Wild West Pearl

I want to be a cowboy sweetheart, I want to learn to rope and ride. Born into poverty and violence and alcoholism, she was forced to work in a brothel as a young girl. I want to ride all the plains and the desert, up west of the great divide. But she rebelled and she ran away. I want to hear the coyotes howling. She married young and she married often.

While the sun sinks in the west. She broke all the hearts and she broke all the rules and once she even broke out of jail. I want to be a cowboy sweetheart. Then she got an idea, I know, let's rob a stagecoach. That's the life I love the best. And they got a small beam of light… True Weird Stuff. It happened right around five o'clock on May 30th 1899 on a stretch of dirt road just past the town of Riverside, Arizona.

The stagecoach had only three passengers and the driver was alone. Typically there'd be one more person aboard. The job title was Shotgun Messenger. This was basically a guard armed with a shotgun loaded up with buckshot and seated atop the coach to the left of the driver. This by the way is where we get the phrase Riding Shotgun.

The Shotgun Messenger served two purposes. One, protection from bandits. And two, if you saw a stagecoach that didn't have a Shotgun Messenger, you could be pretty sure that there was no strong box filled with cash or gold or jewels or whatever stashed on board. This particular afternoon in May 1899, on that particular route, should have been completely uneventful.

No Shotgun Messenger. No treasure. Plus, there hadn't been a robbery along that route in years anyway. And then, as the stagecoach rounded a slight bend in the road, two figures stepped out of the brush. Both were armed. And it was the taller of the two who did all the talking, brandishing a Colt .45. The smaller, silent accomplice, wielding a .38 caliber revolver, swiftly divested the passengers of cash, a gold watch, a chain, and a six-shooter.

Despite two of the passengers being armed themselves, they were caught so unaware by the swift shock of the robbery and by the unnerving silence of the small bandit, whose weapon was drawn and cocked. Before they fully registered what was even happening, it was all over as swiftly as it began. Then, an odd thing happened.

The smaller bandit gave each of the passengers a one-dollar coin. Then, the pair stripped the driver of his own revolver, mounted their horses, and disappeared at a gallop. Passengers had been robbed, but they hadn't been fooled by the bandit's ruse. The smaller of the two gunmen wasn't a man at all. It was a woman, hair cropped short, hat pulled low, dusty blue overalls concealing her curves.

Her name was Pearl Hart, and she wanted a very different life than what was on offer for a young woman of her time. Pearl was born into the chaotic Davy family in the town of Lindsay. That's in Ontario, Canada. Pearl wasn't her name. She was called Lily. She was the third of nine children born to parents who could neither read nor write.

Her father Albert was an alcoholic and prone to violence. He served time for offenses ranging from throwing his wife and children out of the family home to the attempt at rape at knife point of a 14-year-old girl. Albert was bad news and worthless as a provider. With no money and no food, his children fell to crime in order to survive.

Pearl's brother Henry was, by age 10, an accomplished burglar. Pearl and three of her sisters worked as prostitutes, a hustle that put little Lillie Davy in the path of a madam whose name, Pearl Hart, the girl later adopted as her own. When they hit their early teens, Pearl and her younger sister Katie ran away from home, away from their abusive father, and away from the squalid rooms where they toiled as child sex workers.

They made it to Buffalo, where they disguised themselves as boys and found work in a factory that employed children and didn't ask too many questions. It took two months for their parents to track them down and bring them home to Ontario. But two years later, the girls bolted again, this time for Chicago. Disguised as boys, the sisters found work as boot blacks.

That's an old-fashioned word for shoeshine. They made a success of it and were well known to the other boot blacks who rove Chicago's downtown. The sisters bedded down at night in empty boxcars or in the relative warmth of a livery stable or a hayloft. The trouble came when Pearl spotted a wagon load of watermelons parked on a street corner.

