America Could Learn a Lot from Its 'Bandit Queen' of the Wild West

If you’ve been feeling desperate lately to launch yourself into literally any other timeline, travel with me for a moment to the late 19th century—when Mark Twain was writing for Cosmopolitan Magazine, the suffragette movement was charging ahead full steam, and when outlaws like Pearl Hart were running the Wild West. 

It’s Week two of spotlighting the worst-behaved women in history (or really, just women in male-dominated careers), and today, we’re applauding America’s “Bandit Queen.” Hart loved to swear, drink, and smoke cigars, and spent her late 20s shocking society by becoming a female stagecoach robber, stealing from men, and famously declaring during her trial: “I shall not consent to be tried under a law in which my sex had no voice in making.” (Technically, she was born in Canada, and it’s unclear if she ever became a U.S. citizen, but the point still stands.) 

Hart was born Pearl Emma Taylor in November 1871 to a middle-class Protestant family in Ontario. After spending her childhood running away from home to Buffalo, New York, and Chicago, Illinois, and spending time with pimps and drug dealers, her parents sent her to boarding school at 16. There, she met Fred Hart, a bartender and gambler, and eloped with him. 

Hart followed Fred from Canada to Chicago, where she came across Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show—a live-entertainment performance group that acted out frontier life. Growing more unhappy with Fred—and inspired by the sights of sharpshooter Annie Oakley and talks from Julia Ward Howe, a prominent women’s activist and poet—she ditched Fred to head further inland to Colorado, then went to Phoenix, Arizona, before he tracked her down. She soon gave birth to their kids, a boy and a girl, whom she eventually sent to live with her mother in Ohio. Speaking to Cosmo in 1900 from prison about this time of her life, she said, “I was tired of life. I wanted to die, and tried to kill myself three or four times.” 

While there are various records detailing Hart’s life in Colorado and Arizona—including various Cosmo interviews and news archives—there are some conflicting reports around this period, and it’s not clear how she survived between the ages of 22 and 28. But long story short, she was broke by 1899, and allegedly fell in love with a miner named Joe Boot. According to some variations of the story, she’d honeytrap men into a room where Boot would be waiting to jump and mug them. Eventually, they concocted a more organized plan to rob a stagecoach on its way to Arizona. 

To conduct the heist, Hart dressed like a man with a gray flannel shirt, a pair of Levi’s jeans, and oversized boots. (Levi’s—take note for your future campaign.) While she collected about $425 from the robbery, she also gave each passenger a dollar so they could at least have some lunch. (We love a courteous queen.) But the coach driver ultimately escaped on horse to rat her and Boot out to Sheriff William Truman, who tracked them down and arrested them.

“One wouldn’t think that she is a tiger cat for nerve and endurance,” Truman told reporters about her arrest, in a disgusting display of chauvinist chest-beating. “Only a couple of days ago I had a struggle with her for my life. She would have killed me in my tracks could she have got her pistol. Sure, women are curious creatures.” Men have never sucked.

Hart’s story made national headlines, and a San Francisco Call article from June 1899 read: “THIS WOMAN MASQUERADED AS A BANDIT.” During her trial, overseen by an all-male jury, she called out the fact that she was being tried under a government she couldn’t even vote for. 

Though it’s not definitively known what exactly Hart did for the rest of her days, she was reportedly pardoned at 31, and seen two years later operating a cigar store in Kansas before she died in 1955. There’s no record she ever had a third child—suggesting that her final move as a bandit was, indeed, swindling her way out of a full sentence.