The long golden days at the Sunbeam Rest Home were uniformly peaceful and quiet, like a dress rehearsal for the afterlife. For ninety-seven-year-old Libby Thompson, the Los Angeles care center offered a final snug harbor at the end of a tumultuous journey. Wizened to a wisp and kept alive for years on buttermilk and the occasional shot of whiskey, Thompson bore little resemblance to the pretty, petite woman she’d once been. Beyond her window spread a green lawn dotted with palm trees, although the frail little gray-haired lady with the flinty expression could no longer appreciate the view. Blind and failing, she’d sunk into the hazy realm of memory.
If Thompson had been aware of her surroundings, she probably would have spit in contempt. In the spring of 1953, all people seemed to be gabbing about was that new Superman TV show, or Patti Page’s silly song about the doggie in the window (the one with the waggly tail). These days, people thought they had it tough swinging the payments on a new Chevy Bel Air, and they got all excited if they caught a glimpse of a second-rate movie star down on Hollywood Boulevard. Folks sure were different now.
Libby Thompson knew the kind of real problems life could fling at you. When she was a kid, Americans were still fighting the Civil War. Growing up in the wilds of Texas, Libby had to worry about Indian raids and drought and whether her family would make it to the next harvest. Of course, people today would think she was lying if she were to tell them about the old days—when she caroused with the likes of Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and Bat Masterson.1 She’d run her own dance hall and whorehouse back then. Her customers had known her as Squirrel Tooth Alice, one of the more colorful madams of the Old West. Yep, Libby Thompson had seen quite a lot in her century of life, and much of it would turn your face bright red. Her story captures some of the gritty truth about a time and place in American history that has been mythologized almost beyond recognition.2
Thompson’s improbable adventure began in 1855 in the Brazos River Valley. She was born Mary Elizabeth Haley but was always known as Libby. Her father, James Haley, owned a dozen slaves and a good size farm south of Fort Worth. Though not rich, the family was better off than most. Libby and her two sisters grew up thinking of themselves as privileged, but the Civil War fixed that. With their slaves emancipated and much of their wealth gone, the family faced economic insecurity and physical danger. Their farm in Hood County lay on the edge of the frontier. As part of the prairie homeland of the Comanche, Kiowa, and Apache, that chunk of Texas came under frequent Indian attack. Sometime near the close of the Civil War, when Libby was around ten or eleven, a Comanche raiding party stole her away from her family, an event that set the course for her life.3
It’s uncertain how long Libby remained a prisoner, perhaps up to three years. Her parents were finally able to get her back in exchange for some horses. As if she hadn’t endured enough by then, once Libby returned home, she suffered from the worst sort of prejudice. On the assumption that her captors had sexually abused her, she was shunned by white society (Libby never spoke about her captivity). It was common for white females who’d been held captive by Indians to be regarded as spoiled, untouchables of a sort. Libby reacted to the injustice by thumbing her nose at those who looked down on her. When she was thirteen, she became the mistress of a considerably older man. She told people they were married, though that’s doubtful.4
Nothing is known about Libby’s lover, but the fellow must have been a more generous soul than most white people of the time. Unfortunately, James Haley didn’t regard him as noble. Haley thought the man was taking advantage of a young girl. When Libby brought her beau home to meet her parents, her father shot him dead on the front porch.5 It’s not hard to guess how Libby must have felt. Captured by Indians, rejected by her own people, and now cut off from someone who’d offered her love and acceptance, she did the only thing that made sense to her—she ran away from home.
By 1869 or 1870, when she was about fifteen, Libby ended up in Abilene, Kansas, where she found work as a dance hall girl. Recently established as a railhead, Abilene became the first great Kansas cattle town, the destination for herds of Texas longhorns driven up the Chisholm Trail after the Civil War.6 When cowhands reached Abilene and collected their pay, they went looking for three things—whiskey, games of chance, and women. The town did its best to meet those needs, recruiting “entertainers” of all stripes. Abilene bulged with saloons, dance halls, and bordellos. Libby was part of an army of women who descended on Abilene with the intention of sharing in the prosperity, a phenomenon that would be repeated in cattle and mining towns all over the West.
As a dance hall girl, Libby played the lively hostess—chatting up customers, encouraging them to buy drinks, and, yes, even dancing with them, just like Miss Kitty on Gunsmoke. Her job, however, didn’t require her to engage in sex.7 That was left to the “fallen angels” who plied their trade in the local bordellos, which ranged from veritable mansions to shabby backstreet “crib houses.” While prostitutes in the Old West were often forced into the trade by poverty, only a few made much money at it. The bulk of the profits went to the pimps, madams, and brothel owners. The “soiled doves” usually ended up with nothing other than a venereal disease and an addiction to alcohol or drugs. Many committed suicide. (Libby Haley also worked as a prostitute off and on, but she was lucky enough to survive, maybe because she’d been toughened by her earlier experiences.)8
Around the time that Libby left home, she met the man who would figure most prominently in her life, one “Texas Billy” Thompson, a hotheaded cowboy, gambler, and rustler who was at least ten years her senior. Libby and Texas Billy would share many an adventure over the next couple of decades. It was an unconventional relationship, but for the most part, it turned out to be as durable as a rawhide lariat.
