Enter to win a copy of The Bedside Book of Bad Girls:
Outlaw Women of the Midwest
Death, dealing from “a cold deck,” flipped the ace of spades for ‘ Poker Alice” Tubbs on February 27, 1930, it was her admission card to the big game that is eternity. She was one of the last of a bizarre coterie of hard living, straight-shooting men and women who added the color—sometimes it was blood-red—to the old West. “Deadwood Dick,” “Wild Bill” Hickok end “Calamity Jane” were others. Poker Alice wore a gun, smoked cigars and could swear like a trooper. During a life as adventurous as any man’s, she gambled for high stakes without a single betraying quiver of the-hand as she dealt; without the twitch of a face muscle. Old age and complications, following an operation for gall stones, were given by doctors as the cause of her death. Poker Alice was English born but American bred, and always the gambler. She started as a faro dealer. A woman at the box was a novelty that drew the black beards of the wild West, with their bags of gold, to the gambling table. So successful was she, that soon she was known, not just, as a woman gambler, but as a winning gambler, man or woman. Colorado, Nevada, Montana, the Dakotas—wherever there was pay dirt and hombres with guts enough to lay it against the turn of a card—Poker Alice was. She took $6,000 in one night’s play in Silver City, N. M. It seems rather strange, in retrospect, that Poker Alice, self-reliant, courageous and able to take care of herself anywhere—should have had time for love, yet she was three times married. Her first husband was a mining engineer, P. Duffield. Then came W. G. Tubbs, a gambler who, despite a wide reputation of his own, never could equal Poker Alice at the card table. Her third husband was George Huckert, but when he died Poker Alice resumed the name of he- second husband. She was in the rush of the ‘free lands’ of Oklahoma, and later skipped from place to place as the federal government warred on the gamblers. One by one commanding figures of the old, the lawless West, dropped away—many by bullets. Poker Alice grew old. Times changed. Railroads brought civilization to the raw, elemental West. Eventually there came prohibition. Poker Alice retired to a little cabin in the Black Hills. She was convicted for violating the prohibition law but never served the sentence. Governor W. J. Bulow pardoned her, saying: “I can’t send a white-haired old woman to jail on a liquor charge.” The days of big games, hard liquor and strong language are gone now. Only the wild glory of the Black Hills remains. Civilization could not take them away; and there today she lies dead—Poker Alice was seventy-seven when she died.
