Journal Notes

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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

“The Last Ride: Outlaw Laura Bullion and the Wild Bunch tells the true-crime story of outlaw Laura Bullion, the Wild Bunch’s only known female train robber, who rode with outlaws and became notorious for participating in a high-stakes robbery. Her name was renowned for decades until she disappeared.

Chris Enss embarks on a wild ride through the West to uncover Bullion’s story, life, motivations, and ultimate fate, bringing readers into a world documented not by the usual memoir, but through fragments of reports and contemporary accounts. From these, she reconstructs Bullion’s world with an eye toward vividly portraying the Wild Bunch in a different light, revealing Bullion and the other women whose lives swirled around uncommon choices.

Enss purposely shifts the timeline of events back and forth, opening with a 1949 Memphis seamstress and moving back to the Wild Bunch years, contrasting and profiling the lives of Bullion and the other women, their motivations and choices for becoming female bandits, and their return to more socially acceptable lives.

The first chapter outlines these women and Pinkerton Detective Agency records regarding them, while the second returns to 1887, when a great blizzard wreaks havoc on the Texas longhorn cattle industry and prompts changes in cattle roundups along with the emergence of rustlers and thieves in its wake. From these roots emerges the Ketchum Gang of train robbers, who find newfound success in something much easier than cattle rustling.

As the chapters fill in the myths, realities, and history of the Wild Bunch, they also create background on the men and women who pioneered the West in a very different manner, participating in outlaw activities that thwarted the Pinkertons in different ways.

Laura Bullion’s story intersects with these events, which are heavily footnoted and accented with vintage black-and-white photos and illustrations throughout. The exceptionally lively “you are there” form of reporting also provides general readers an inviting narrative of action and reaction that brings this world to life.

Especially notable is the critical thinking Enss applies to her subject. Not content with simply unearthing and reproducing newspaper accounts, she consistently peppers her findings with auxiliary research and points out inconsistencies in reporting and what most likely truly happened. This will especially satisfy history readers who know that not every newspaper account, even from that era, can be relied upon as intrinsically accurate.

The result is a vivid blend of mystery, history, women’s issues, and fact-based analysis that expands our understanding of the subjects, motivations, and choices these individuals made during this turbulent period of Western history.

Librarians seeking additions to their Western or women’s history holdings that encourage critical thinking about the American West, promote book club discussions, or support classroom study of women who chose nontraditional lives before eventually returning to conventional society will find The Last Ride: Outlaw Laura Bullion and the Wild Bunch unusually accessible to a wide audience.”

Midwest Book Review

Available everywhere August 15, 2026.  Enter now to win a copy of The Last Ride.

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The Last Ride: Outlaw Laura Bullion and the Wild Bunch

The worst winter in Texas history changed everything for Laura Bullion. The devastating Blizzard of 1887 destroyed cattle herds across the Great Plains, leaving thousands of cowboys without work. As ranches failed and honest opportunities disappeared, many desperate young men turned to robbery. Among them were Tom “Black Jack” Ketchum, Will Carver, and Ben Kilpatrick – the very outlaws who would soon change the course of Laura Bullion’s life forever.

Orphaned as a teenager and raised by her grandparents on a Texas ranch, Laura was drawn to the excitement of the cowboy life and fell deeply in love with Will Carver. Her story was never as simple as “outlaw girlfriend.” She was intelligent, well-educated for her time, fiercely independent, and caught between loyalty, love, and the dangerous choices made by the men around her. As the Wild Bunch’s train robberies grew bolder, Laura found herself riding ever closer to the center of one of the most notorious outlaw gangs in American history.

The Last Ride: Outlaw Laura Bullion and the Wild Bunch tells the remarkable true story of the woman history has too often overlooked, separating myth from fact through years of original research. The book arrives in bookstores everywhere August 15, and I can’t wait to share Laura’s extraordinary journey with readers.

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#LauraBullion #WildBunch #WesternHistory #TrueCrime #WomenOfTheWest #OutlawHistory

Sometimes the most rewarding part of writing history is watching a story find a new audience years after a book is published.

As excitement builds for the October premiere of the film According to Kate, readers have been discovering According to Kate: The Legendary Life of Big Nose Kate, Love of Doc Holliday in growing numbers. This morning the book climbed to #47 on Amazon’s Best Sellers list in U.S. Immigrant History.

Here are just a few of the comments from readers:

“Excellent work. Easy read. Big Nose Kate’s account of her relationship with Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp. It’s very, very interesting. Highly recommended!”

“This is a very Good Read if you are a Wild West fan or more specifically a ‘Doc Holliday’ fan! I believe Kate was being truthful since she actually ‘Owned up to who she really was’! She has a very interesting take on relationships of the Earps and Doc! Enjoy.”

“We hear so much about the main Western figures, that the more obscure ones fall through the cracks. Found this a really interesting and informative book. From Kate’s perspective.”

And my favorite review comes from historian Garth Gould of the Wild West History Association:

“As the reader of the journal knows, Mary Katherine Harony, a.k.a. Big Nose Kate, was the paramour of Doc Holliday. She figures in all the literature about Tombstone and the Earps. In the early books, especially, she lends herself to caricature. She is the perfect dancehall girl who is mostly known for going on what is frequently termed, ‘a monumental drunk,’ and implicating Doc in an attempted stage robbery and murder. In short, she is a colorful subordinate character in the Tombstone saga. Author Chris Enss brings her to center stage in this first-book length biography.

Ms. Enss utilized a wide range of sources but primarily used Kate’s own recollections to put together her narrative. These include the Bork and Mazzanovich interviews as well as Kate’s handwritten notes compiled between 1935 and 1939. I was previously unaware of the last. Ms. Enss relates the story as Kate remembered it, inaccuracies and all. The author rightly does not appoint herself as a corrector of historical errors. After all, what is interesting is Kate’s take on her past.

Devotees of the Tombstone story should find much in this book to interest them. Few pages pass without a new twist on an old story. For instance, to pluck one from the canon, when Doc saves Wyatt’s life in Dodge City, the leader of the rowdy cowboys is James Kenedy, the later killer of Dora Hand. Also, a new suspect in the killing of Johnny Ringo is brought forth. It is certainly one I have never heard before.

Needless to say, when one encounters nuggets of this variety an immediate flip-through to the endnotes follows. The notes in this book are specific and you will learn the source. You might quibble with the source, but it will be there. I learned from the notes that an Indiana newspaper, The Fort Wayne Sentinel, retold the story of Doc’s evisceration of Ed Bailey and Kate’s subsequent rescue of Holliday. This article appeared in November of 1896, so they probably got it from Wyatt Earp’s San Francisco Examiner article published in August 1896. It was interesting to see the story had a wider circulation than I previously thought. Incidentally, Kate ridiculed this legend.

This book contains many photographs. The ones of the principal characters are all familiar ones. There are some good pictures of the towns Kate and Doc visited, as well as a map of Tombstone. The book reads well. Many times, I picked it up planning to read only ten pages but kept going. There have been many individual tales of outlaws, cowboys, and gamblers. Here now is one of the dancehall girl, and a famous one at that.”

If you haven’t yet read According to Kate, it’s available wherever books are sold.

And if you’d like to see Kate’s remarkable story come to life on the screen, join us for the world premiere of According to Kate on October 17 at the historic Tombstone Courthouse during Helldorado Days in Tombstone, Arizona.

Reserve your seat today:
https://azstateparks.com/tombstone/events/helldorado-days-film-screening-according-to-kate

Thank you for helping keep Kate’s extraordinary story alive.