Throughout their time together, Libby and Billy slipped back and forth between legitimate work and criminality with the nimbleness of a pair of otters sliding down a muddy creek bank. That wasn’t so unusual in the rough-and-tumble frontier era, when people occasionally did desperate things to make ends meet. Single women had it especially tough. For them, honest jobs were few, and those that existed—cook, seamstress, laundress—paid starvation wages. As a result, prostitutes and dance hall girls far outnumbered “decent” women in cattle towns.9 For men, jobs were often seasonal or boom and bust, leaving them to improvise at times. A hardworking drover, for instance, might be tempted to appropriate a few head of cattle to get through the winter. The challenging conditions made it difficult to tell a “hard” man from a “bad” one. In a strange sort of fellowship, even lawmen and known criminals drank and gambled together. Sometimes, the only difference between a peace officer and a desperado was a tin star (legendary marshal Wild Bill Hickok was just as likely to gun someone down over a game of cards as uphold the law).10
Libby and Texas Billy made a contrasting couple—she a pert little five-footer with dark curly hair and he a nearly six-foot beanpole with a handlebar mustache. The mismatched mavericks spent their first couple of years together on the Chisholm Trail. Libby came along when Billy was driving cattle north from Texas to the Kansas railheads. The pair frequently lived out of a covered wagon, or even in caves or crude shelters dug into a hillside. Whenever they hit a cattle town, Libby donned her ruffled skirts and slipped into her role as a dance hall gal, while Billy employed his card-playing skills. They had a series of more or less permanent homes in northern Texas, but they spent much of their time on the trail or bouncing between towns in Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas.
It was in Kansas that Libby acquired the nickname she would use for the rest of her career: Squirrel Tooth Alice. In Abilene, she met a saloonkeeper with an unusual hobby—he loved to feed the prairie dogs that flourished on his property, and he had a lively trade in catching and selling them as pets. A type of ground squirrel, prairie dogs can make interesting companions. Libby Haley was taken by the cute little animals and soon had one of her own, which she kept on a leash like a toy poodle. Since Libby’s front teeth were slightly prominent and had a noticeable gap between them, she adopted the name Squirrel Tooth Alice as her professional sobriquet. (Dance hall girls and prostitutes often went by a nickname, in some cases to hide their identity. The curious custom produced such fascinating handles as Big Nose Kate, Dutch Jake, Cotton Tail, Peg Leg Annie, Irish Queen, and Timberline.)11
By 1872, the railhead had moved west to Ellsworth, Kansas, and Libby and Billy followed. Like Abilene, Ellsworth was wide open, with saloons and bordellos lining the dusty streets. Drunken cowboys routinely charged through town, firing their pistols in the air. Libby and Billy got on well in Ellsworth. While Libby shook her booty in the dance halls, Billy haunted the local gambling dens. At the age of seventeen, Libby was a striking beauty, but she had no trouble fending off amorous cowboys. Everyone knew she was Texas Billy’s girl, and Billy’s reputation with a gun forestalled any untoward advances. Plus, the mere thought of angering Billy’s older brother, Ben Thompson—the top gunfighter of his day, according to some—kept rowdies in check.12
In the spring of 1873, Libby and Billy again took to the Chisolm Trail. Libby rattled across the rolling grasslands in a covered wagon while Billy did his part to keep hundreds of cantankerous longhorns pointed north. In April, as they crossed the Oklahoma Territory, Libby gave birth to their first child, a boy they named Rance. The baby’s arrival prompted the hard-living couple to turn conventional for a change. So their child would be legitimate, the two got married that July in Ellsworth. The couple’s blissful stay in Ellsworth was interrupted when Billy got liquored up and shot the local sheriff, Chauncey Whitney.13 To avoid arrest, Billy scooped up Libby and little Rance and fled westward. The family hid out in the mountains of Colorado for several months before returning to Texas.
By 1875, Billy was back on the cattle trails. Dodge City was then emerging as the newest railhead—and the wildest spot on the Kansas prairie. When Libby and Billy Thompson blew into Dodge, they resumed their usual trades. At the time, Billy’s brother was a card dealer in Dodge City’s famous Long Branch saloon. In the town’s raucous bars and dance halls, the Thompsons rubbed elbows with future western legends Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday.14 Earp had been hired to bash a few heads and otherwise tone down the revelry that had regular citizens afraid to walk the streets. Libby became good friends with the marshal’s mistress, Mattie Blaylock.
