Journal Notes

A nice review for Daughters of Daring: Hollywood Cowgirl Stunt Women and especially meaningful coming from respected film historian, biographer, and actor Stephen Michael Shearer.

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The Last Ride: Outlaw Laura Bullion and the Wild Bunch

1. Laura Bullion holds the distinction of being the nation’s first female train robber.
Laura was not simply a girlfriend who happened to associate with outlaws. She rode with the Wild Bunch, knew its hideouts, and became involved in the world of train robbery at a time when women were rarely imagined as active participants in such crimes.

2. Women were a real part of the Wild Bunch story.
Laura wasn’t the gang’s only female associate. Five women are identified with the bandit group: Laura Bullion, Etta Place, Annie Rogers, Ann Bassett, and Josie Bassett. They had relationships with members of the gang and sometimes had access to its hideouts. Laura was romantically involved with Ben “The Tall Texan” Kilpatrick.

3. An $85 watch helped bring Laura and Ben Kilpatrick down.
In November 1901, Kilpatrick bought an $85 watch at a St. Louis pawnshop and paid with four $20 bills. The pawnbroker later took the bills to a bank, where teller Victor Jacquemin checked their serial numbers against a Pinkerton circular. They matched notes stolen in the Great Northern robbery. That purchase helped put detectives on the trail of Kilpatrick—and ultimately Laura.

4. Laura was caught with $7,500 in stolen money when her purse spilled open.
After Kilpatrick disappeared, Laura realized something was wrong and prepared to flee St. Louis by train. Detectives were already waiting at her hotel. During a struggle over her purse, it spilled open on the counter, revealing $7,500 in banknotes connected to the train robbery. A search of her room even uncovered the charred remains of money in the fireplace.

5. One of the Wild West’s most notorious women disappeared into Memphis and became a seamstress.
This may be the most remarkable part of Laura’s story. She reinvented herself as Mrs. Freda Lincoln and spent more than forty years making draperies and doing sewing work in Memphis. Her customers had no idea the quiet woman measuring their windows and sewing their curtains had once ridden with the Wild Bunch. She essentially succeeded at something many famous outlaws could not: she survived the Wild West, disappeared, and lived an ordinary life.

To learn more read The Last Ride.

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Coming this October, a new YouTube channel dedicated to the women who write about the women who made the American West.

Frontier Her will be a gathering place for readers, writers, historians, and anyone fascinated by the remarkable women whose courage, determination, creativity, and adventures helped shape the West.

The channel will feature book trailers, poetry, new book announcements, author news, historical features, and information about works written by women about women of the American West.

From outlaws and law women to ranchers, pioneers, performers, entrepreneurs, aviators, artists, and adventurers, Frontier Her will celebrate the women who lived these extraordinary stories—and the women keeping their histories alive today.

Frontier Her launches in October.

Frontier Her – Women’s Voices of the West Heard Here.

Learn more and subscribe now:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcYC_5YpXwogNNR5vzr_paQ

For information about having your work featured, contact Chris Enss at gvcenss@aol.com.

#FrontierHer #WomenOfTheWest #WomenWriters #WesternHistory #WomenInHistory #AmericanWest

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The Last Ride: Outlaw Laura Bullion and the Wild Bunch

It was November 1901 and Laura Bullion and Ben Kilpatrick thought they had successfully disappeared into the crowds of St. Louis. Registered at the Laclede Hotel as Mr. and Mrs. Rose, the Wild Bunch couple lived comfortably and ventured out mainly at night, spending money taken in the Great Northern Railway robbery.

Then Kilpatrick made one costly mistake.

On November 4, 1901, he purchased an $85 watch at the Globe Loan Agency, paying pawnbroker Max Barnett with four $20 bills. The next day, Barnett took the money to Mechanic’s National Bank. Teller Victor Jacquemin recognized something suspicious about the notes and compared their serial numbers with those on a Pinkerton Detective Agency circular.

They matched the money stolen in the Great Northern robbery.

The discovery set detectives on the trail of Kilpatrick and ultimately Laura. When authorities closed in, they found thousands of dollars in stolen banknotes connected to the robbery. Laura maintained that the money had been given to her and denied knowing anything about the holdup, but the evidence told a far more complicated story.

The serial numbers on a handful of $20 bills had accomplished what posses and Pinkerton detectives had struggled to do: they helped bring down Laura Bullion and Ben Kilpatrick.

Read the complete story in The Last Ride: Outlaw Laura Bullion and the Wild Bunch, available wherever books are sold.

