing a cell with a man.
But to illustrate what I was talking about, her case comes up for trial. The evidence against her is overwhelming. She and Joe Boot both admitted robbing the stage to multiple newspaper reporters and they were caught with the stolen gold after this week long manhood and the jury acquits her.
And the reason is she’s this beautiful young woman and the, the jurors, you know, you just don’t convict women of crimes in the Old West for the reasons I explain. And the judge pops a cork and then he has her charged on a second account of stealing a pistol from the stage driver. And the judge by all accounts, reads the new jury the riot act.
And this time they convictor of robbing the stagecoach driver and she’s sentenced to a term in Yuma prison.
So if you don’t mind, I’d like to switch. To Pearl’s sister Katie for a bit. She’s been having some adventures, dangerous adventures of her own. She becomes a parachutist. And then in an example of art imitating life, Katie writes a play inspired by her sister Pearl’s Exploits, which she intends to play the lead role
in.
Yeah, that’s right. And so Katie, while Pearl is having all of her adventures in Arizona territory, Katie is having unbelievable adventures of her own. And she has these like, just like Pearl, just like her sister, she has these disastrous relationships with men. She hooks up with this guy who, you can’t really call him a desperado, but he’s kind of a narrow, do well confidence man would be the best way to explain it.
And she marries him. He ends up passing bad checks in Oklahoma. Territory gets thrown into jail. Katie smuggles a gun into the jail, which he uses to break out. They then flee together to Texas and at this point, the Spanish American War is breaking out. This is about a year before the stage robbery that are sister polls.
And he enlists, she claim Katie later claims that he enlisted in the rough riders, which is not true, but he did enlist in the US Army in Austin, Texas. But then he finally gets identified as a fugitive from Oklahoma. And he’s thrown into the guardhouse in Austin. And again, Katie Smuggles a gun probably uses our feminine wilds to get it past the guards.
He then breaks out of the guardhouse. There’s another big manhunt he’s finally captured. And again, to illustrate my point, even though Katie has smuggled guns into two different jails and engineered two different jail breaks, they never even consider filing a case against her in either Texas or Oklahoma.
So then her man gets sent off to prison and she then finds, let another guy who’s a a pioneer, balloonist and parachute artist, and she hooks up with him and she claims they just have a business relationship except she then uses his last name because the Davy girls are constantly using the last name of whatever guy they’re with.
To try to prevent their mother who they love and adore from being humiliated. And she ends up back in Austin where a lot of the army wives really like her. She’s very charming. She’s extremely well read. I mean, she has like an eighth grade education, but she’s habitual reader. She loves writing.
She writes plays and and novels in her part-time despite the fact that she’s, you know, associating with some of the worst scoundrels you could ever think of. And so she ends up as a parachute artist in Texas. And what they do is her partner has a gas balloon and he is got this early mechanism that makes gas and inflates the balloon.
Then Katie goes, A thousand feet in the air or more. And then has a rope mechanism that she cuts, and she immediately, it activates a parachute and then she parachutes to the ground. And this is in 1898. And so she’s a pioneer aviation person. Aviatrix, I guess would be the the proper term.
And of course, nobody today knows anything about her because of her background. She later, just like her sisters, concealed all this. And it was only through digital newspapers that I could ever figure out that this Katie, Davy, she used a real name when she was in Austin, thank goodness. And the, the local newspaper ran advertisements Katie, Davy, the balloonist and parachute girl will be exhibiting her skills tomorrow.
Everybody come and see it, and thousands of people would come and watch her. And so finally she and the parachute guy break up and then she goes on to even more adventure. Yeah,
there is a, a close call right when Katie’s parachute malfunctions and she hits the water and people believe she
has been killed.
That’s correct. And she plunges into the water Today it’s called Lady Bird Lake after Lady Bird Johnson. The lake had a different name back in the 1890s, and there was a huge park there. And this is where everybody in Austin would go to watch her do these exhibits. And at one point, yes she wasn’t able to activate the parachute.
She plunged into the lake. A couple of local lads had a row boat and they rushed out and saved her life. And and she did one or, you know, a few more after that. But I think she realized that this is like too risky even for me. And so what happens is then. She clearly is communicating with her sister because Katie you know, as soon as Pearl Hart gets arrested, Katie knows it’s her sister.
