Legends of the Old West - WOMEN OF THE WEST Ep. 6 | Pearl Hart: “The Stagecoach Robber, part 2”

Episode Date: May 11, 2022

In Arizona Territory, Peart Hart’s adventures escalated and intensified. She robbed a stagecoach, tried to outrun the law, escaped from jail, and ended up in the notorious Yuma Prison. Her exploits made headlines across the country, but her fame was fleeting in the waning days of the Old West. Join Black Barrel+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons: blackbarrel.supportingcast.fm/join To advertise on this podcast, please email: [e-mail] For more details, visit our website www.blackbarrelmedia.com and check out our social media pages. We’re @OldWestPodcast on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. This show is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please visit AirwaveMedia.com to check out other great podcasts like Ben Franklin’s World, Once Upon A Crime, and many more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On May 29, 1899, a man and a woman rode their horses through the rugged mountains and canyons of southeastern Arizona until they reached the outskirts of the copper mining town of Globe. At about five in the afternoon, they waited at a bend in the road and listened for the drumbeat of horse hooves that signified the arrival of a stagecoach. They pulled their horses to the side of the road and walked them slowly until they saw the approaching carriage. The woman pulled her 38, and her companion drew his 45. He yelled, throw up your hands, and the terrified driver stopped the stage. The man then ordered the driver and his four passengers to get out, and he told his companion to search them for guns, which she did. While the man trained a gun on the passengers,

she searched all of their clothing and took every dollar and coin they had. To do it, she had to take off one of her gloves. One of the men smiled, thinking that because she was female, she might take pity on him and leave his cash. He was wrong. Pearl Hart had no intention of leaving anything behind. The 28-year-old had already lived several lifetimes in the East and Midwest before committing the robbery in the West. She was hardened by abuse, poverty, and failed romances. In other words, she had nothing to lose. As a podcast network, our first priority has always been audio and the stories we're able to share with you. But we also sell merch.

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This is Episode 6, the season finale, Pearl Hart, The Stagecoach Robber, Part 2. In the spring of 1898, Pearl Hart was struggling through a difficult existence, to put it mildly, in Phoenix, Arizona. She'd been working as a prostitute to keep food on the table and opium in her pipe. As had been the case several times before, Pearl's common-law husband, Dan Bandman, returned to her from parts unknown and begged for food, morphine, and company. She was miserable with Bandman,

but only slightly relieved when he left to be a musician in the Spanish-American War. Though she was afraid of him, he at least provided a measure of protection against even rougher characters. Feeling restless and probably vulnerable, too, Pearl took to the road again. She boarded a stagecoach for Mammoth, Arizona, about 150 miles southeast. It was then a thriving gold mining camp. Pearl later gave an honest account of her work there, which was not exactly cooking for miners. In Mammoth, she acquired a six-gun for both protection and a way to keep boredom at bay. She used it for hunting and for target

practice, both of which she got pretty good at. In January 1899, Pearl met a slim, mustached man named Joe Boot. She knew it wasn't his real name, but she never found out what his real name was. He was 28 years old and only 5 feet 4 inches tall. People in Mammoth later recalled that Joe was enthralled by Pearl. He seemed to treat her well and did the cooking at her camp of ill repute. In the middle of April 1899, Pearl and Joe decided to move to Globe. Globe was a lot bigger than Mammoth, so she could do more business. She could also hide from Dan Bandman. Before they left Pearl's camp, they watched the Globe's stage coach pass them by. Growing up, Pearl depended on being sharply observant of everything around her,

so as the coach passed, she paid close attention. She took note of the craggy rock formations and other details of the landscape and their distance to the passing coach. That information would be useful later. In Globe, Pearl went to work in a brothel, not having any real alternative. She thought she could hide from Dan Bandman in Globe, but she was wrong. Bandman got an early discharge from the army and tracked her down. He stole her meager savings, and they got in one last furious fight, and she managed to get rid of him for good.

While Pearl wondered what to do next, she got a letter from one of her siblings. It said their mother was dying. In spite of the fact they had seen very little of each other in recent years, Pearl loved her mother dearly. She desperately wanted to see her before she passed, but she was out of money and didn't have time to save enough to travel. Her pseudo-boyfriend, Joe Boot, seemed to come to the rescue. Joe told Pearl he had a mining claim. He offered to go out there with her and dig up enough metal, whatever that metal might have been, to buy passage to Kansas City, where Pearl's mother now lived.