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I’m deeply honored that The Sharpshooter and the Showman: May Lillie, Pawnee Bill, and Their Wild West Show has been named a finalist for the WILLA Literary Award in the Scholarly Nonfiction category by Women Writing the West.

My sincere thanks to Women Writing the West for this wonderful recognition and for helping shine a light on the remarkable May Lillie. A courageous and talented Wild West show star, accomplished sharpshooter, and devoted keeper of the buffalo in northeast Oklahoma, May lived a life worthy of being remembered and celebrated.

I’m especially grateful that her story continues to find new audiences. May Lillie deserves every bit of the attention being heaped upon her and then some.

What an honor to see her extraordinary life recognized in this way.

#MayLillie #TheSharpshooterAndTheShowman #WILLAAwards #WomenWritingTheWest #PawneeBill #WildWestShow #WesternHistory #WomenOfTheWest #AmericanWest

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The Last Ride: Outlaw Laura Bullion and the Wild Bunch

“Chris Enss’ According to Kate, an adaptation of her 2019 book According to Kate: The Legendary Life of Big Nose Kate, Love of Doc Holliday, tries to reimagine its titular character’s life and time in the wild West as a woman who valued adventure and independence over security.

Curiously aged up but without the accompanying behavioural evolution, Kate’s (Manuela Schneider) existence for at least the first half of the film is defined by Doc Holliday (Craig Hensley). The whole premise—in 1899, a reporter hunts Kate down to get her story of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral—rests on it. But as protagonist of the film, Mary Katherine Horony Cummings, aka Big Nose Kate or Kate Elder, replaces the primacy of Doc Holliday’s presence with her experience of his life—a way to locate the women within and beyond the myths of the American frontier.

Simultaneously developing is the equation of understanding and compassion between the two women, Kate and the reporter, Lucy Evans (Enss). By the time the two women have met, Kate is fifty. She has matured over the years into a self-assured woman with her share of regrets, memories, and nostalgia. Lucy, similarly aged, speaks Kate’s language despite having lived a very different life. It is one of the film’s highlights, the whispers of a bond in active formation.

In comparison, the time with Doc Holliday is marked by longing and dissatisfaction. Homosociality takes precedence for Doc over the domestic pleasures of a romance. Rivals for his attention, the Earps, remain a consistent sore point. Interestingly, we never see them, as though so aggravating to Kate that she excises their visual existence from her memory. And because the film emphasises memory, specifically that of a woman destined to the confines of the sidelines, it also portrays the O.K. Corral gunfight using those limitations as a statement.

Kate’s life separate from Doc is woven into their sporadic time together, allowing the introduction of a new character, Johnny Ringo (Curt Lambert). The resulting conflict is unsurprising, and yet the film also demonstrates the relative insignificance of the conventional life. Doc or Johnny, their presence is subordinate to Kate’s determination for independence. Even in the throes of love, Kate retains her selfhood. The framing of the story—a conversation between two middle-aged women about a rough, adventurous time now preserved only in memory—allows Kate to remain both the lens and the subject.

At forty-one minutes, According to Kate works on an ambitious scale for its protagonist’s worthwhile tale. Yet, the pacing and tone do not reach for a high-octane pitch; instead, it is pensive, making room for unaired grievances and withered hopes. It is the story of a woman who would not betray herself.”

According to Kate the film festival is currently making rounds and will premiere on October 17, 2026 at the Tombstone Courthouse in Tombstone, Arizona.

The book According to Kate: The Legendary Life and Times of Big Nose Kate Elder, Love of Doc Holliday is available everywhere.

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The Last Ride: Outlaw Laura Bullion and the Wild Bunch

“Chris Enss’s newest nonfiction work, The Last Ride, is Old West crime biography at its finest. The well-written, smoothly paced book brings fresh light and new life to the little-known story of Laura Bullion, now considered “America’s first female train robber.”

Enss’s wide-ranging research not only uncovered intriguing new details about Laura Bullion and the outlaw she loved, “Tall Texan” Ben Kilpatrick. It also explains how Laura was able, after her 1905 release from prison, to outwit the sensationalist media and deliberately escape into obscurity.

Born in tiny Mertzon, Texas, in 1876, Laura grew up nearby in Knickerbocker, in an area that soon became known as a haven for criminals. (A huge blizzard in 1887 killed countless cattle and left many cowboys and ranch hands desperate for work; some turned to crime.) Laura’s parents had died while she was still young, and the unsupervised wild-child eventually became a “green-eyed, five-foot-four woman with prominent cheekbones and a reputation for being able to ride like a jockey and shoot like Annie Oakley,” Enss writes.

