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A grim-faced bartender led a pair of sheriff’s deputies up the stairs of Deadwood’s Lone Star Saloon to the two lifeless bodies sprawled on the floor. One of the deceased individuals was a gambler named Kitty LeRoy, and the other was her estranged husband, Sam Curley.

The quiet expression on Kitty’s face gave no indication that her death had been a violent one. She was lying on her back with her eyes closed and, if not for the bullet hole in her chest, would simply have looked as though she were sleeping. Sam’s dead form was a mass of blood and tissue. He was lying face first with pieces of his skull protruding from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. In his right hand he still held the pistol that brought about the tragic scene.

For those townspeople who knew the flamboyant twenty-eight-year-old Leroy, her furious demise did not come as a surprise. She was voluptuous beauty who used her striking good looks to take advantage of infatuated men who believed her charm and talent surpassed any they’d ever known.

Nothing is known of her early years: where and when she was born, who her parents and siblings were, or what she was like as a child. The earliest historical account of the entertainer, card player and sometime soiled dove lists her as a dancer in Dallas, Texas, in 1875. She was a regular performer at Johnny Thompson’s Variety Theatre. She had dark, striking features, brown, curly hair, and a trim, shapely figure. She dressed in elaborate gypsy-style garments and always wore a pair of spectacular diamond earrings.

Kitty’s nightly performances attracted many cowboys and trail hands. She received standing ovations after every jig and shouts from the audience for an encore. The one thing Kitty was better at than dancing was gambling. She was a savvy faro dealer and poker player. Men fought one another—sometimes to death—for a chance to sit opposite her and play a game or two.

In early 1876, after becoming romantically involved with a persistent saloon keeper, Kitty decided to leave Texas and travel with her lover to San Francisco. Their stay in Northern California was brief. Kitty did not find the area to be as exciting as she had heard it had been during the Gold Rush. To earn the thousands she hoped as an entertainer and gambler she needed to be in a place where new gold was being pulled out of the streams and hills. California’s findings were old and nearly played out. Kitty boarded a stage alone and headed for a new gold boom town in the Black Hills of South Dakota.

To learn more about Kitty LeRoy read

An Open Secret: The Story of Deadwood’s Most Notorious Bordellos.

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Libby Thompson twirled gracefully around the dance floor of the Sweetwater Saloon in Sweetwater, Texas. A banjo and piano player performed a clumsy rendition of the house favorite, “Sweet Betsy from Pike.” Libby made a valiant effort to match her talent with the musician’s limited skills. The rough crowd around her was not interested in the out-of-tune playing; their eyes were fixed on the billowing folds of her flaming red costume. The rowdy men hoped to catch a peek at Libby’s shapely, bare legs underneath the yards of fabric on her skirt. Libby was careful to only let them see enough to keep them interested.

Many of the cowboy customers were spattered with alkali dust, grease, or plain dirt. They stretched their eager unkempt hands out to touch Libby as she pranced by, but she managed to avoid all contact. At the end of the performance, she was showered with applause, cheers, and requests to see more. Libby was not in an obliging mood. She smiled, bowed, and hurried past the enthusiastic audience as she made her way to the bar for a drink.

A surly bartender served her a glass of apple whiskey, and she headed off to the back of the room with her beverage. When she wasn’t entertaining patrons, Libby could be found at her usual corner spot by the stairs. A large, purple, velvet chair waited for her there along with her pets, a pair of prairie dogs. As Libby walked through the mass of people to her spot, she saw three grimy, bearded men surrounding her seat. One of the inebriated cowhands was poking at her animals with a long stick.

“Boys, I’d thank you kindly to stop that,” she warned the unruly trio. The men turned to see who was speaking, then broke into a hearty laugh once they saw her. Ignoring the dancer, they resumed their harassment of the small dogs. The animals batted the stick back as it neared them, and each time the men would erupt with laughter.

Libby watched the three men for a few moments then slowly reached into her drawstring purse and removed a pistol. Pointing the gun at the men, she said, “Don’t make me ask you again.” The drunken cowhands turned to face Libby, and she aimed her pistol at the head of the man with the stick. Laughing, the man told her to “go to hell.” “I’m on my way,” she responded, pulling the hammer back on the gun. “But I don’t mind sending you there first so you can warn them,” she added. The cowboy dropped the stick, and he and his friends backed away from Libby’s chair. One by one they staggered out of the saloon. Libby put the gun back into her purse, scooped up her frightened pets, scratched their heads, and kissed them repeatedly.