Pearl said they went to the claim and worked day and night, hacking at the ground with picks and shovels until she couldn't stand it anymore. They found no sign of ore of any kind. Pearl later claimed that she was so desperate to see her mother that she became temporarily insane, and that was why she suggested the idea of robbing a stagecoach. In the 1890s, stage and train robbery remained a significant problem in Arizona. The territory was plagued by bandits, including some with names that might sound

familiar, Bronco Bill Walters and Black Jack Ketchum. Pearl remembered that stagecoach from Globe. She said that she put on a quick display of marksmanship for Joe Boot to prove that she could shoot straight and true if need be. The shooting display convinced him that they could pull off the robbery. They secured Winchester rifles, pistols, ammunition, and two good horses. Pearl never explained how or where they got the items, and if they bought them, Pearl never explained how or where they got the items. And if they bought them, she never explained why they spent so much money on the tools of a robbery instead of just buying a $30 railroad ticket to Kansas City, which would have been much less expensive. But in late May 1899, the pair rode south from Globe to rob a stagecoach.

globe to rob a stagecoach. They crossed Pioneer Pass and descended into Cane Spring Canyon. The road at that point was one of the worst in the Southwest at the time. It followed the bed of a creek and was steep and skirted high cliffs. Finally, they reached a settlement on the Gila River, aptly named Riverside. Riverside was just slightly more than a camp. It only had 50 residents, but it did have a stage coach stop. Pearl and Joe made camp nearby and watched the coaches as they came and went out of the station. In this area, Wells Fargo was the principal express business in Arizona. It paid stage lines to carry valuable cargo in its well-known green boxes. If a stage coach had a guard sitting on the bench next to the driver, it meant the coach almost certainly carried one of the green boxes. If there was no guard on the coach, then there probably wasn't a green box,

which meant the robbers would have to target the passengers instead. And that was exactly what Pearl and Joe wanted. They didn't want to tangle with a shotgun rider whose sole job was to battle robbers. In Riverside, Pearl and Joe figured out the stage schedule. On May 29, 1899, the pair smoked some opium, steeled their nerves, and rode out of their camp. They waited three hours for a coach to arrive. At about five o'clock, the stage came rattling down the trail. At the reins was driver Henry Bacon. Three of his passengers were Oscar Neal, a traveling salesman,

an old man named Harding, and a Chinese man whose name was never recorded. Pearl and Joe stepped out from the roadside brush, and Joe shouted, Henry Bacon pulled hard on the reins. Both he and Oscar Neal were armed with large revolvers, but they never tried to use them. The driver and the passengers complied with Joe's command. The robbers lined up the men and emptied their pockets. Pearl wasn't supposed to talk so that no one would know she was a woman. But her temper got the better of her when one of the passengers was slow to hand over his cash, and she threatened to put a bullet in him. The whole robbery took

just a few minutes. Pearl and Joe stole roughly $450, which would be the equivalent of about $13,000 today. It was potentially life-changing money for Pearl Hart. Thinking of how many times she herself had been broke, Pearl handed back a few dollars to each of the passengers. Later, of course, they remembered thinking how petite her hands looked. After that generous gesture, Pearl and Joe hopped back on their horses. It sounds counterintuitive, but the two followed the stagecoach when it resumed its route. They rode up the road for a few miles, trying to come up with a plan. Apparently, they had done very well in organizing the robbery itself, but hadn't given any thought to the escape. Pearl eventually made them turn off the well-traveled

road. It was her idea to travel at night and sleep during the day in the hopes of eluding the law. And for the next few days, that's exactly what they did. Pearl and Joe kept to the most inaccessible land they could find. Even though it was night and dangerous, they crisscrossed several canyons in the hope that the many trails left by their horses would confuse anyone tracking them. They continued for about six miles and then camped for a couple hours before daybreak. Meanwhile, the stage arrived in Riverside about an hour after the holdup. Passenger Oscar Neal began searching for the bandits on his own. The majority of the stolen money came from him, and the bandits also took his gold watch and his revolver,

so he was powerfully motivated to find them. Stage driver Henry Bacon rode 35 miles west to the town of Florence and reported the holdup. The descriptions of the robbers were enough to know, without a doubt, the road agents were Pearl Hart and Joe Boot. When Sheriff William Truman returned to Florence that afternoon, he learned of the robbery and promptly rode for Riverside. The fugitives had a full day's head start, but the lawman was an experienced tracker.

