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PEARL HART

THE GIRL BANDIT

For most of her life, Pearl Hart lived in dismal obscurity. She got her chance for fifteen minutes of fame following a bungled stagecoach robbery in 1899. An adoring eastern press dubbed her the “Girl Bandit” and chastised the callused Arizona judicial system for putting such a pretty young lady behind bars in the notorious Yuma Territorial Prison.

Some accounts credit her with holding up the last stagecoach and also being the only woman to rob a stage. However, neither account is true. The last stage robbery took place in Nevada in 1916, and a woman named Jane Kirkham was killed while robbing a stagecoach near Leadville, Colorado, in 1879.

Not much is known about her early years. She was born Pearl Taylor of French descent in Lindsay, Ontario, Canada. She was five feet, two inches tall, weighed less than one hundred pounds, was reasonably intelligent and was considered quite attractive. It was said she came from a respectable, well-to-do family, but things started going downhill at age seventeen when she married a shiftless gambler named Frederick Hart.

They traveled in 1893 to Chicago, where Freddie hired out as a carnival barker at the Chicago Exposition and she worked at odd jobs. At the exposition, she got a chance to see Annie Oakley perform and became enthralled with the Wild West show. She was also an avid reader of the popular dime novel books, presumably on colorful characters like Belle Starr and Calamity Jane.

The Old West drew her like a moth to a flame, something that likely inspired her to dump her worthless husband and head west with an itinerant piano player.

In Trinidad, Colorado, she took a job as a saloon singer but had to return to her family when she learned she was expecting Freddie’s baby. After giving birth to a son, Pearl left him with her family and headed for Phoenix. She worked at a series of unskilled jobs. Pearl soon found that life in the West wasn’t as glamorous as those dime novels she’d read about and Wild West shows she’d seen at the exposition in Chicago.

Sometime in 1895, Freddie showed up in Phoenix begging her to take him back. She did, and for a time things were good between them. However, they began living it up in the saloons along Washington Street, where she developed a fondness for cigars, whiskey and morphine. A second child, this time a girl, was born, and their domestic problems resumed. Following an argument that got out of hand, he beat her up and then left town.

One version says he joined Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders and went to Cuba, but his name doesn’t show up on the roster of either of the two Arizona companies.

Pearl returned to her family, left the baby with her mother and headed west again, taking up residence in various Arizona towns like Globe, Phoenix, Tucson and Tombstone and working at various times as a prostitute, waitress or cook.

She was working in a café in Mammoth when she took up with a miner, gambler and con man named Joe Boot. After a letter came from home saying her mother was ill and needed money, Joe decided the couple could make some easy money robbing a stagecoach. On May 30, 1899, near Kane Springs just north of the Gila River on the road from Florence to Globe, they held up the stage, taking some $400. Neither of the two knew the lay of the land and hadn’t really planned an escape route. They headed up the San Pedro River toward Benson, where, on June 3, a posse caught up with them. Boot meekly surrendered, but Pearl gamely tried to put up a fight with all the strength her one hundred pounds could muster. The two were escorted to Florence and locked in the local jail.

The Florence jail had no facility for women so she was taken to Tucson to await trial. While temporarily residing in the Tucson jail, she used her feminine wiles on a couple of admiring gents to help her escape, but she was quickly recaptured in Deming, New Mexico, when a lawman recognized her.

During her trial, Pearl changed into a pretty dress and told the jury that she had robbed the stage to get enough money to visit her sick mother back east. She batted her eyes, lifted her skirt to reveal a well-shaped ankle and flirted shamelessly with the all-male jury. Naturally, they found her not guilty. Judge Fletcher Doan was outraged and ordered her to be tried again, this time on a federal charge for tampering with the male…er…mail.

Pearl Hart posing for the photographers in her stage-robber attire. Presumably the rifle wasn’t loaded. Courtesy of Southwest Studies Archives .

Newspapers, especially the Hearst press, turned her into a national celebrity. People gathered around to see the famous girl bandit. She enjoyed playing the role of a desperado, signing autographs and flirting with the men.

Pearl Hart as she demurely dressed to catch the eye of the all-male jury during her trial for robbing a stagecoach. Courtesy of Southwest Studies Archives .

Pearl and Joe were tried and convicted. She was sentenced to five years in the Yuma Territorial Prison. Her accomplice was given thirty years on the same charge. Being a female in the Old West did have some advantages.

Pearl briefly enjoyed her celebrity status at the prison. Visitors and reporters were allowed to visit. She was paroled on December 15, 1902, and told to get as far away from Arizona as possible. She immediately headed east for Kansas City, where she launched her show business career as the Arizona Bandit.

Territorial governor Alexander Brodie refused to discuss the reason for her early release, but his secretary, George Smalley, later wrote that Pearl had informed the warden she was pregnant. According to Arizona legend, at the time the only two men who’d been alone with Pearl were the warden and the territorial governor. After a series of telegrams between the capitol and the prison, it was decided to release her immediately. Pearl wasn’t pregnant, but she wasn’t dumb either and cleverly went on her way, a free woman.

For a brief time, she toured the East reenacting her role on stage as the Arizona Bandit, but the plot was thin and her acting career was brief. Fame was fleeting, and soon Pearl soon drifted back into obscurity.

Nobody knows for certain how Pearl spent her later years, but there is strong evidence she married a cow rancher named Cal Bywater from the Dripping Springs Mountains south of Globe, not far from where she and Joe Boot held up the stagecoach. Pearl became respectable and lived out her life as an honest ranch wife.