She can tell, and especially after all the photographs are published and, you know, Cosmopolitan Magazine and all these newspapers, it’s gonna be pretty obvious who she is. However, all of the siblings keep the news from their mother. How they do this, I don’t know. But the mother, one thing that helped is that the mother was illiterate and she did learn to read and write in later years after 1900, but the mother in 1899 did not know how to read.
So they she would have no reason to look at a newspaper and read or even see a photograph of her notorious daughter. So, in any event, Katie then ends up in Nebraska and Omaha, Nebraska, and. Inspired by her sister’s exploits. She decides to write a new play and wherever she goes, she has this big trunk she takes with her all women that travel back then had their travel trunk.
And in it it was full of short stories and plays that she had written over the years. And she writes a play called the Arizona Woman Bandit. And she starts recruiting actors in Omaha. And at this point she has acted off and on for quite a few years, been generally in the entertainment business.
So her career as a short lived aviatrix was just part of this entertainment business that she was engaged. And so she starts recruiting actors. Well, what happens first? Katie is absolutely stunning. You can see photographs of her in my book. The next thing you know, three men are in love with her.
So it’s not a love triangle. It’s a love quad triangle, I guess. And the short version is she kind of goes from one to another and she can’t make up her mind. And one of them’s really handsome, but the other one is not that good looking, but he’s got the money to put on the, the play she wants to put on.
And the final result is the one lover who’s been jilted, confronts her and her lover, and her young boy, who’s about six years old at the time. And this is a boy that she’s had with her first husband, the one that she broke out of jail twice. This guy’s in, in prison, and is, you know, out of her life at that point.
So this other lover shows up to her hotel room just goes after her for dumping him, and he finally whips out a pistol and shoots her in the chest and then places the pistol against his temple and blows out his brains. And this is in newspapers all over the mid, It’s in newspapers all over the country.
And Katie, thank goodness, recovers from this gunshot wound. She carried the bullet the rest of her life. Her death certificate even mentions the gunshot wound, and I think it showed the bullet was still in her when she died in the 1950s.
Yeah,
just wild . So back to Pearl. She finds herself, as you’ve said, in the territorial prison in Yuma.
You write that this prison was very bleak, very foreboding and hot as well. How did she handle her
time there?
Well, there’s so many stories about her in Yuma. It’s kind of difficult to sift the fact from the fiction. She was placed in the there was a series of cells, three or four cells that were dug into the cliffs in the bluff overlooking the Colorado River, which is where Hum prison was located.
And so in the Rocky Bluffs, they actually would carve cells out of the rock. And in those cells, they had a woman’s. Section of the prison that could hold. I think there were three or four cells that could hold maybe, you know, 10 women at the most, and that’s where she was put. And so she was segregated from the men.
There were hundreds of male prisoners. And one of the most common stories is that the notorious Arizona robber Billy Styles somehow gets together with her and gets her pregnant. And Billy Styles in fact knew Pearl Heart. They were both arrested at the same time and lodged in jail when they were in Phoenix.
So she definitely knew him and they were both arrested for fighting, although the court records are not clear whether they were fighting with each other or with somebody else. But in any event so there is a, it is truthful that she knew Billy Styles. Styles and his partner Bert Alfred had been well known lawmen in Tombstone, Arizona, and then they became the most famous train robbers of Arizona territory.
So Billy Stiles was locked up in the Yuma prison. That’s another long story, but briefly, he had agreed to testify against his gang, so they locked him up in the prison to keep him from getting killed by the gang members. And so, Could not possibly have gotten Pearl pregnant because they both weren’t in there at the same time.
As I recall, she came in sometime after he was released. And so this whole story that he got her pregnant and then the governor was so embarrassed he gave Pearl a part in to keep the pregnancy out of the newspapers is just the hogwash. That never happened.
It, it was well known for being a pretty much escape proof prison.
But one of the, the few successful escapes in its history involved Joe Boot. Right. Who was doing time there along with
Pearl. Yes. And another indication of my point about the treatment of women in the West. The evidence of the stage robbery showed that Pearl. Organized it. She was the leader. She gets like a five year prison term and Joe Boot gets, I don’t remember how long, 30 years, something like that.