To learn more about women like Libby Thompson, better known as Squirrel Tooth Alice, read

An Open Secret: The Story of Deadwood’s Most Notorious Bordellos.

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Rosa May sat beside the bed of a dying miner and wiped the sweat off his feverish brow.  She looked around his rustic, one-room cabin, past the sparse furnishings, and fixed her eyes on a tattered photograph of an elderly man and woman.  “Those are my folks,” the man weakly told her.  “They’re in Marshall County, Illinois.  Where are your folks?”

The question stunned Rosa.  No one ever asked about such things.  No one ever asked her much at all.  Conversation wasn’t what men were looking for when they did business with her.  Rosa glanced out the window at a couple of respectable, well-dressed women.  They watched her through the clouded glass, pointed, and whispered.  She knew what they were saying without hearing it.

Rosa was just one of a handful of “sporting women” living in Bodie, California, in 1900 and she knew what people thought of her.  It used to bother her years ago, but not now.  It was an occupational hazard she’d learned to live with.

“Don’t you have people anywhere?” the miner asked.  Rosa dabbed the man’s head with a cloth and smiled.  “I don’t know anymore,” she answered.  “If I did have, they’d be back in Pennsylvania.”

Rosa’s parents were Irish – hard, strict people.  Rosa had dreamed of the day she would be out of their puritanical household.  She had left home in 1871, at the age of sixteen and soon found there weren’t many opportunities for a poor, petite, uneducated girl with brown eyes and dark, curly hair.  She ended up in New York, hungry, homeless, and eager to take any job offered.  The job offered was prostitution and five years later she came west with other women of her trade, hoping to make a fortune off the gold and silver miners.

Prostitution was the single largest occupation for women in the West.  Rosa hoped to secure a position at a posh brothel with crystal chandeliers, velvet curtains, and flowing champagne.  The madams who ran such places were good to their girls.  They paid them a regular salary, taught them about makeup, manners, and how to dress, and they only had to entertain a few men a night.  If a high-class brothel wasn’t available, Rosa could take a job in a second-class house and work for a percentage of the profits, turning as many tricks as she could each night.  If all failed, she could be a street walker or rent a “crib” at a boardinghouse.  Cribs, tiny, windowless chambers, had oilcloths draped across the foot of the bed for customers in too big of a hurry to take off their boots.

Rosa May arrived in Virginia City, Nevada in 1875 and went to work for a madam known as Cad Thompson.  Cad was a widow who ran several parlor houses in town, including a three-story, brick structure called the “Brick House.”  Cad and Rosa became fast friends, confiding in one another and talking about meeting their Prince Charming.  “Whores dream of falling in love, too,” Cad frequently told Rosa.

To learn about Rose May read

An Open Secret: The Story of Deadwood’s Most Notorious Bordellos

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It was a warm, mid-July evening in 1913 when twenty-six-year-old Private Fred Koetzle began hurling rocks at Poker Alice Tubb’s brothel in Sturgis, eventually shattering the upstairs windows. Koetzle and several other soldiers with K Company from Fort Meade stood outside the business throwing rocks and cursing at the occupants inside. Moments before the rowdy, intoxicated group had begun pelting the two-story bordello with stones, one of the men had cut the electrical wires leading to the house, casting it into darkness. Owing to their unruly behavior, it was 10:30 at night when Koetzle, Private Joseph C. Miner, and more than fifteen other infantrymen had been evicted from the business by the feisty madam who ran the resort.  Less than two weeks prior, the men had been thrown from the premises for the same reason.

In retaliation, the soldiers had gathered every rock and pebble in sight that July evening and had begun destroying the property. The misguided troops were assaulting the house with another volley of rubble when shots from a Winchester automatic rang out. Koetzle, Miner, and the other men scattered to avoid the spray of bullets.

When the magazine of the gun was empty, all but two of the soldiers emerged unscathed. Private Koetzle had been shot through the head, and Private Miner had been hit in the chest. Both men were transported to the post hospital. Koetzle died shortly after arriving, while Miner was in critical condition and, in time, made a full recovery. Poker Alice was arrested and charged with the shooting death of Private Koetzle. Six prostitutes were also taken into custody. The gun the notorious madam used was found outside the door of her house, and the magazine was found lying on Alice’s bed. A box of shells was found under the bed.

To find out what happened to Poker Alice after the shooting read An Open Secret