It’s a Christmas giveaway featuring some
very badly-behaved women.
Enter now to win five books about women of the Old West who were
wicked to the core.
Legends has it that “Cattle Kate” (Ella Watson), who was twenty-seven and beginning to show a few signs of wear and tear, told friends she was going to pull up stakes and set up a crib in another town, since Cheyenne was no longer easy pickings. “There’s no use pulling the wool over my own eyes, for the sad fate is, I’m not a young chicken anymore,” she is supposed to have said. Her customers were beginning to throw their business to floozies who had come into the wide-open railroad town. So Cattle Kate moved to Rawlings, a cow town in the Haystack Hills where, except for a few chorus girls who also showed mileage, a favor-selling lady on the decline might still have a chance. Soon Kate, who was a bosomy brunette with a handsome face, quickly had all the customers she could manage.
There was a hitch, for the cattle market was in a slump and cash money was scarce as hen’s teeth. But this did not worry Kate. She would simply homestead a grassland quarter-section, and stock it with mavericks which she would accept from her men in place of cash. “When those little critters fatten up, I’ll get a nice price for them, you can bet on that,” she is reported to have said. It was a sound idea, though in the end Kate paid for her actions with her life.
But the legend of Cattle Kate was created in the editorial room of the Cheyenne Leader for the benefit of the Wyoming Stock Growers’ Association. Almost overnight, they transformed the real Ella Watson into the infamous woman bandit who killed one husband plus various other men, and had stolen more cattle than any man in the West.
To learn more about badly behaved women on the American frontier read Wicked Women:
Notorious, Mischievous, and Wayward Ladies from the Old West.
