Pearl Hart: The Bandit Queen Who Robbed a Stagecoach and Fooled a Nation

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On May 30, 1899, a woman with cropped hair and men's clothes held up the stagecoach running between Globe and Florence, Arizona, one of the last horse drawn lines in the territory. With her partner Joe Boot covering the passengers, she collected $431.20 and two guns, then handed each victim one dollar back for a meal. The gesture made Pearl Hart famous. She told reporters she was Pearl Taylor, the educated daughter of a wealthy Ontario family, led astray by a gambler named Hart and drawn west after seeing Buffalo Bill's show at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair.

This episode sets that story beside the one historian John Boessenecker pieced together. She was born in 1871 as Lillie Naomi Davy, the third of eight children of illiterate parents, with a violent alcoholic father and a childhood of poverty, petty crime, and prostitution. At 11 she was caught with her brother trying to resell a stolen cow. The robbery itself came after a mine closed in Mammoth, Arizona, cost her a job as a boarding house cook, and a gold claim she worked with Boot turned up nothing.

• The stage carried no armed guard because the route had not been robbed in years. A posse led by Sheriff Truman found the pair asleep in the brush on June 5.
• Jailed in Tucson, she became such a celebrity that a fan gave her a bobcat cub. In October 1899 she escaped through an 18 inch hole in the wall and was soon recaptured.
• A jury acquitted her after she wept about needing money to reach her dying mother, to the fury of Judge Fletcher M. Doan. Prosecutors rearrested her at once for tampering with the U.S. mail.
• At Yuma Territorial Prison she was the only female inmate, with a larger cell, a private yard, and visiting reporters. Joe Boot drove a supply wagon out of the prison and was never seen again.
• She was pardoned in December 1902 by Governor Alexander Brodie amid rumors of a faked pregnancy. Research shows she died in Los Angeles in 1935, not in Arizona in 1955 as long believed.