And both for the same event, for the same crime, and both a first offense in Arizona territory. Joe Boot though is he’s not a, a career criminal. This is his first defense, at least. You know, we don’t know his real name, but he made a good impression on the prison staff. So he’s made a trustee and he’s assigned as a cook or orderly for the warden and his family.
And the warden’s home is located on the bluff right next to the. So he goes out the main gate, goes to the warden’s house, does all his work every day, and then he goes back into the prison at night. And so one day in 1901, he is only been there less than two years. He leaves the warden’s home after doing all of his work there, and no one ever sees him again.
There’s a big manhunt. It’s very difficult to escape from Yuma. Even if the prisoners can escape, the word is immediately put out in Yuma. Indian trailers who are experts at tracking both men and game get into the saddle and there’s a reward for any escape prisoner. And they’re often and usually recaptured within a few days.
And also if that doesn’t get them, the desert is gonna kill them. So the successful escapes from Yuma Prison were fairly few and far between.
So there were very few female prisoners at, at Yuma besides Pearl, but she did end up doing time with a woman nicknamed The Heartbreaker.
So among the women prisoners in Yuma with Pearl was a woman named Elena Estrada.
And many years later, she became kind of notorious in southwestern history as Elena Estrada the heartbreaker. And the story was that she was this gorgeous young daughter of a famous Mexican general during the days of Por porphyria Diaz, and that she got into a knife dual with her dashing lover in Tucson, and she stabbed him to death.
And in her, in her anger, she cut out his heart. And slapped it in his face. And this to this day is a famous Arizona story, but it’s just totally false. She . It’s, it’s she’ll probably come as no surprise at this point. Anybody listening to this podcast that Elena was actually a 25 year old prostitute from ir, which is in the state of Sonora and northern Mexico.
And on the 4th of July in 1900, she gets roaring drunk and gay alley, the same red light district in Tucson that Pearl had worked in. And she was got into a coral with this other guy named Ola who was drunk. And she started coring with him and suddenly she whipped out a knife and stabbed this unarmed guy in the stomach.
And the next day he died. So obviously she didn’t cut his heart out if he lived for another day after she stabbed him. And so this was an example again, of a really serious offense. You can’t stab an unarmed guy and get away with it. So she got seven years in Yuma for manslaughter, and she and Pearl seemed to have got along pretty well in Yuma.
There are stories that she quarreled. There were a few other women that came in and out at the time. Pearl was there. And also for things like one of the women was one of the most disgraceful crimes that I’ve ever read about. But this woman held her teenage daughter down while her new husband, the daughter’s stepfather, raped her.
Oh geez. Ugh.
And this woman, and that also was just beyond the pale. And even to this day, you don’t, I haven’t read a read about anything like that happening in, in, you know, decades of reading the newspapers. And this woman also was sent to Yuma, Justifiably so and so, who the women that she quarreled with were several, but they didn’t include Elena, the so-called heartbreaker.
Right. They, they definitely got along well. So would you tell us about Pearl’s release and where she ended up
going?
Yeah. So what the, the true story of her release is not that she was pregnant by, by a guy who wasn’t even in Yuma when she entered the prison but that the women’s quarters were too crowded.
And I’m sure the guards were complaining, the women were probably squabbling with each other and they were, according to the newspaper accounts. And, you know, you can’t go punish a woman by flogging her. You can’t put her on bread and water in the dungeon. You know, there was a limit to what they can do.
And so finally, I think there was enough boning and groaning from the guards that the governor decided, Okay, we’re gonna release one. Let’s tell Pearl hard. She’s released, but she has to promise to never come back to Arizona territory, which she did, did return to Arizona in later years. And so she ends up going at, at this point, her sister Katie has opened a small store.
Kansas City, Kansas, right across the river from Kansas City, Missouri. And Katie is running, you know, it’s basically just a grocery store. And Pearl goes to Kansas City and moves in with Katie, and Pearl
ends up operating a tobacco shop. And this would be kind of the, the perfect moment, right? For, for her to finally settle down.
She’s lived a lot of life in a short period of time, but now she’s reunited with her family. But she gets into more trouble. She and Katie get involved in buying stolen goods.
Yes, exactly. And what happens is, among various things in Kansas City Katie buys a bunch of large sacks of stolen sugar that were burglarized out of a box car at the railroad station.
