Wildcat: The Untold Story of Pearl Hart, the Wild West's Most Notorious Woman Bandit.
John Boessenecker.
Hanover Square Press. 2021. 336 pp.
ISBN 978-133544905.
The perpetrators of the stickup flee on horseback over miles of desolate country before being apprehended by lawmen. Upon arrest, they are identified as Joe Boot and Pearl Hart, the latter a 28-year-old woman. Pearl, soon known as the "Girl Stage Robber," becomes an instant celebrity nationwide, photographed and interviewed by representatives of major American newspapers, her life story, told by herself, appearing in the pages of Cosmopolitan magazine, her autograph sought by ardent fans. Incarcerated in the Pima County jail in Tucson, awaiting trial, Pearl wins the sympathy of the nation's feminists by declaring, "I shall never submit to be tried under the law that neither I nor my sex had a voice in making." True to her word, she then thrills her many admirers when, only a few weeks after her capture, she manages to break jail and make a getaway.
Pearl Hart had, as it were, long wandered a pathless desert before reaching, upon a certain hour, that desolate desert road where she lay in wait for the Wells Fargo coach. The beginning , as the author of Wildcat discovered, was a remote rural community in the northern woods of the province of Ontario, Canada. There, in 1871, in the town of Lindsay, the later-to-be notorious "girl bandit" was born and christened Lillie Naomi Davy. Her parents were illiterate, her father an itinerant farm laborer, a base, drunken, violent man, a pariah in the community, who when Lillie was six years old was arrested, convicted and sent to prison for the attempted rape at knifepoint of a 14-year-old girl. Later, her mother, five months pregnant, was raped in the presence of her children by four drunken men.
Lillie's childhood and that of her eight siblings was passed in squalor, neglect, abuse, and privation. Due to the family's frequent moves, her education was intermittent and patchy. Out of fear of their brutal father and in response to their low standing in the communities in which the family resided, Lillie's brothers and sisters were firm in their allegiance to each other and remained so throughout their erratic, troubled lives. By the time Lillie was 15, she had run away from home, left Canada for the United States, hopped freight trains, begged and stolen to survive, worked in a factory, worked as a bootblack, sold newspapers in the streets, been arrested, incarcerated, and had broken free of custody. She had also experienced the first of what were to be a series of infatuations with dapper, flashy "men of low instinct." Already in her young years, a pattern was being established: repeated scrapes with the law and serial romantic affairs with low-life, no-account, dissipated, and violent conmen, thieves, and hucksters.
Lillie soon drifted into prostitution, drifted west, and, as did many in her profession at that time: acquired a morphine habit, then legal. She worked in brothels and tents, in slapdash frontier cities, in raw towns and raucous mining camps. To shield her mother and protect her family's name, she adopted the alias of Pearl Hart, the name of a madam (then deceased) for whom she had once worked. I wonder if there was not implicit in her choice of that particular name something more than a practical expedient? Might there perhaps also have been a poetic impulse? Pearl Hart is a resonant name, rich in suggestion, charged with brightness and grace. Perhaps adopting the lyrical name Pearl Hart was an expression of yearning for a state beyond the soiled, sordid world Lillie Naomi Davy inhabited.
Despite the historian Frederick Jackson Turner's famous declaration that by 1890 the American frontier was closed, the "wild west" lingered for decades in the southwestern quarter of the United States. Nowhere was this more true than in the Territory of Arizona, where, for example, a battle between Yaqui Indians and the US Army took place in 1918, and a deadly western-style gun battle (the Power's Cabin Shootout) was fought later that same year. In the late 1890s, when Pearl Hart established herself there, the Territory of Arizona was still an unruly region, offering freedom from restraint and in many cases even freedom from accountability. It was a place that must have seemed potentially favorable for a spirited young woman of the lowest social stratum. A young woman unsubmissive and unresigned.
And Pearl was, indeed, of a buoyant, defiant, resourceful nature, undaunted by the many impediments and reversals she endured. Her brother, Willie, later described her as "lithesome, blithe and witty, gushing with fun and jollity." She was fond of reading and singing, adept at sewing her own clothes, and at knitting and embroidering. She could compose a kind of folk-ballad poetry, was an accomplished horsewoman (sitting astride her horse, not riding sidesaddle as was then the custom for girls and women) and was a dead accurate shot with a pistol. None of these qualities and abilities, however, served to contribute to her economic advancement. That is why in late May of 1899, nearly destitute and urgently wishing to visit her ailing mother, she determined to rob the Wells Fargo stage coach at Kane Spring Canyon in Arizona.
Pearl Hart capped her bold escape from the Pima County jail by hopping an eastbound freight train out of Tucson and crossing into the Territory of New Mexico. Alighting ultimately in the town of Deming, she lived and worked there for a time before being recognized, arrested, and returned to Tucson to face charges for the Wells Fargo holdup. She was subsequently tried at Florence, Arizona, for the crime of robbery, found guilty, and sentenced to a term of five years in the Yuma Territorial Penitentiary, the west's most infamous prison.
