Kickass Women in History: Pearl Hart

Pearl Hart was not only a fascinating individual, but she was also a member of a scrappy family of stubborn survivors, each of whom had their own interesting stories to tell. Pearl Hart led a difficult but adventurous life and gained renown for dressing up as a man and robbing a stagecoach in Arizona in 1899. Bear with me, readers, because the lives of Pearl and her siblings, especially her sister Kate, are hard to sum up. My source is the book, Wildcat: The Untold Story of Pearl Hart, the Wild West’s Most Notorious Bandit, by John Boessenecker. It’s a fascinating book that places Pearl’s actions in context with her family, the times and places where she lived, the economic options available to her, and her place in White mythology of the Wild West.

Pearl was born Lillie Davy in rural Canada to a horrifically abusive father. He was constantly in and out of jail for assault, including a conviction of…

Lillie’s mother had eight children, all of whom fought each other tooth and nail but also stayed in close contact with each other and supported each other legally, financially, and emotionally throughout their lifetimes: Saphronia, Willie, Lillie, Katy, Amy, Henry, Mary, and Acle. We will be catching up with all of these siblings at the end of the post, since they were constantly in and out of each others’ lives.

As children, the siblings learned early to steal because they rarely had enough to eat.

Lillie and her sister Katy ran away from home at least twice, dressing as boys and riding the rails, spending some time in foster care and some time in reform and corrective institutions which they tended to escape from. By the time she was 16, Katy owned and operated a brothel in Buffalo, New York, where Lillie and Amy worked for a time and were known as “Those Davy Girls.”

Meanwhile, their brothers committed a series of thefts and were also in and out of jail, as were the various men whom the sisters took as lovers or (legal or otherwise) spouses. The siblings assisted one another with escaping from jail or other institutions whenever and however possible. Over the years all of the siblings experienced many moves, many lovers, and many brushes with the law. The only siblings who avoided this turbulent life were Mary, who was adopted by another family, and Acle, who died from health complications at a young age.

Eventually, and I’m skipping over many towns, many years, and many dirtbag men here, Lillie ended up in Arizona Territory, where she adopted the name Pearl Hart and unfortunately also acquired addictions to opium and morphine. She reported later that during this time she had two children by an abusive husband, children which were probably raised by Lillie’s sister, Amy. She ditched the husband, became lovers with another man named Joe Boot, moved a lot, became a crack shot, and worked as a sex worker, a cook, and a miner. And it’s at that point in her life that Lillie and Joe decided to rob a stagecoach.

Meanwhile…

Katy got fed up with sex work and swore never to do it again. She found a new way to make a living by performing stunts including jumping out of balloons (with a parachute). Under the name Millie Davy she made many jumps and survived an accident in which her parachute failed to open. She was also a tightrope walker and performed “the Slide for Life” which was sort of a zipline stunt which she sometimes performed while holding one of her children. For more about women and balloons, check out Kickass Women in History: Balloonomania Belles.

Back to Lillie! Mining wasn’t paying, and Lillie wanted to go home to visit her mother. So Lillie, who often wore men’s clothing, dressed up as a man and she and Joe Boot set out to rob a stagecoach. The robbery went fine with no injuries to either the robbers or their victims, but, after many days of running and hiding, they were captured by a posse. Lillie became a huge celebrity although she never revealed her real name for fear of breaking her mother’s heart. In jail, Lillie was given a bobcat which she kept as a pet while she awaited trial. She escaped the Tucson county jail but was promptly recaptured.

During this time, she became something of a feminist icon, particularly because of her statement, “I shall never consent to be tried under the law that neither I nor my sex had a voice in making.”

This statement was much debated and discussed in local papers, accompanied by the many photographs of Lillie taken by reporters and curious fans.

Eventually Lillie was tried and convicted and sent to Yuma prison. For much of her sentence she was the only woman at Yuma. At other times she had anywhere from one to five female cellmates, each with their own complicated story. In prison, she read and embroidered and sewed, plotted escapes, wrote to her siblings, and became sober. She was released after three years and was reunited with her family who were then living in Kansas City.

