Probably the real Pearl Hart

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, outlaws, women, biographies

When you're one of a kind, and become a legend, speculation abounds. Wildcat: The Untold Story of Pearl Hart, the Wild West's Most Notorious Woman Bandit, by John Boessenecker, is my most recent wild card selection. The author, who really knows his research, has written a biography that is most likely the most truthful depiction of Pearl Hart's life we are ever to receive. Accounts ranging from mostly speculative to downright fallacious abound, and as of this writing, the Wikipedia Article "Pearl Hart", somewhat less than 50% factual, perpetuates one of many myths about her given name. Our author ought to get a Wikipedia account and correct it.

Lillie Naomi Davy was born April 19, 1871, the third of nine children of Anna and Albert Davy. She died in her daughter Millie's home in Los Angeles, on May 9, 1935, aged 64. She is interred in Whittier under her married name, Lillie Naomi Meyers. Earl Meyers, AKA Earl Nighthawk, was the last of her several husbands.

When she was 28, on May 29, 1899, a man calling himself Joe Boot and Lillie, now calling herself Pearl Hart, perhaps after the name of a deceased madam, robbed a stagecoach in Kane Spring Canyon, Arizona, along the Gila river near Riverside.

This photo shows a display in the Yuma Territorial Prison, where she spent two years of a five year sentence. Joe Boot was also incarcerated there for a time. The large picture of Pearl holding a rifle is reproduced on the cover of Wildcat.

The author stresses frequently that the horrific abuse Lillie and her siblings endured whenever Albert Davy was present (less than half the time, it seems), led them all to be untrustful of anyone except themselves. The older girls at least were probably also sexually abused. They treated sex as a commodity, and some of them, Lillie included, were prostitutes at various times. In Lillie's case it may have underlain her disdain for dressing or acting like a woman (except in the bedroom). She felt mens' clothing was more comfortable, and her command of profane language was legendary; at least a couple of her sisters could match her, curse for curse.

I don't know how to relate to outlaw characters. Their stories are often fascinating, and this one is doubly so, because Pearl Hart was the only really "badman" among women of the time. While she lived a life of petty crime until her thirties, her life is defined by a single event that took no more than a couple of hours. It is sometimes called the last stagecoach robbery, but it isn't; that came more than 15 years later. It isn't even the only one in which a woman played a part, but it is the only one where she played a primary part, and it became the most notorious.

Who knows why people do what they do? Except for the youngest boy, who died at age 10, all of the Davy siblings spent various periods of time on the wrong side of the law. The parenting "skills" of their father must have had much to do with that, but it doesn't go very far to elucidate the nature-nurture divide. The book is deeply interesting, and equally puzzling. I appreciate the work John Boessenecker undertook to extract the real story of Pearl Hart from the mists of time and the maze of speculative accounts that surround her legend.