The temptation was too much. The girl grabbed one of the heavy melons and took off running. A police officer caught her before she made it a whole block. And Pearl and her sister were promptly arrested and sent to a reform school for boys. That's how convincing they were in their disguise. Unfortunately, or maybe very fortunately, took about a minute for staff at the school to realize that these two delinquent lads were actually girls.

Off they went to a school for wayward young ladies. They lasted three months before making their escape. The classic rope made of bedsheets lowered out a window. The pair managed to steal two sets of boys' clothing and then took off, making their way first to Montana, then to Victoria, British Columbia. Like a couple of real outlaws, the sisters laid low until they deemed it safe to return to Chicago. Once there, though, Katie, who was younger than Pearl by a year, fell ill.

The girl was tired and homesick. So Pearl brought Katie back to Ontario. By now, Pearl was 16, confident, worldly and impatient with authority. Her parents knew that she'd bolt for freedom at her first opportunity, so they packed her off to a boarding school in Montreal. The school may have promised that the girl would be under lock and key, but they underestimated Pearl.

She made the acquaintance of a man named Henry Boardman, who lived nearby. In less than four months after arriving in Montreal, Pearl did bolt. She eloped with Boardman. The couple headed straight for Chicago, where they would quarrel and Pearl would leave and then return, rinse and repeat. It was on a trip to the World's Fair in Chicago in 1893 that Pearl first became enamored of cowboys and the mythology of the Wild West.

Her husband had picked up work as a barker on the Midway, leaving Pearl free to slip into a seat in the audience of Buffalo Bill's Wild West show. If you'd been there, you'd have no trouble understanding why Pearl was swept away by the spectacle. Ads for the show promised 450 horses from every country of the world, and according to the papers of the day, it delivered.

In fact, the show was so successful that it had a longer run than the World's Fair itself, and it played to packed grandstands of roaring fans every day. And the spectacle packed with everything from reenactments of buffalo hunts to thrilling attacks on stagecoaches to trick riders performing breathtaking stunts on horseback, one star attraction really caught Pearl's attention.

The legendary sharpshooter and Wild West legend herself, the one and only Annie Oakley. Pearl was transfixed. Now this was a life. This was a role model. This was what Pearl wanted for herself. By the time Buffalo Bill wrapped up his Chicago show, Pearl's marriage was over. They say she took off on a train bound for Colorado, and they whispered that a piano player of questionable reputation, one Dan Bandman, was at her side.

It's challenging to piece Pearl Hart's story together because Pearl herself was always on the move. She left a trail, sure, but it was a broken, meandering trail. Much of what's been written about her is inaccurate, starting with her very name. And even as Pearl stood before the world in all her fierce truth, the world was busy reinventing her, making her into a caricature of a dainty little miss gone bad.

But Pearl had never been dainty, never been sheltered, never knew even one minute's protection from the frankly awful circumstances she'd been born into. Pearl was a woman who did as she pleased. And listen, at no time in history has that been a thing that society is willing to cheerfully indulge. Pearl broke every rule.

Some sources say that she and Henry Boardman reconciled over and over and over again. Others say she was married many times, was guilty of bigamy and used men at her pleasure and discarded them at will. Beat them at their own game, sis. One story goes that she stole her sister Katie's man, a dude with the excellent name of Earl Lighthawk.

The two wed using fake names since both were already married to other partners. And when Pearl was later unfaithful to Lighthawk, he became so distraught that he shot himself in the head and somehow survived. As did the relationship, since the couple later had a daughter together. What? I have an ex who's still salty that I wasn't into mountain biking.

Some women just have this, I don't know, power or something. It's like it's supernatural. So inspired by Annie Oakley and the spectacle that was Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, Pearl found herself on the frontier at long last. And by the frontier, I mean Arizona. And what of the sketchy piano player Dan Bandman? Good question. He either abandoned her and went off to war or took every penny she earned and treated her with such malice that she attempted suicide.