While all this was happening Katy had found her true vocation as a writer and an actress. She wrote and starred in a play based (extremely loosely) on Lillie’s stagecoach crime called The Arizona Bandit. While Katy’s love life was chaotic and sometimes violent, her financial life was not bad. She was especially proud of being able to buy a house for herself and her mother. Unfortunately her brothers were still committing petty crimes and when Willie was sent to jail Katy tried to help him escape, which landed her in jail for about a year, after which she settled into a non-criminal, and very successful career of writing and acting for stage, screen, and radio.

So what happened to Lillie and her family in the long run? Lillie’s beloved mother finally found happiness with a third husband who treated her well. She learned to read and write and enjoyed a busy correspondence with her children. By contrast, her first husband, the dirtbag, drowned while fishing, which was fine with everyone.

Most of the siblings ended up doing surprisingly well in the long run:

1. Mary, who was adopted by another family early in life, became an opera singer. As old ladies she, Saphronia, and Katy shared a house but she quickly moved to another house down the street as the bickering was too much for her. This didn’t stop the women from dining together daily, with their dogs, all of whom sat at the table in their own chairs with their own plates.
2. Willie was in and out of trouble until he finally became a tailor, one assumes out of sheer exhaustion. With Katy’s encouragement, he also wrote for radio and film.
3. Henry may have been either gay or bisexual. He was arrested for sodomy several times. He was also arrested for theft on several occasions. After his final jail sentence finished, he moved in with Katy and made a modest living as a songwriter and singer until he died.
4. Jennie moved to New York City and lodged with Mary while she worked as an actress. After she married and divorced, she moved in with Katy but they had such an awful fight that she attempted suicide. Ultimately, she seems to have escaped from a toxic relationship with her siblings and moved to Chicago with her son where she opened a grocery store.
5. Amy, the one who may have adopted Pearl’s children, married a brick contractor with whom she had two more children. When he was hit and killed by a truck, Amy sued the company that owned the truck and won – in the middle of the Great Depression – ten thousand dollars, which she lived on comfortably for the rest of her life.
6. Katy wrote for theater, radio, and silent movies, in which she also acted, and wrote a science fiction novel.
7. Lillie had another daughter, and when this daughter grew up and married a Navy man Lillie spent two years spoiling her grandchildren in Hawaii, where they were stationed, and then went with them to California where she lived until she died.

In writing about kickass women, one must set some sort of criteria for what a kickass woman actually is. Lillie gained a tremendous amount of fame for her stagecoach robbery, but her story is, in many ways, more sad than kickass. She was always linked to some no-good man. She was exploited at a horrifically young age after a gothically horrific childhood. She committed a great many crimes, mostly petty, and she was not a huge success as a criminal. She lied and stole and cheated. She couldn’t raise her first two children because of her drug and alcohol addiction and economic uncertainty. She robbed a stage coach but was promptly caught, which seems less than victorious. Honestly, most of Lillie’s life was just really difficult and tragic.

However, the conclusion of Wildcat leads me to feel that Lillie, as well as her siblings, deserves kickass credit not only for the unconventional lives that the siblings lived but for the fact that so many of them were ultimately able to live relatively stable, productive, happy (if, apparently, argumentative) lives. It’s also remarkable that in a family with almost no education, over half of the siblings became artists of some kind. Even Lillie wrote songs and poems while imprisoned at Yuma.

After all those fights and prison escapes and divorces and violent events, the siblings mostly seemed to wind up bickering but also caring for one another, with many finding love at last and/or contentment in their children or grandchildren. Their collective survival was kickass, much more kickass than a single crime committed by Lillie in a moment of desperation.

Lillie’s story has been lost in her myth, one that she consciously created by telling many different and conflicting stories about who she was, what she did and why she did it. She never revealed her real name and her siblings, loyal to the end, never told anyone that their sister Lillie was also Pearl Hart, “The Bandit Queen” of Arizona. She spoke out, she broke taboos, and after decades of struggle she was finally able to do the most kickass thing of all – she thrived.