He teamed up with passenger Oscar Neal, and they hired an extra tracker to help. The trio arrived in the town of Mammoth, where Truman correctly guessed that the pair would have to stop to get supplies. That night, the sheriff and his men took refuge from a rainstorm at a remote ranch house near a trail that led to the railroad. He figured the bandits would head that way, and the ranch owner assured him that no one could pass by without his dogs sounding the alarm. Unfortunately for the lawman, the rancher was wrong. Shop with Rakuten and you'll get it.

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That's R-A-K-U-T-E-N. Pearl remembered an old trick for hiding horse tracks and muffling their sound. She wrapped canvas squares lined with grass around their horses' hooves. In the morning, the sheriff was furious that the dogs didn't bark, but at least he now had some distinct, funny-looking tracks to follow. Pearl and Joe managed to stay ahead of Sheriff Truman for five days, but they were absolutely exhausted, as were their horses. They were also sick from anxiety. There were times, Pearl said later, where they would be lying in a gulch and the small posse would ride by within a few feet of them.

Truman, Neal, and the tracker hunted the outlaws to a schoolhouse north of Benson. That was worrisome because once the duo reached the train station in Benson, they could conceivably get away for good. conceivably get away for good. At daybreak on the morning of June 3rd, the sheriff and his two-man posse watched the couple leave the schoolhouse. Staying far behind, the manhunters followed and watched. Eventually, the bandits dismounted near some brush and seemed to make camp. As soon as the lawmen thought Pearl and Joe might be asleep, they sprang from their hiding spot and leveled their Winchesters at the captured outlaws. True to form, Pearl put up a brief struggle and tried to grab her guns, but the sheriff overpowered her. Then she claimed she was a man named Joe Goodrich, but eventually she admitted her real name.

The posse recovered $469 and six guns, which included Hart's.45 caliber Colt Army revolver and her.44 caliber Merwin and Holbert revolver. The sheriff kept her Merwin and Holbert as a memento. The posse loaded the prisoners onto the train to Florence, and Pearl admitted everything to Sheriff Truman. She said she was tired of the hard life and only wanted to go back to her childhood home in Canada. She also laughed and chatted with other passengers on the train and freely described the holdup. with other passengers on the train and freely described the holdup. Pearl was temporarily placed in jail in Pinal County, where newspaper reporters soon flocked to get her story.

She was allowed to sit with her cigarettes and tell them whatever she felt like telling them, but she was forced to wear a dress. And to call her a sensation would be an understatement. Newspapers from all around the country wrote about the beautiful 28-year-old bandit. She spoke freely, telling them she did it because she needed to send money to her sick mother. She also took aim at the driver of the stagecoach, saying that if she was held up by a woman, she wouldn't tell a soul.

She told the LA Times that she didn't care what happened to her. She'd do it all over again if she had the chance. Pearl and Joe didn't have money for bail. The Pinal County Jail was too crowded, and so was the jail in Phoenix. So Sheriff Truman made arrangements for Pearl to be held at the Pima County Jail in Tucson. She was taken into custody by Undersheriff Bob Paul. Paul was nearing the end of a very adventurous life. His five-decade career as a peace officer began in 1854 during the California Gold Rush. He fought lynch mobs,

tracked down stagecoach robbers, investigated murderers, pursued Apaches and jailbreakers, and killed five desperados in gun battles in Arizona and Old Mexico. Paul was a friend of Wyatt Earp and played a role in the famous events in Tombstone in 1881 and 1882. In 1890, President Benjamin Harrison appointed Paul U.S. Marshal for the entire Arizona Territory, and he held the post until 1893, after which he served as Justice of the Peace in Tucson. In spite of all his experience, Paul had never met anyone quite like Pearl Hart. Bob Paul was a compassionate man, and he recognized the signs of opium withdrawal. He made arrangements for Pearl to receive a dose of the drug each morning and evening so she