The record's a little bit murky on this score. There are rumors of Pearl returning to prostitution, which honestly makes sense given how few legit employment opportunities there were for a woman making a go of it alone in the There were also rumors of Pearl developing a taste for liquor and cigars and the occasional morphine binge.

But by the time Pearl reached the little town of Mammoth, Arizona, she was on her own. She found work as a cook at a mining camp. You won't talk about a rough spot to land. Mining camps were rowdy, lawless places where sanitation was a daydream and vigilante justice was the only kind of justice to be found. The miners worked anywhere from 12 to 16 hours a day and the labor was backbreaking with no guarantee to strike it rich.

Miners working underground were exposed to poison gases, along with the very real threat of cave-ins. Being the camp cook meant dishing out endless bowls of beans and whatever local game could be scared up, though that was the least of Pearl's hardship. A woman alone in an environment like that, it's a good thing that Pearl was a survivor.

You can imagine what surviving that took. Whatever else life in a frontier mining camp was, it sure as heck wasn't the Wild West, Pearl's imagination. There was no glamour here. And when the mining company failed and the camp shut down, Pearl had only $10 to her name and not much in the way of options. She was determined to get to the town of Globe, Arizona.

Isolated as it was, Globe was the real frontier, infamous for hosting outlaws, known to be a place where travelers and residents alike risked murder, lynching and robbery. Hey, here's a fun little nugget for fans of the movie Tombstone and Wild West stories in general. Remember the legendary gunfight at the OK Corral, where a group of outlaws known as the Cowboys squared off against the Earps, Wyatt, Morgan and Virgil, along with everyone's favorite Huckleberry, Doc Holliday.

One of those outlaws was named Ike Clanton. His brother, Billy, was shot dead that day at the OK Corral. But Ike survived. And along with another Clanton brother named Phineas, eventually made his way to Globe. They didn't peacefully retire. There was nothing peaceful about the Clanton boys. Ike died at the hands of a deputy sheriff.

And since he was not a wanted criminal at the time, the deputy was arrested for murder. But the charges didn't stick and the man went free. Phineas Clanton did time for robbing a stagecoach and then later succumbed to pneumonia. He's buried in the Globe Cemetery. Ike Clanton was buried where he fell in an unmarked grave right alongside Eagle Creek.

This was the gritty little Garden of Eden that Pearl set her sights on. As luck would have it, she encountered a pair of young Mormon men who happened to be headed in that direction. She gave them eight of her ten dollars in exchange for a spot on their wagon. She wasn't their only passenger. There was another man on board, a former shoemaker from Chicago turned gold and silver prospector.

He went by the name of Joe Boot. So fabulous. Given Pearl's many adventures in the Windy City, the two had a lot to talk about and soon struck up a friendship. The journey from the mammoth mining camp to Globe was 60 miles. Nothing today, but a real ordeal back then, one that took days. On the evening of their last day, the group may camp for the night as they hobbled the horses and set about gathering firewood.

They heard the rumble of an approaching stagecoach. It was the Globe stage, ferrying a few passengers on its usual line between the outposts of Florence and Globe. The group watched as the coach lumbered past them on the trail. There's nothing at all remarkable about the moment, except seeing that stagecoach making its way through the Arizona scrub, vulnerable and unprotected.

May just have given Pearl the idea that would finally make her famous and put her behind bars. Life in Globe wasn't much better for Pearl than the mining camp had been. She found work as a cook and clerk in a hotel, a hotel that apparently doubled as a brothel. It was there that Pearl got word that her mother was close to death, but lacking the means, Pearl couldn't make the trip.

Her new friend, Prospector Joe Boot, told her that he had a solid mining claim not too far away. And was she interested in helping him dig out that gold or silver? Desperate for cash and believing that she and Joe Boot could quickly and easily find enough gold or silver to finance her trip home, she agreed. What wishful thinking, right?

Because most of us are not prospectors, but we've seen enough cartoons and movies to know that it just ain't that simple to haul a fortune out of the earth. Tired, frustrated and disillusioned, Pearl pitched an idea to Joe Boot. Hey, remember that stagecoach we saw, the one traveling between Globe and Florence? Did you see how unprotected it was?

