She Dared by Ed Butts

Author:Ed Butts [Butts, Ed]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-77049-008-6
Publisher: Tundra
Published: 2005-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

he stagecoach robbery may be one of the most familiar images we have of the wild days of the Old West. The bandits draw their pistols, as the coach driver and the shotgun guard reach for the sky. Many of the most famous outlaws were stagecoach robbers and they were tough customers. But the last stagecoach hold-up in the dying days of the Old West was committed not by a dangerous bandit from Texas or Montana. It was pulled off by a woman from Canada.

She was born about 1871 to a respectable middle-class family in Lindsay Ontario. Not much is known of Pearl Taylor's early life, but there was no indication that she would ever set foot on the slippery slope to crime. She was described as attractive, witty, and outgoing. Perhaps she was too outgoing, for people said that she would go out with just about any young man who asked. Not exactly proper for a girl in Victorian Ontario.

At about the age of 17, Pearl was sent to a straightlaced boarding school in preparation for a good marriage to some upstanding young man. But the idea backfired. While Pearl was attending school, she met Frederick Hart. He was a personable and charming young man, and the teenaged Pearl fell head over heels in love with him. The couple eloped, and married.

For all his charm, however, Fred Hart was a wastrel, a rotten gambler, and a wife-beater. For a while the Harts traveled around Ontario, living in cheap rooming houses, while Fred tried to win at card tables and racetracks. Occasionally he got jobs tending bar, but it was plain that knuckling down and working for a living did not agree with Fred Hart.

Pearl continued what she called her “nomadic life” with Hart, taking his abuse, until 1893, when they went to Chicago for the Columbian Exposition. Fred wanted to get in on some of the big time gambling that would be going on there, but the real cardsharps realized he was just a hustler and wouldn't let him in on the action. He had to settle for a job at as a barker at a sideshow, luring people in to see freaks and exotic dancing girls.

Pearl, meanwhile, wandered the fairgrounds and made the discovery that would change her life. A Wild West Show! She was enthralled by the cowboys, the Indian fighters, the sharpshooters, and the handsome, masculine frontiersmen who seemed to be everything her husband wasn't. She went back to the show again and again to watch the chases on horseback and the shoot'em-ups. Pearl was blinded by the romance of the West a West that, in fact, had never really existed. Bidding good-bye to her no-good husband, she boarded a train for Trinidad, Colorado.

Pearl gave birth to a baby boy in Trinidad. According to an issue of the Arizona Star, “She wrestled with the world in a catch-as-catch-can style, making a living for herself and her baby son.” With things not turning out as she had hoped, Pearl went home.

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