wouldn't get sick. He also made sure she had regular hot meals from a nearby restaurant. He sent her clean dresses and shirts, and he also allowed her to wear men's clothes when she felt like it. He let her do interviews with newspapers and magazines, one of which was Cosmopolitan Magazine, which published a long piece about her in 1899. It contained photos of her in both male and female attire, which shocked and fascinated the country. Bob Paul even allowed her to pose with firearms that weren't loaded, of course. Lastly, Paul gave her a special gift. It was a baby bobcat to keep her company while she awaited trial. But the gifts and the kind treatment weren't enough to keep her in the Tucson jail, and she began plotting her escape with the help of a

trustee named Ed Hogan. Hogan was a thief and a drunk, and he was only going to be in jail for a few days. As a trustee, he had more freedom of movement than regular prisoners. But even with his liberties, he decided to help with the jailbreak. On October 11, 1899, Pearl and Ed began their breakout. Next to Pearl's locked room was an alcove that led to a stairway to the courthouse tower. Hogan climbed a few steps up the stairway and then used a jackknife to cut a hole through the plaster-in-wood wall. Pearl put on men's clothing and then put a chair on top of a table and climbed up to the hole in the wall. Hogan helped her crawl through the hole and they quickly escaped the courthouse. They hurried to the rail yards and hopped on an eastbound freight train that was ready to leave.

They hid between two boxcars and headed for New Mexico. The next morning, a jailer found Pearl's room empty and saw the hole in the wall. He summoned Bob Paul, who found a long farewell letter. Oddly enough, Pearl took all the responsibility for the stagecoach robbery and begged him to let Joe Boot go. Then she rambled about seeing her mother. She threatened that if her mother died before she got to see her, she'd kill everybody responsible for detaining her. Neither Bob Paul nor his boss, Sheriff Wakefield, were amused. Wakefield was convinced that Pearl and Ed had traveled south to Mexico, but in reality, they had alternated between walking and stealing rides on freight trains until they made it all the way to the town of Deming, New Mexico.

Deming is in the southwest corner of New Mexico, about an hour from Las Cruces and about an hour and a half from El Paso, Texas. In 1899, Deming was the home of George Scarborough, a celebrated lawman of the Old West. Four years earlier, Scarborough and El Paso lawman Jeff Milton shot and killed a fugitive named Martin. shot and killed a fugitive named Martin. Martin was the Polish immigrant and cattle rustler who had hired notorious killer-turned-lawyer John Wesley Hardin. It was Hardin's entanglement with Martin, and more specifically Martin's wife, that led to Hardin's death. George Scarborough was always on alert, and like everyone else in the Southwest, he knew that Pearl and Ed had escaped from Tucson. And like everybody else, he'd seen Pearl's photos in Cosmopolitan magazine.

So, he immediately recognized Pearl when she strolled into town with a stranger who was probably Hogan. That night, Scarborough arrested them in their hotel room and took them back to Tucson. On November 13, 1899, Pearl Hart and Joe Boot stood trial for robbing the stagecoach. Surprising everyone, Joe stood up and pleaded guilty. He accepted all responsibility for the crime. At first, the jurors and onlookers were skeptical. But when Pearl testified passionately that all she wanted to do was get enough money to go home

and see her dying mother, they were overcome with empathy. Pearl, it turned out, was a decent actress. The jury returned a verdict of not guilty. But the judge saw right through Pearl's fraud. He ordered her held on a second, separate charge of robbing Henry Bacon, the stagecoach driver. This time, the jury found her guilty. Two days later, the judge gave Jo Boot 30 years in prison.

Compared to that, Pearl's sentence was relatively light. in prison. Compared to that, Pearl's sentence was relatively light. She got five years in Yuma Prison, which was described by one observer as the most repulsive hellhole. Yuma Prison was little more than an adobe bullpen that corralled 260 criminals. It was perched on a bluff over the Colorado River about 10 miles from the Mexican border. It was extremely isolated and surrounded by hundreds of miles of arid desert. The heat was so oppressive that a common anecdote made the rounds for years. It said that one time, a soldier at Fort Yuma died and went to hell, but he immediately returned to Yuma to get his blankets.