No one riding shotgun to defend it. Do you know how easy that would be to rob? They'd get plenty of money in no time and far more easily than any day of mining. Joe Boot, the cobbler who fancied himself a prospector, was taken aback. He forcefully objected. He was no bandit. But Pearl shocked him by revealing that she possessed a brace of six shooters and more than knew how to use them.

To prove it, Pearl drew her weapons and dazzled Boot with her shooting skills. The heist was on. Pearl Hart and Joe Boot left their mining claim, traversing the rugged mountainous terrain on horseback until they finally reached the Globe Trail. This next part is like a scene out of every other Western movie or TV show.

The two concealed the horses a short distance from the trail, then hid themselves behind a very large rock. Thanks to the landscape, which was beautiful to behold, but torturous to travel, the stagecoach driver had his work cut out for him. Coaxing his team of horses over pitted ground and steep climbs and drops with maybe 20 feet of trail visible at a time took all his attention.

Pearl and Joe Boot had been hiding for about three hours when they finally heard the coach approaching. The pair moved to hiding spots on either side of the trail, lying in wait for their victims. It was Pearl who left out first, leveling one revolver at the driver, another at the window of the passenger compartment. And once all passengers had been ordered out of the coach, searched for firearms and freed of their cash and valuables, it was Pearl who returned one dollar to each man.

The driver had eight dollars in his pocket, money Pearl advised him to keep on the grounds that he had earned it. Then she and Boot forced the men at gunpoint to march down the trail. The instant they were out of sight, Pearl led Boot into the mouth of a nearby canyon and they followed a long, circuitous route back to their horses.

So now there are two slightly different versions of what happened next. In one, Pearl Hard and Joe Boot became hopelessly lost, wandering in circles for days until a posse of lawmen surprised them while they were sleeping and took them into custody on June 5th, 1899. In the other version, the two spent days drifting through the area with Boot heading into the town of Mammoth at one point in a desperate bid to find tobacco for himself and food for Pearl.

Since they traveled strictly by night, the two hid themselves as best they could during daylight hours and were dead asleep when that posse of lawmen led by Sheriff Truman of Pinal County surprised them and took them into custody. The couple was separated and Pearl found herself incarcerated in a Tucson jail. Though well used to hard living conditions and very familiar with hardship and suffering, Pearl decided that jail was just not for her.

This, despite a near constant parade of admirers, photographers and reporters, one fan gave her a bobcat kitten as a companion and she was allowed to keep it in her cell as a pet. She befriended and then fell in love with another inmate there, a man named Ed Hogan. Now, listen to this bit of gruesomeness. When the pet bobcat bit Hogan, he seized the cat and slammed it to the floor in a fury, killing it instantly.

That was it for Pearl. Unforgivable, unforgivable, that is, until Hogan made it up to her by promising to help her escape a promise he kept. Hogan was a trusted prisoner with considerable freedom of movement. He climbed to the top floor of the jail and cut a nine by 12 hole into the grate covering the window. And that was how Pearl made her escape.

She was recaptured 12 days later, despite once again being disguised as a man. A lady stagecoach robber was such a wild novelty that Pearl might be able to escape her cell, but she couldn't escape the media frenzy that surrounded her. Suddenly, everyone wanted to know about the girl bandit. Finally, Pearl was getting a taste of that Annie Oakley style fame and glory that she'd craved ever since sitting in the crowd at Buffalo Bill's Wild West show.

Kind of. The press and the public can be worshipful one minute, cruel the next. The Arizona Weekly star called Pearl a notorious prostitute and morphine fiend. They were no kinder to Joe Boot, tagging him a half-witted Frenchman. By the time Pearl's trial began, reporters were in and outside the courtroom covering every detail and clamoring for quotes about the young, beautiful and now thoroughly flounced and ruffled and delicately feminine defendant.

