Which Wild West Woman Are You?

Martha Jane Canary was born to a gambler and a prostitute and was orphaned at age 12 or 13. She took the family wagon and her younger siblings, by herself, 115 miles across the wilderness of Wyoming Territory to a fort and then by train to the nearest town. Calamity Jane never shied away from what she had to do to get by, and she had fun doing very daring things. There are a lot of legends, some very unladylike behavior, and few truths in the stories of Calamity Jane. But what is most verifiable about her life was that she was generous to a fault and could always be counted on to nurse the sick and needy.

Mary Katherine Horony-Cummings was the daughter of a Hungarian doctor. She and her brother and sister were orphaned soon after arriving in America and were sent to live with an attorney. Kate didn't like him and soon stowed away on a riverboat headed to St. Louis. She married and had a child, but they both died of yellow fever. She entered a convent, but that didn't take either. She then started working in a 'sporting house' owned by Wyatt Earp's sister-in-law, as a prostitute. She went from place to place and, in the rowdiest town in Texas, introduced Wyatt Earp to Doc Holliday. They were not innocent lawmen at the time. She used fire and two pistols to break Holliday out of jail--the beginning of their fiery relationship. Kate and Doc moved from place to place together, alternating between settled dentist and wife, and gambler and saloon girl. They both preferred the latter.

Descended on one side from Virginia aristocracy and on the other from the West Virginia Hatfields, Belle was a fashionable woman of wild character. She grew up with Frank and Jesse James. She also was classically educated, played piano, and was a graduate of a women's academy. Belle was a lady and a horse thief. She married her teen crush, who became a murderer, and they spent the rest of his life moving around. When he died, she married one of his criminal cohorts, the Cherokee outlaw Sam Starr. She made it her job to be the organizer in organized horse thievery and served time for it in a notorious Detroit prison, where she became a model prisoner and a favorite of the warden. She was murdered two years after her great love, Sam Starr, died in a gunfight. There were many suspects for her murder, but it has never been satisfactorily solved.

Josephine would like you to think that she was just an average, respectable woman and the wife of a lawman, but she was a wild child from the word go. As a young girl, she was fascinated by the pretty dresses and independence of the ladies at a brothel by her dance school. Their lavishness prompted her to run away to Arizona when she was 13, for 'an adventure.' What happened during that adventure is unknown--she sued publishers to keep it private. Between 14 and 17, she was a prostitute under the alias Sadie Mansfield. What were her secrets? Certainly some of them involved Wyatt Earp . . .

Known as a polite, feminine, soft-spoken lady with a bit of an opium problem, Pearl Hart became an outlaw when she donned men's clothes and held up a stagecoach. The men were so flabbergasted that such a tiny woman would even dare that, so they did not even resist. Pearl later said that the only reason she did it was to get home to Canada to see her dying mother. When she was caught and jailed, Cosmo ran an article on her, saying, 'She is just the opposite of what would be expected of a woman stage robber.' One of her new fans gave her a bobcat as a pet. Later imprisoned for another crime, she was given a large cell with a mountain view and a yard where she could receive visitors.

Alice Ivers was born and attended a fine boarding school in Devonshire, England, before moving to Colorado, where she married a poker-playing miner. When he died in a mining accident, she became a professional gambler to make ends meet. She traveled to nearly every state and territory in the West, sometimes outplaying the house and taking over the game with her own bank of money. In her later years, she became a bootlegger and madam but never gave up playing poker and winning.