Yuma had been home to female prisoners in the past, but in 1899, Pearl was the only one. There were only three cells for women, and they weren't actually cells. They were caves that were carved into the rock embankment in the southwest corner of the grounds. They were separated from the main cell block of male prisoners by a high fence. In the winter of 1899, Pearl's main concern wasn't the heat. That wouldn't return for another few months. Pearl's first test was to weather the storm of opium withdrawal. She no longer had access to the drug and she became violently ill. But over the next couple months, she fought through the effects of withdrawal and came out clean on the

other side. Next, she had to find ways to pass the time, which may have included an escape attempt or a fake attempt. A fake attempt. Pearl kept herself busy by reading, sewing clothing, and writing poetry. And for a short time, she maintained a romance with a convict named Billy Stiles. She'd met him six years earlier in Phoenix when they were both hauled into court for disturbing the peace. Now, he was passing time in Yuma Prison while he waited to testify at a trial. When Billy left the prison, Pearl was back on her own. Neither prison records nor Arizona newspapers made any mention of Pearl attempting

to escape. But decades later, two different ex-convicts told a similar story about her. According to one, he and Pearl started to smuggle themselves out by hiding under the tarp of the wagon that delivered beef to the prison every Saturday morning. But right before they successfully escaped, Pearl jumped out of the wagon and alerted the guards to the plot. The theory was that she hoped to get a pardon or a reduced sentence for helping to stop an escape. But if anything of the sort happened, it was absent from recorded history. The rest of Pearl's stay at Yuma was hard, but in late 1902, she got some welcome news. She was going to be paroled early. It probably wasn't because of good behavior so much as the fact that there were now more women

in the prison than cave cells, and also there was a smallpox outbreak. She was released on December 15th, and the terms of her parole required that she leave Arizona territory, something she was only too happy to do. A few weeks later, Pearl Hart arrived in Kansas City. She had a tearful reunion with her mother, who apparently wasn't quite as close to death's door as it appeared three years earlier. Two of Pearl's sisters were also there, and Pearl got a job working in a store before eventually opening her own cigar shop. Her sister Katie, with whom she'd had all those adventures as teenagers, had wrestled with depression, poverty, and the death of a child. Katie moved in with Pearl, and the sisters were back together again.

Though Katie had struggled, like all the other Davey siblings, she wrote a semi-successful play Pearl was arrested in July of 19 relationships, the marriage was rocky at times. Pearl was arrested in July of 1908 for disturbing the peace while fighting with her husband. When the police arrived, she claimed they were merely rehearsing lines for the play about her life. The police didn't believe her, and the pair were charged but released. The police didn't believe her, and the pair were charged but released. That was the last time Pearl tangled with the law. In 1920, Pearl and her husband made the interesting decision to move back to Phoenix, and then two years later, to Southern California.

Pearl eventually divorced her husband and moved to Victorville, about 80 miles northeast of Los Angeles. There in 1935, at the age of 64, Pearl Hart passed away with her daughter by her side. One of the many falsehoods about her life was that she lived for another 20 years and died around 1955. But in 1935, her death received only a three-line obituary in the Los Angeles Times newspaper. She was one of the most notorious figures of the waning days of the Old West, but by the Old West, the plan is to do the story of Tom Horn and the Johnson County War. But at this point, my announcements about future seasons need to come with a disclaimer

subject to change in case something crazy comes up, like it did before this season. Either way, we'll see you soon for more Legends of the Old West, and hopefully the story of Tom Horn. Members of our Black Barrel Plus program don't have to wait week to week. They receive the entire season to binge all at once with no commercials and exclusive bonus episodes. to binge all at once with no commercials and exclusive bonus episodes. Sign up now through the link in the show notes or on our website, blackbarrelmedia.com. Memberships begin at just $5 per month. This episode was researched and written by Julia Bricklin. Original music by Rob Valliere. I'm your host and producer, Chris Wimmer. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening.

Check out our website, blackbarrelmedia.com, for more details and join us on social media. We're at Old West Podcasts on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. This show is part of the Airwave Media Podcast Network. Please visit airwavemedia.com to check out other great podcasts like Ben Franklin's World, Once Upon a Crime, and many more. Thanks for listening.