For her part, Pearl primly took the stand and informed the proceeding that she, quote, did not consent to be tried under a law in which my sex had no voice in making. End quote. Girl, look at you throw down the suffrage card. Well done, Pearl. The judge may not have cared for her comportment, but the jury clearly ate it up.

Even though Pearl admitted her guilt, she was acquitted. The jury clearly took pity on the sweet daughter who only wanted money to travel to her dying mother's bedside. Spoiler alert. Her mother lived for another 16 years. Medicine back then was a real guessing game. I mean, a slight cough might kill you within a week.

A bullet to the face might just leave you with a scar. Anyway, Pearl was now a free woman, just not for long. The judge was disgusted by the jury's verdict. He promptly called for Pearl and Joe Boot to be arrested again, this time for the crime of stealing a guard's revolver. The jury at the second trial was not at all charmed by the pretty girl bandit and returned a verdict of guilty.

Joe Boot was sentenced to 30 years. Pearl was sentenced to five. She served her time in the Yuma Territorial Prison as the only female incarcerated there. Pearl was quite the star. She had a cell all to herself, a large one, and a stretch of exercise yard all her own. The warden enjoyed the attention Pearl brought his way.

Fans and reporters alike lined up to visit and pay their respects. She was a well-behaved inmate, but her fame was an enormous challenge to be managed. And perhaps that's why in December 1902, the Arizona territorial governor, Alexander Brodie, issued her a pardon. Of course, even that came complete with a cloud of rumors about Pearl and the warden having this incendiary love affair, one that resulted in Pearl falling pregnant.

Since no evidence can be found of Pearl having had a third child, who knows? And if it was true, how much of that love affair was real and how much just another ploy to gain her freedom? The Tucson Citizen reported that Pearl was as surprised as anyone to suddenly find herself on the outside again. The paper said that a new career awaited her, one where her boldness and fearlessness would never again put her at risk of being arrested.

This new career was on the stage. One of Pearl's sisters had written a play and the climactic moment involved a stagecoach hold up and the robber was to be played by Pearl Hart herself. The show went off as planned and Pearl had a brief period of notoriety for it, but by 1904, she was back in jail, this time in Kansas City, charged with receiving stolen property.

Though she denied everything, she was in a chatty mood and she regaled her KC jailers with stories of her wild outlaw days. She spoke of her escape from the jail in Tucson and her recapture. She said that once both she and Edward Hogan were back in custody. The arresting officers locked the two up in one small cell, chaining them together at the ankles and then attaching that chain to the floor.

Of this, Pearl said, being chained together that way was worse than being married. I want to be a cowboy, sweetheart. I want to learn to row and ride. I want to ride all the planes in the desert up west of the Great Divide. I want to hear the coyotes howling while the sun sinks in the west. I want to be a cowboy, sweetheart.

That's the life I love the best. I want to be a cowboy, sweetheart. I want to learn to row and ride. I want to ride all the planes in the desert. Up west of the Great Divide. I want to hear the coyotes howling while the sun sinks in the west. I want to be a cowboy, sweetheart. That's the life I love the best. Often, we don't know what to even do with a story like Pearl Hart's.

We think, what a wild spirit she was, or poor thing just ricocheted from one bad choice to the next and paid the price for it. The best we can muster might be, well, there was a woman ahead of her time. But what if instead we looked at Pearl as someone who, from the jump, understood the hard math of poverty and powerlessness?

Born into a life where she had nothing and nothing was hers, not even her own body. Pearl very swiftly figured out that freedom was the only thing worth having. And if she couldn't buy it or couldn't earn it, then she'd steal it. There was one person who claimed to know Pearl's whole story. His name was Francis Reno. He was a deputy U.S. bandit in that jail cell in Tucson.

She confessed to him the details of her role in the Globe stagecoach hold up and told him her life story up to that point. Reno wrote a detailed account of his time with Pearl Hart and published it in a book called A Tale of the Last Frontier, being a reminiscence of an early border experience of a noted detective. That's a mouthful of a title.

