“Exploding onto the movie scene in 1935, Republic Pictures brought the pop culture of the 1930’s & 40’s to neighborhood movie houses. AWARD-WINNING screenwriter Chris Enss along with AWARD-WINNING producer & entertainment executive Howard Kazanjian have put together a BEAUTIFUL coffee table presentation on, in “my” opinion, one of the coolest movie studios ever. The book is, “Cowboys, Creatures, and Classics; The Story of Republic Pictures.” Movie buffs & readers alike will be treated to the inside story of the “little studio” that John Wayne, the Duke himself, built. In fact, Republic Pictures was home to Mr. Wayne for some 33 films & featured the west’s FIRST singing cowboy. Republic promised & delivered action, adventure, & escape. “Cowboys, Creatures, and Classics: The Story of Republic Pictures is for anyone who likes B movies magic. I submit that this spectacular presentation is the honest account of an extraordinary production house. I encourage you to check out one of the coolest, if not THE coolest book I’ve ever read pertaining to the film industry, from Lyons Press, An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. at LyonsPress.com. And, next weekend when you kick back to one of your favorite all time classic movies on the Turner Movie Channel (TMC,) check to see if it’s a REPUBLIC picture!”

Jerry Puffer, Townsquare Media KSEN/KZIN

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“Lillian Russell, (Mrs. Alexander P. Moore) bright star of American comic opera for three decades and internationally known as a professional beauty who died at 2:20 o’clock this morning, had been ill several weeks following a shipboard accident while returning from Europe. Her death was unexpected, as her physicians two days ago announced she had passed the crisis and would recover.”

—The Clinton Herald, June 6, 1922

It was not so much Lillian Russell’s great dramatic ability or her clear, well-trained voice as it was her personality and physical beauty that made her the most famous musical comedy star of her day and acclaimed for more than a generation as “America’s greatest beauty.”

Born on December 4, 1861, in Clinton, Iowa, Helen Louise Leonard had the kind of beauty that stopped traffic from her earliest years. She had a voice that her mother, Cynthia Rowland Leonard, an ardent feminist, paid to have trained when her daughter was still in her teens. Helen Louise was educated at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Chicago and attended finishing school at Park Institute. She took singing lessons and sang in the church choir at the Episcopal church.

Her parents separated when she was in her teens, and her mother took Helen Louise and moved to New York, where young Helen started training for the grand opera. She could sustain the highest notes with virtually no effort, and do it again and again without strain. Her voice coach, Dr. Leopold Damrosch, told her mother that with a few years of training, he could make her a diva to rival the best.

The beautiful blond from Iowa had other ideas. Years of training and rehearsals, with only bit parts and backup roles as an understudy, lay before her on the road to stardom in opera. Helen Louise joined the Park Theatre Company in Brooklyn. She was eighteen when she danced onstage for the first time in the chorus of H. M. S. Pinafore, a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta that went on to resounding success.

Before the run of Pinafore was over, Helen Louise had accepted a proposal of marriage from an admirer in the show. She married the company’s musical director, Harry Graham. That marked the end of her appearance in the chorus. She withdrew from the company and settled into domestic life, but her time as a homemaker didn’t last.

In late 1879, Helen Louise gave birth to a son. A nurse was hired to care for the baby so the actress could once again take up her career. Her paycheck made a big difference for the little family. Her much older husband was not happy with his wife being the bread winner, however; he wanted her to stay home and take care of their child. But a woman raised to be independent is not easily swayed when fame and fortune call.

Then one day Helen Louise returned from the theatre to find her baby desperately ill. Despite all attempts to cure the infant, he died in convulsions. Apparently, the inexperienced nurse had accidentally pierced his abdomen with a diaper pin. Harry accused his wife of neglect, and he divorced her in 1881.

Grieving over the death of her son, feeling betrayed by her husband’s accusation, and devastated over the end of her marriage, Helen Louise concentrated on her career. Tony Pastor, legendary producer of musical comedy, heard her sing at the home of a friend and consequently offered her a job. Helen Louise liked the immediate success she’d already tasted in comic opera. At nineteen, with a statuesque figure, golden curls, skin like “roses and cream,” and a soprano voice that could do everything with ease she had found her first mentor in Tony Pastor.

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Sheriff Bill Tilghman

“A deputy marshal and a posse arrested two notorious female outlaws. … One was in men’s clothing.”

—August 21, 1895 edition of Evening Gazette, Cedar Rapids, Iowa

On the afternoon of August 18, 1895, United States Marshal Bill Tilghman and Deputy Marshal Steve Burke led their horses toward a small farm outside Pawnee, Oklahoma. The lawmen had tracked a pair of outlaws to the location and were proceeding cautiously when several gunshots were fired.