And Pearl Hart is with her when she does this, they both get arrested. One of their brothers shows up and he gets involved and all three of ’em get arrested, and eventually they’re released from jail. And but this gets into all the newspapers. And she is then identified as Pearl Heart because the Kansas City detectives find her parole papers when they search her, they find her parole papers from Arizona on her person, and she says, No, no, no.
I, I just know Pearl Heart. I’m holding those papers for her. But then eventually to a Kansas City reporter. She does admit she really was Pearl Heart, but she’s using a different name. At that point, she had married. Another guy legally married him, actually a guy named Ke. And so she went by Lily Keel, so nobody still ever put together her real name of Lily Davy.
And then eventually she divorces keel, and then marries one of Katie’s former lovers, a guy named Earl Lighthawk, who’s kind of this flaky like all the men they were involved with. He’s a total flake. He’s a cell. He pretends to be a Native American selling so-called Indian Patent Medicine. And he is also a vaudeville actor, a traveling performer.
And, you know, instead of just mirroring a, a cop or a firefighter or something like that, or a farmer or a storekeeper, she goes after these flashy women. And that was the problem with all the Davy girls.
At, at some point Katie and Pearl decided to put on a play together that they would actually go on the road with it.
So Katie and Pearl and their brother they go up to Iowa from Kansas City and they try to put on a play based on, you know, the Arizona female bandit. And again, nobody figures out that this young woman, you know, in her early thirties is actually the real pearl heart. And then at one point she marries one of the actors, this guy Earl Lighthawk, who actually had been the common law husband of Katie before.
So this back to your prior question of Katie and her sister Lily, aka Pearl Hart. Being close. They were so close, they actually shared the same husband. And so she did get legally married Pearl, legally married Earl Lighthawk. They travel around trying to do this play. They even end up in New Mexico territory trying to do several different plays, which are not successful.
And finally Pearl ends up back in Kansas City, living with her sister and her mother.
There’s so much going on with the family and not just with Pearl and Katie. They are other siblings especially their brothers. Willie and Henry have serious problems with the law and we could go on for another hour just talking about them, but since we’ve invested so much time in Katie and Pearl’s life in this conversation, I want to ask you specifically about Katie’s time in prison.
She does time in Joliet.
Yeah, that’s right. And what happened is the, the family, as I mentioned before, is incredibly close, drawn together by this mutual childhood trauma. And so her brother Willie has a very, as you mentioned a very checkered career. He and his brother Henry are also very intelligent, creative.
One of them writes all kinds of sheet music, some of which ends up fairly popular at the time. But Willie becomes a notorious horse thief and he steals buggies and teams of horses operating out of Chicago, Illinois. And so finally he wires his sisters and they rush. To this rural town in Illinois to try to help him.
And the short version is Katie Forges letters trying to provide an alibi for Willie. Pearl also goes to the court, but she doesn’t ever take the stand or testify because she knows if it, if it comes out that her brother is the most notorious woman outlaw of the old west, that’s not gonna play very well in front of a jury.
And so the end result is that both Katie and Willie and Katie’s new lover all ended up in prison Willie for grand larceny for horse theft. And Katie and her new husband, who’s a theater producer, are sent there for perjury. For again attempting to provide this alibi. Plus Katie also smuggled in materials to try to break her brother out of jail.
This is the third time she was so loyal to the men in her life. She would try to break them out of jail. This is the third time she did it and this time for her brother in, in Illinois. So yes, they, the three of them end up in Jolie in Joliet Prison.
And it
was acid and files. Right. That, that she was attempting to sneak in.
Exactly. And that was a pretty standard way of doing jail breaks back then. The acid would weaken the metal and then the, it would allow you to cut through it more quickly. And this was all discovered and that was one of the charges against her when she was sent to the state prison of Illinois.
And this, again, is a huge come down for this gorgeous and glamorous actress who’s had this huge career of, you know, she’s definitely like, not a b actress, She’s probably like a d actress in these, you know, low level honky talks and Ville theaters and everything. But nonetheless, she was really not a, other than her life as a prostitute, she was not, she did not engage in, in stealing and that kind of thing.
I, I was surprised to read that Katie later in life and, and of course she, she eventually does get released from prison. Katie becomes the author of a science fiction novel.