By age 16, Laura already had met up, through shady friends, with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Then she joined the notorious bandits known as the Wild Bunch, “a criminal syndicate that terrorized railroads and banks across the West at the turn of the twentieth century.” Enss quotes Laura recalling: “Horses and cowboys was all I ever knew.”

During their final train robbery in July 1901, the Wild Bunch took Laura along for her “ability to charm, distract, and deceive” people they encountered along the way, and she was dressed as a cowboy, Enss notes. The gang, including Kilpatrick, successfully robbed the train in Montana’s Missouri Breaks badlands, then split up and escaped when pursuing law enforcement grew close.

Enss describes how Kilpatrick and Laura fled to Texas and kept moving through other states, too, including Arizona and Arkansas, posing as man and wife. They spent lavishly, openly enjoying their new wealth, before Pinkerton detectives tracked them down and apprehended them in St. Louis in November 1901.

Kilpatrick received a life sentence. And, when Laura was sent to prison for seven years, Enss writes chillingly: “The iron door to the women’s ward clanged shut, sending a metallic shiver through the stone corridor of the Missouri State Penitentiary.”

The heart of The Last Ride is its focus on the hopeful love letters Laura and Kilpatrick wrote to each other while incarcerated and continued penning after Laura’s release. She had served only half of her original sentence. Now, intense media scrutiny and social shaming quickly and relentlessly followed the still-young woman everywhere she went.

Nonetheless, she kept trying to get fresh starts. And she continued seeking ways to have Kilpatrick’s sentence shortened so they could live together. She even changed her name several times and moved from town to town and state to state—until she finally found peaceful obscurity working as a seamstress in a big city, Memphis.

As Enss makes clear, “Laura Bullion left behind no explanation for the choices she made, only a life lived in fragments and shadows.” The author has described her latest book as “an attempt to gather those fragments” and “give shape to a woman long obscured by the men beside her….”

However, The Last Ride “seeks neither to excuse her crimes nor to romanticize them, but to understand how and why a woman once hunted by the law managed to outlive her legend and what it cost her to do so,” Enss emphasizes.

America’s first female train robber is now no longer lost among the still-frequent barrages of images, legends, articles, and books focused only on male outlaws of the Old West. Enss, who has written more than fifty books about unusual and pioneering women in the Old West, clearly portrays not only who Laura Bullion was and what she did. She reveals how Laura managed to create an uncommon new life in her final decades, while surviving longer than all others in the Wild Bunch.”

—Lone Star Literary Life

Enter now to win a copy of The Last Ride.

Available everywhere books are sold on August 15.

#TheLastRide #LauraBullion #WildBunch #WesternHistory #AmericanWest #WesternBooks

Ever wonder what it’s like to step into the world of the Wild Bunch?

Beginning this Friday, you can read the first chapter of The Last Ride: Outlaw Laura Bullion and the Wild Bunch absolutely free.

Meet Laura Bullion, the woman history nearly forgot, and discover how she became part of one of the most notorious outlaw gangs in the American West.

Simply visit my website, sign up with your email address, and I’ll send the opening chapter directly to your inbox.

If the story leaves you wanting more, you’ll also find links to order the book and learn about upcoming author appearances.

The adventure begins with a single chapter. I hope you’ll join me for the ride.

#TheLastRide #LauraBullion #WildBunch #TrueWest #WesternHistory #OutlawHistory #AmericanWest #BookExcerpt #HistoricalNonfiction

“No women need apply.” That was the message many frontier towns sent when advertising for a physician. Fortunately, a remarkable group of determined women ignored those words and forever changed the history of medicine in the American West.

The Doctor Was A Woman: Stories of the First Female Physicians on the Frontier introduces readers to ten extraordinary women who overcame prejudice, treated gunshot wounds, battled epidemics, pioneered new medical techniques, and proved that skill—not gender—made a great doctor. Their courage helped shape communities across the frontier and opened doors for generations of women who followed.

Publishers Weekly called the book “a colorful account” of pioneering physicians, while Library Journal praised it as “a collection of tales about real superhero women and how they won respect.”

Email gvcenss@aol.com between now and midnight to request a copy of the book.

#WomenInHistory #WomenInMedicine #AmericanWest #FrontierHistory #HistoryMatters #FemalePhysicians #WesternHistory #ChrisEnss #BookGiveaway