Poker Alice: The Cigar-Smoking Card Queen Who Shot It Out with Soldiers

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Alice Ivers Duffield Tubbs Huckert, known across the frontier as Poker Alice, was born in Devonshire, England, on February 17, 1851, and schooled at a Virginia boarding academy meant to turn out refined ladies. Then her family moved to the mining town of Leadville, Colorado. There she married Frank Duffield, a mining engineer who taught her poker, and when a dynamite charge killed him she turned to the tables to survive. She counted cards, kept a cigar in her mouth and a .38 revolver at hand, and refused to play on Sundays. On a good night she could take in up to $6,000.

This episode follows her from the saloons of Colorado and New Mexico to Deadwood, where around 1890 she pulled her gun on a knife-wielding miner and saved the life of fellow dealer Warren G. Tubbs, who became her second husband. After his death from tuberculosis she opened a resort between Sturgis and Fort Meade, and on the night of July 14, 1913, she fired five shots into a mob of soldiers who were smashing her windows. The years that followed brought raids for bootlegging, convictions for keeping a brothel, and finally a pardon from the governor.

• In Creede, Colorado, she dealt cards in a saloon owned by Robert Ford, the man who shot Jesse James.
• After big wins she traveled to New York City to buy the latest fashions, then wore them at the table so that opponents would underestimate her.
• When Tubbs died on December 31, 1909, she drove his body four days through a blizzard in a lumber wagon to bury him in Sturgis, then tended bar to pay for the funeral.
• She married her sheepherder George Huckert because she owed him $1,008 in back wages and decided marriage was cheaper than paying.
• Facing prison in 1928, she was pardoned by Governor William J. Bulow after hundreds of citizens petitioned for her. She died on February 27, 1930, and her will cut out the relatives who had ignored her.