Yes. She, she ends up fairly successful. She has she marries an attorney in Chicago. They own a large brownstone building.
There’s a, a home, a three or four story home, and a brownstone in what’s now downtown Chicago. They end up getting divorced. She buys a second home in the Silver Lake area of Los Angeles. And I stayed in the book. I, I just wish it was still standing in the 1960s or seventies in true California style.
It got torn down so they could put up condos in its place. But Silver Lake, there’s actually a movie that came out in recent years called Silver Lake, which is set in the Silver Lake District, and it’s kind of like it’s kind of like just outside of downtown Los Angeles and a very nice neighborhood back then and still a good neighborhood today.
And she ends up going back and forth in the teens, twenties. She becomes a silent movie actress. She claims that she’s acted in multiple silent films. Hopefully some someday somebody can find them cuz there’s not a good index or directory to silent films. A lot of them were lost over the years and she was actually introduced in the Hollywood trade papers as a successful actress and producer and and theater director.
And I point out in the book that nobody, and she gave talks in Hollywood to people in the film industry. And I just can’t imagine what these people would’ve thought this button down audiences of Hollywood people if they knew that this glamorous woman was a jail breaker, a prostitute, she’d been shot in the love cor uh, triangle, had adventures all over the west.
They would’ve been totally shocked. But yes, she did have this career. She was a successful she wrote a science fiction novel in the early 19. It was published, I think in 1941, called Above the Clouds. And so this gets back to this innate intelligence of all the Davy family members.
So at what point in Pearl’s life does she finally take the straight and narrow?
She stays married to Earl Lighthawk, but this guy is such a worthless. Cad. He goes to southeastern Missouri and he opens up in about 1915, he opens up a so, so-called medical clinic, and then he marries one of his teenage nurses, even though he’s still married to Pearl Heart. Then he gets exposed and he goes back to Pearl and they end up moving to Phoenix, which is the very town she was this notorious prostitute in, you know, 20 years earlier.
And so there nobody recognizes her and eventually they settle in Los Angeles and Earl Lighthawk continues, you know, going from town to town, selling his fake patent medicines, pretending to be an Indian chief, that kind of thing. And eventually she dumps him. And by this time her daughter, Is in her early twenties, and she’s married a very reputable guy.
He’s a, a kind of a pioneer submariner with the US Navy. She ends up, Pearl, goes with the daughter and lives with them in Hawaii, helps raise the two little granddaughters. And then they end up back in Los Angeles, they moved to a home in East Los Angeles, which at that time was a kind of a working class neighborhood.
The home is still standing. It’s a little cottage, and she just lives a quiet life as a housewife in Los Angeles. And she dies there in 1935 and her obituary is run in the newspaper. And, and nobody knows she’s Pearl Heart.
Wow. What happens to their worthless father, Albert
Davy?
Albert Dvy continues his reckless lifestyle.
He stays in the remote northwest. He has a small camp on a lake in the north woods, and shortly after the turn of the century, he’s drunk as a skunk, as usual. He’s his favorite pastime is fishing. He gets into his canoe and he’s paddling up the lake and he is so drunk, he falls out of the canoe and he’s found dead a few days later and nobody mourned his passing.
Wow.
Oh gosh. This has been so interesting. I really appreciate you coming on and talking about this. May I ask what you are working on
now? Well, my new book is coming out in the spring of 2023. And it’s a fairly lengthy, full length biography of Black Bart, who was the West’s most infamous stagecoach robber.
And he posed as a wealthy mine owner in San Francisco. And whenever he’d run outta money, he’d head out to remote California or Oregon, pulled up one or two stage coaches, and then come back to San Francisco and resume the high life. So you had a very interesting career.
Oh goodness. You’re absolutely welcome to come back on the show and, and talk about black Bart.
Well again, thank you so much for sharing stories about the Davy Sisters with us today.
Thank you for having me.
Again, I have been speaking to John Boessenecker. He is the author of Wildcat, the Untold story of Pearl Heart, The Wild West’s Most Notorious Woman, Bandit. This has been another episode of the most notorious podcast, broadcasting to every dark and cob webbed corner of the world.
I’m Erik Rivenes and have a safe
tomorrow.
