wild women column

Among the spectators attending the baseball game at Fort Meade in mid-June 1879 between the Hard Scrabbles and the Never Sweats was brothel owner and operator Mollie Johnson and three of her best employees. All wore burgundy or emerald-green, silk taffeta and velvet dresses, and their blond curls dangled haphazardly from beneath the fancy bonnets...

The polite but enthusiastic applause from 40,000 Londoners brought a huge smile to fifteen-year-old Lillian Smith’s face.  Her performance before England’s Queen Victoria was the highlight of her early time with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. It was the fiftieth anniversary of the queen’s rule, and the stands were filled with royalty from across Europe. ...

On March 1, 1933, four men left Casper, Wyoming, to search for a woman that had been missing since mid-February.  Mrs. Rose Coleman was reported missing by her husband, the reputed cattle rustler Charles W. Coleman.  Charles wrote his brother-in-law Ernest Gale from jail informing him that he’d not heard from his wife for more...

Cowboy Bill Pickett is credited with introducing the sport of bulldogging to rodeos in 1907.  In bulldogging, the rider dashes after a mad, fleeing steer; leans out from the saddle; throws himself onto the steer’s horns; and bringing the beast to the ground in a swirling scramble of dust and a half a pound of...

An angry chestnut mare dashed out of the wire enclosure, bucking and twisting.  The rider on its back gripped the reins with all her strength.  The horse pitched, whirled, and kicked in an attempt to eject the passenger.  Lulu Bell Parr, the tenacious cowgirl atop the animal, held on tightly, determined not to be thrown. ...

A bespectacled photographer emerged from under a black curtain draped over a massive camera and tripod.  In his right hand he held an instrument that when pressed would take a picture.  In his left hand he held a flash attachment to illuminate his subject.  “On the count of three, Mrs. Lillie,” he warned.  May Manning...

“If there aren’t any horses in heaven, I don’t want to go,” World Champion Saddle Bronc Rider Fanny Sperry Steele told a New York public relations consultant in 1980. Fanny’s love for horses began at the age of three when she tried to lasso a pinto with her mother’s scarf. By the time she was...

Night had fallen over Tombstone, Arizona, and every restless and rowdy character in the vicinity of the southwestern town had poured into the saloons and gambling dens to while away the hours until dawn arrived. The doorways of the numerous taverns that lined Allen Street were illuminated with smoky kerosene torches. Signs that hung over...