He described her as highly observant, possessing what he called a wonderfully tenacious memory, daredevil courage and the kind of recklessness you'd expect from a member of that Jesse James gang. Given all she'd experienced in life from being forced into prostitution as a child to life on the streets in Chicago, to being a hired hand at a mining camp, Pearl had to be tough.

Stories about her focus on her petite beauty, but Pearl had little use for the narrow roles available to women. What did she care about the conventions and rules of polite society? She was too busy surviving, too busy scandalizing one and all by wearing breeches, smoking, drinking, swearing, robbing, shooting and taking lovers how and when she pleased.

And just when they thought they had her cornered, she'd slip away. Even her death is murky and a little shrouded in mystery. Most accounts will tell you that she passed away in nineteen fifty five and is buried under the name Pearl Bywater. That's the last name of her last husband, a rancher called Calvin Bywater. But John Boessenecker, author of Wildcat, is just a fantastic book about her life.

He says, nope. He said Pearl actually passed away 20 years earlier in 1934 at her daughter's home in Los Angeles and is buried there at Rose Hill Memorial Park under her married name of Lillie Naomi Meyers. How perfect that her death, like her life, serves up one contradictory story after the next. America's most famous lady stagecoach bandit is a legend of the West.

She's part of our frontier mythology. Guts and grits and swagger to spare. That's our Pearl Hart and the flesh and blood woman behind the legend. That once upon a time, scrappy little girl who refused to be anyone's victim. That's our Pearl Hart, too. You know, the old rhyme, the one that says that little girls are made of sugar and spice and everything nice.

This little girl, Pearl Hart, she was made of courage and cunning and the kind of resilience that's honestly stunning. And that's what legends are made of. I want to ride old pain, going at a run. I want to feel the wind in my face. A thousand miles from these city lights, going a cow hands pace. I want to pillow my head near the sleeping herd while the moon shines down from above.

I want to be a cowboy sweetheart. That's the life I love. I want to ride old pain, going at a run. I want to feel the wind in my face. A thousand miles from these city lights, going a cow hands pace. I want to pillow my head near the sleeping herd while the moon shines down from above. I want to be a cowboy sweetheart.

Oh, that's the life I love. Next time on True Weird Stuff. When was the last time you went outside and looked at the moon and asked yourself, what is the moon? Because guess what? Science isn't even sure what the moon is, but there are a whole lot of folks who think it's a hollow alien base. That's the next time on True Weird Stuff.

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Everything true weird is waiting for you at trueweirdstuff.com. And follow True Weird Stuff on Instagram and Twitter. True Weird Stuff is a Now! Media production. Our executive producer is Anthony Garcia. The show is written and hosted by me, Sheri Lynch, along with my deeply weird director, Max Sweeten. Our equally odd producer is Kary Bowser.

Additional production by the mysterious Stephen Call. Our digital witch and social media cult leader is Heather Furr. Original graphics by Kevin Nash. Original artworks by Olivia Axland. True weird original music composed and performed by Jack Griffin and Zane Nash. Copyright 2023 Now! Media. All rights reserved. All wrongs remembered.

Special thanks to Elizabeth Jordan for crooning a classic from another legend. Patsy Montana wrote and recorded I Want to Be a Cowboy Sweetheart in 1935. And with it became the very first female country music performer to sell a million singles. Tipping our cowboy hats to you, Queen. I want to be a cowboy sweetheart I want to learn to rope and ride I want to ride all the plains and the desert Up west of the great divide I want to hear the coyote howling While the sun sinks in the west I want to be a cowboy sweetheart That's the life I love the best I want to be a cowboy sweetheart I want to learn to rope and ride I want to ride all the plains and the desert Up west of the great divide I want to hear the coyote howling While the sun sinks in the west I want to be a cowboy sweetheart That's the life I love the best