Marshall Tilghman caught sight of a Winchester rifle sticking out a broken window of a dilapidated cabin. He spurred his horse out of the line of fire just as the weapon went off. He steered his mount around the building and arrived at the backdoor the same time sixteen-year-old Jennie Stevens, alias Little Britches, burst out the house. She shot at him with a pistol while racing to a horse waiting nearby.

By the time Marshal Tilghman settled his ride and drew his weapon Jennie was on her horse. She turned the horse away from the cabin, kicked it hard in the ribs, and the animal took off. Tilghman leveled his firearm at the woman and shot. Jennie’s horse stumbled and fell, and she was tossed from the animal’s back, losing her gun in the process.

The marshal hopped off his own ride and hurried over to the stunned and annoyed runaway. Jennie picked herself up quickly and cursed her misfortune. She charged the lawman, dug her fingernails into his neck, and slapped him several times before he could subdue her. He was a battered man when he finally pinned her arms behind her back.

Back at the cabin, Deputy Marshal Steve Burke wrestled a gun away from thirteen-year-old Annie McDoulet, alias Cattle Annie, a rail-thin young woman wearing a gingham dress and a black, wide-brimmed straw hat. The pistol she had tried to shoot him with was lying in the dirt several feet in front of her.

Two years prior to their apprehension and arrest, Cattle Annie and Little Britches were riding with the Doolin gang, a notorious band of outlaws who robbed trains and banks. Enamored by the fame of the well-known criminals, the teenage girls had decided to leave home and follow the bandits. They helped the criminals steal cattle, horses, guns, and ammunition and warned them whenever law enforcement was on their trail.

Legend tells that Bill Doolin, leader of the Doolin gang, gave Cattle Annie and Little Britches their nicknames. Cattle Annie was born Anna Emmaline McDoulet in Kansas in 1882. Jennie Stevenson was born in 1879 in Oklahoma. Both girls had run afoul of the law before joining the Doolin gang. Each sold whisky to Osage Indians. According to the September 3, 1895, edition of the Ada, Oklahoma, newspaper the Evening Times, Jennie seemed to have “plied her vocation for a long time successfully, going in the guise of a boy tramp hunting work.” In between selling liquor to Indians and life with the Doolins, Jennie had married a deaf mute named MidKiff and Annie rustled livestock.

News of Cattle Annie and Little Britches’ arrest was reported in the August 21, 1895 edition of the Cedar Rapids, Iowa newspaper the Evening Gazette. “A deputy marshal and a posse arrested two notorious female outlaws but had to fight to make the arrest,” the article read. “The marshal’s posse ran into them and they showed fight. Several shots were fired before they gave up. One was in men’s clothing.”

The teenage outlaws were held in the jail in Guthrie, Oklahoma Territory until a trial was held. They were found guilty of horse stealing and sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment at the Farmington Reform School in Massachusetts. Cattle Annie and Little Britches were model prisoners and only served three years of their sentence.

Annie returned to Oklahoma Territory, where she met and married Earl Frost in March 1901. The couple divorced after eight years. In 1912 Annie married a house painter and general contractor named Whitmore R. Roach. They had two sons and lived a respectable life in Oklahoma City. Annie McDoulet Frost Roach died from natural causes on November 7, 1978, at the age of ninety-five. Her obituary ran in the November 8, 1978, edition of the Oklahoma City newspaper The Oklahoman. The article noted that “she was a retired bookkeeper and member of the American Legion Auxiliary and the Olivet Baptist Church. She had five grandchildren and thirteen great-grandchildren. She was laid to rest at Rose Hill Burial Park in Oklahoma City.”

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“I aim to shoot the hell out of anybody that tries to stop me. I aim to mind my own business, and aim to back up the law.”

—Judge Roy Bean

With the passing of Judge Roy Bean, who referred to himself as the “Law West of the Pecos,” the rowdy frontier lost one of its most unique and picturesque characters. It was Judge Bean that was said to have held an inquest on the body of an unknown man found in his precinct, and, finding on the corpse a pistol and $40 in cash, proclaimed the dead man guilty of carrying a concealed weapon and fined him $40, which was forthwith collected from the pocket of the offender.

There were no customers from Judge Roy Bean’s opera house and saloon by his side when he died on March 16, 1903; no friends from the Langtry, Texas, community where he had resided; no lawbreakers to be tried and sentenced. Judge Bean’s son, Sam, was the only one with him when he passed.

The stout, seventy-eight-year-old man with a gray beard spent his last hours on earth in a near comatose state unaware of where he was or who he was. He died of heart and lung complications exasperated by alcohol.

Roy was born in a cabin in Mason County, Kentucky, in 1823, but he spent his childhood in Independence, Missouri. He followed his older brother to the Southwest in 1846, and the pair opened a trading post in Chihuahua, Mexico.