Rumors, embellishments, falsehoods, and fabrications abound concerning the life of Pearl Hart, both during her time at the Yuma Territorial Penitentiary and following her release from confinement there. In this study, John Boessenecker effectively separates fact from myth. Drawing on a wealth of previously unknown evidence, including official documents, letters, memoirs, census records, photographs, and newspaper accounts, Boessenecker delineates her prison years and traces the post-prison life of the former "girl bandit" through aliases and restless movements across the west to her death in obscurity in Los Angeles in 1935. (How curious to consider: Pearl Hart who robbed a stagecoach with a sixgun and fled on horseback across the desert lived on in an era of radio and automobiles, talking motion pictures, movie magazines, commercial air travel, and frozen foods!) Boessenecker also follows the chaotic lives of her siblings and provides relevant contexts and backgrounds for persons and places appearing in the course of the narrative.
Mixing a few metaphors, we might say that despite the cards being stacked against her, she had something of a run for her money before running out of road. Born into abject poverty and subject to the codes governing women during that era, Lillie/Pearl enacted a one-woman rebellion, audaciously defying for a time the economic, social and legal systems she viewed as restraining her. Stepping outside these norms and systems, she conducted herself according to a personal code: unflagging loyalty to her mother and her siblings, and honest dealings with those she deemed deserving of her respect. This latter principle we see when, for example, down to her last ten dollars and about to depart town, she nevertheless pays her debt to the proprietor of a general store in Mammoth, Arizona. And we see, again, her personal code exercised when, during the robbery of the Wells Fargo coach, it will be remembered, she declines to take money from the driver, and considerately (under the circumstances) returns two dollars to each of the passengers, so that they do not have to continue their journey entirely penniless.
Her ringing feminist statement of non-compliance addressed to her jailers, as quoted above, may be seen as a concise declaration of the causes of her revolt against the forces and agencies she saw arraigned against her. The economic system, the conventions governing gender roles and sexual relations, the laws and the courts were all clearly male institutions, for her a reflection in the world at large of the despotic, arbitrary rule of her father in the household in which she was raised. Her oblique perspective on the official culture of her era can be seen to derive in large part from a cruel childhood.
An incongruous weakness in Pearl's self-reliant character would seem to be her poor taste in men. In this regard, Boessenecker observes that "having been subjected to extreme neglect and abuse" from her father, she "sought affection from the same kind of man. In so doing, she became doomed to repeat the same experiences of her childhood. Modern psychologists believe that is why many troubled young women marry men much like their abusive fathers." The reader is relieved to see, though, that late in life she seems to have found a measure of stability and satisfaction, living quietly in a modest Los Angeles bungalow among her family, relishing the company of her young granddaughters.
Not least interesting in Wildcat is Boessenecker's chronicle of various fictional and dramatic treatments of Pearl Hart's life and misdeeds, beginning with her sister Katy's authorship of a melodrama titled "The Arizona Female Bandit," (later re-titled "Arizona's Girl Bandit") in which in stage performances of the play Katy acted the principal role. Indeed, at one point, after her release from prison, Pearl herself took a supporting role in the play as she and her sister performed the piece in small towns throughout the west. Decades later, inspired by reading of the then nearly forgotten life of Pearl Hart, Niven Busch wrote a novel titled Duel in the Sun (1944) "A Lusty Novel of the Southwest," changing the name of the female protagonist from Pearl Hart to Pearl Chavez. The novel was soon made into a Technicolor motion picture epic (shot partly on location in Arizona) directed by King Vidor and starring Jennifer Jones, Joseph Cotten, and Gregory Peck. The most expensive film ever made at the time of its release in 1946, the movie was criticized and censored for its sexual content and was considered controversial for its Freudian slant. Later dramatized versions of Pearl Hart's once famous Kane Spring Canyon holdup of a Wells Fargo stage appeared in episodes of the television shows Tales of Wells Fargo and Death Valley Days. A more recent fictional treatment inspired by her life and crimes is the novel, I, Pearl Hart (1998) by Jane Candia Coleman. Yet, despite sporadic interest in Pearl Hart, a full version of her life story has remained unknown until Boessenecker's well-researched biography.
The minds and inner lives of the denizens of the old west are in large measure impenetrable to us today. Their illegible faces in old photographs, the curious coins they carried in their pockets, the tunes, riddles and jokes they knew, the now antique firearms they wielded as they posed for photographers. They heard and uttered words in another time. They looked out through their eyes at the raw world around them, a world that was their here, their now, against which they were driven to improvise. In our own era, we often tend to romanticize the frontier west or in a revisionist spirit to view it as brutal and sordid, but beyond those polarities, deeper than that, there is about the American west and the lives lived there—those fates, those faces—something disquieting, the suggestion of an underlying terror and sadness. Only very rarely does the mask crack, as in the mugshot photograph taken of Pearl Hart upon her entrance into the Yuma Territorial Prison in which we see on her face a naked expression of fear and forsakenness. It is a look to haunt the heart.
Reading Boessenecker's biography often called forth in my mind that disquiet, that sense of pathos and poignancy, that elusive awareness of the mystery of human lives and destinies. Boessenecker has rescued from myth and oblivion the lived days of Pearl Hart's wild, hard-knock, proud, uncommon life, and has rendered a vivid portrait of this half-forgotten, much misrepresented figure of frontier days.
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