In the Kansas cow towns, Libby and Billy lived the sort of uninhibited lifestyle that would be exaggerated and glorified in dime novels and movies ever afterward, a brassy scenario played out to the sounds of tinkling pianos, drunken laughter, and the occasional explosion of six-guns. In truth, life in the frontier fast lane was a tawdry experience. Wild West “fun” was usually little more than the feral, liquor-fueled debauchery of lonely men who knew they were soon to return to lives of monotonous drudgery.15 Like sailors on shore leave, hell-raising wranglers drank and whored and gambled with heedless urgency. A few days later, they rode out of town, broke and hung over and with a good chance of developing gonorrhea or syphilis as a reminder of their stay. No one was weaving memories to tell the grandkids about.
Toward the end of 1875, Libby and Billy moved to Sweetwater, Texas (a Panhandle town now known as Mobeetie). There they opened their own dance hall and bordello. Libby ran the girlie operation as the colorful Squirrel Tooth Alice while Billy spent his time at cards. The Thompsons befriended one of the town’s faro dealers, Bat Masterson, who would later earn fame as a lawman and writer.16 The Sweetwater property lent some stability to Libby and Billy’s lives, although not for long. In 1876, a posse of Texas Rangers nabbed Billy for killing Sheriff Whitney. Hauled off to jail in Kansas, Billy spent nearly a year behind bars. When he finally stood trial, he was acquitted. By the time Billy was released, Libby had disposed of their Sweetwater holdings. In 1878, the two returned to Dodge City, but their nomadic life together was coming to an end.
The following year, Libby gave birth to her fourth child (her firstborn, Rance, had died as an infant). With a growing family to look after, Libby was becoming tired of all the moving around. From the early 1880s on, she remained in Texas, eventually settling in Palo Pinto, not far from where she’d grown up. A lifelong drifter, Billy found it impossible to stay in one place. He continued to pop in and out of Libby’s life over the next several years. Whenever he did show up, Libby usually found herself pregnant a short time later. Gradually, however, Billy’s appearances became less frequent, leaving Libby to get by on her own—or with whatever help she could find (although she continued to use the Thompson name, it’s fairly certain that Libby had relationships with other men during Billy’s absences, and she likely had children by them as well).17
In 1897, after a long absence from his wife, Texas Billy Thompson passed away. Libby was in her early forties then and had six kids to take care of, with another on the way. To provide for her family, she’d fallen back on prostitution. She may have even coaxed her two oldest daughters into the sad profession. Her sons kept up family traditions as well—all of them became criminals. The next quarter of a century was the most blatantly lawless period of Libby’s life. She and her offspring ran wild, first in the Palo Pinto area, then later in Milford, and finally in the vicinity of Mountain View, Oklahoma. Besides prostitution and rustling, they had their hands in bootlegging, robberies, and, in later years, stealing cars—the modern replacement for horse theft.18
Unlike the prostitutes portrayed in romantic accounts of the Old West, Libby Thompson did not have a heart of gold—more like vinegar. As she got older, her desperate circumstances as a single mother with a large family to support made her as testy as a riled up rattlesnake. Her great-grandson and biographer, Laurence E. Gesell, said she was downright mean when he met her near the end of her life, especially toward other females. Her daughters, granddaughters, and great-granddaughters, he wrote, “came to know the meanness of the Old West every time Granny pinched them, pulled their hair, or hit them with her cane.”19
In 1925, Libby Thompson left Oklahoma and moved to California. Settling in Burbank, the seventy-year-old former dance hall girl, drover’s wife, prostitute, madam, and gang leader lived out her twilight years surrounded by her extended family (at least those who weren’t dead or serving time). Squirrel Tooth Alice had finally come to rest in the brilliant sunshine of the Golden State. Not surprisingly, the tough old bird hung on for another twenty-eight years. She wasn’t the kind to give up. By the time she passed away in April 1953, she had long outlived her era, a time when the West was still raw and the faint-of-heart fared best by staying safely at home.
Libby Thompson definitely added a splash of color to the lore of western America. And while she was no angel, who knows, perhaps she strengthened our gene pool just a bit, like a wild mustang breeding with a docile captive herd (in all, she had twelve children, thirty-seven grandchildren, and eighty-eight great-grandchildren).20 As shockingly crude as her life might seem to us today, it was typical of a much larger percentage of the frontier population than we might care to admit. In the Old West, the greatest challenge was simple survival. And that was a game at which the profane, immoral, irascible Mrs. Thompson excelled.