In 1848, eighteen-year-old Roy killed a desperado trying to steal from him and fled the area to escape arrest. There were several more run-ins with the law between 1849 and 1862. In 1862, Roy decided to join the army to fight for the North in the Civil War. He married Virginia Chavez in 1866 and the couple settled in San Antonio, Texas. Roy and his wife had four children, but the marriage was rocky and didn’t last.

When the Southern Pacific Railroad began its extension from San Antonio to the Rio Grande, Roy followed the line with a moveable house that featured a saloon. During one of the rides he met an attorney from Chicago who regaled him with stories of how the justice system worked in the eastern states. The fascinating details of law and order stuck with Roy, and when he was appointed Justice of the Peace at a railroad stop in West Texas he decided to employ all he had learned from the Chicagoan.

Roy Bean gave the temporary railroad stop that grew into a town its name. He called the spot Vinegroon. A vinegroon is a whip-tailed scorpion common in that region. The name was appropriate as well as symbolic. “I aim to run a square place,” the judge informed all potential customers. “I aim to shoot the hell out of anybody that tries to stop me. I aim to mind my own business, and aim to back up the law.”

“What law?” some brave railroad worker ventured to ask. “There hasn’t been any sign of civilized law this far west yet.”

“My own!” Judge Bean roared. “I’m the law from now on. I’m the law west of the Pecos.”

Judge Roy Bean hung a sign in front of his establishment that read: “Roy Bean, Notary Public, Ice Cold Beer. Judge Roy Bean, Law West of the Pecos.” The railroad executives liked it. It was convenient and gave the railroad a location to tie themselves to, and somebody to punish thieves and other rowdy cowboys. Cattle ranchers came in fast, and they liked the semblance of law, too. They had no time to organize and hold elections, so they took Roy Bean on as the authority.

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On the afternoon of August 18, 1895, United States Marshal Bill Tilghman and Deputy Marshal Steve Burke led their horses toward a small farm outside Pawnee, Oklahoma. The lawmen had tracked a pair of outlaws to the location and were proceeding cautiously when several gunshots were fired.

Marshall Tilghman caught sight of a Winchester rifle sticking out a broken window of a dilapidated cabin. He spurred his horse out of the line of fire just as the weapon went off. He steered his mount around the building and arrived at the backdoor the same time sixteen-year-old Jennie Stevens, alias Little Britches, burst out the house. She shot at him with a pistol while racing to a horse waiting nearby.

By the time Marshal Tilghman settled his ride and drew his weapon Jennie was on her horse. She turned the horse away from the cabin, kicked it hard in the ribs, and the animal took off. Tilghman leveled his firearm at the woman and shot. Jennie’s horse stumbled and fell, and she was tossed from the animal’s back, losing her gun in the process.

The marshal hopped off his own ride and hurried over to the stunned and annoyed runaway. Jennie picked herself up quickly and cursed her misfortune. She charged the lawman, dug her fingernails into his neck, and slapped him several times before he could subdue her. He was a battered man when he finally pinned her arms behind her back.

Back at the cabin, Deputy Marshal Steve Burke wrestled a gun away from thirteen-year-old Annie McDoulet, alias Cattle Annie, a rail-thin young woman wearing a gingham dress and a black, wide-brimmed straw hat. The pistol she had tried to shoot him with was lying in the dirt several feet in front of her.

Two years prior to their apprehension and arrest, Cattle Annie and Little Britches were riding with the Doolin gang, a notorious band of outlaws who robbed trains and banks. Enamored by the fame of the well-known criminals, the teenage girls had decided to leave home and follow the bandits. They helped the criminals steal cattle, horses, guns, and ammunition and warned them whenever law enforcement was on their trail.

Legend tells that Bill Doolin, leader of the Doolin gang, gave Cattle Annie and Little Britches their nicknames. Cattle Annie was born Anna Emmaline McDoulet in Kansas in 1882. Jennie Stevenson was born in 1879 in Oklahoma. Both girls had run afoul of the law before joining the Doolin gang. Each sold whisky to Osage Indians. According to the September 3, 1895, edition of the Ada, Oklahoma, newspaper the Evening Times, Jennie seemed to have “plied her vocation for a long time successfully, going in the guise of a boy tramp hunting work.” In between selling liquor to Indians and life with the Doolins, Jennie had married a deaf mute named MidKiff and Annie rustled livestock.

News of Cattle Annie and Little Britches’ arrest was reported in the August 21, 1895 edition of the Cedar Rapids, Iowa newspaper the Evening Gazette. “A deputy marshal and a posse arrested two notorious female outlaws but had to fight to make the arrest,” the article read. “The marshal’s posse ran into them and they showed fight. Several shots were fired before they gave up. One was in men’s clothing.”

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