Women of the Wild West
It is commonplace to hear the tales of gunmen such as Jesse James, Johnny Ringo, Billy the Kid and my newest entry, David Murphy, the main character of the forthcoming book “From the Ashes.”
Shameless plug, I know, it is my blog, eh. LOL.
Less known, yet part of the colorful Wild West are the women. Today I have a few interesting women to share with Ya’ll.
How about that picture of Raquel Welch? That's why it's called a Teaser Image, eh :)
Big Nose Kate - Born Mary Catherine Haroney in Hungary on November 7, 1850.
Kate was the daughter of a physician who had been appointed as the personal surgeon of Mexico’s Emperor, Maximillian, in 1862. With the appointment, the family left Hungary for Mexico, but in 1865 Maximillian’s rule crumbled. The Haroney family fled the country and settled in Davenport, Iowa.
Little known tidbit: By 1874, Kate lived in Wichita, Kansas where she worked in a sporting house for Nellie Bessie Earp the wife of James Earp. Though Kate always stated that she did not meet Wyatt Earp until she was in Fort Griffin, Texas, she and Wyatt Earp were in Wichita at the same time. Speculation charged she had a relationship with Wyatt at that time.
Kate is most famous for her relationship with Doc Holiday and the dangerous days of Tombstone Arizona. Where to this day a saloon holds her name.
July 20, 1889, Ella Watson, a homesteader with a small ranch, was demonstratively lynched by vigilantes of Wyoming’s powerful cattlemen.
Also known as "Cattle Kate," this lady of the West made a name for herself in the late 1800s when she was in her mid-twenties. Watson worked as a cook in the Rawlins House hotel and there she met her true love, James Averell.
The two were hanged in 1889 by vigilantes who claimed Averell and Watson were cattle rustlers, but it is now believed that their murder was unjustified, the result of an abuse of power by land and cattle owners.
Born Martha Jane Canary in Missouri around 1856, was a sharpshooter by the time she was a young woman. She received her nickname, Calamity Jane, when she rescued an army captain in South Dakota, under attack by Native Americans. Jane, known to be a whiskey-drinking, "don't-mess-with-me" kind of gal. She joined Buffalo Bill's show in the mid-1890s. Though she married a man named Burk at age 33, when Jane died in 1903, she asked to be buried next to Wild Bill Hickock. Rumor has it that Hickock was the only man she ever loved.
Myra Maybelle Shirley Reed Starr (February 5, 1848 – February 3, 1889), better known as Belle Starr, was a notorious American outlaw.
She was born Myra Maybelle Shirley (known as May to her family) on her father's farm near Carthage, Missouri. Her mother was a Hatfield from the infamous Hatfield-McCoy feuding clans. Frank and Jesse James's gang hid out at her family's farm when she was a kid, and from then on, she was hooked on the outlaw life. Later, when her husband Jim Reed shot a man, the two went on the run, robbing banks and counterfeiting.
1889, while living in the Choctaw Nation, near the Canadian River, an unknown assassin shot her from ambush with a shotgun. Many suspects were named. However, there were no charges, nor convictions. Still alive, they took Belle to her cabin where she expired an hour later, two days short of her 41st birthday.
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G. B. Miller