Thought I’d post this review from New Mexico Magazine about The Lady Was A Gambler. It was my pleasure to write about these unique ladies.
THE LADY WAS A GAMBLER: True Stories of Notorious Women of the Old West
by Chris Enss
TwoDot/Globe Pequot Press, www.GlobePequot.com, 160 pages, paper, $12.95
The Lady Was a Gambler document women who engaged in professions outside the box for their time. The Lady Was a Gambler takes as its subjects 13 women gamblers, including Belle Star; Martha Jane Canary, better known as Calamity Jane; and Eleanora Dumont, a stunningly beautiful and demure young woman whose meteoric rise included owning a highly successful blackjack parlor in Nevada City, California. A wealthy woman, Dumont unwisely married a scamp,lost everything, and returned to dealing blackjack in mining camps before her demise in Bodie, California. Another character was Mary Hamlin, a lucky poker player and bunko artist who pulled off several big scores: In 1869, the sale of shipping rights to the Mississippi River to a group of French investors, a scam akin to selling the Brooklyn Bridge, netted her more than a quarter-million dollars; and in a diamond hoax a few years later, frequently referred to as the West”s Greatest hoax, she and accomplices salted a claim with bogus diamonds, sapphires, and opals, and secured $1 million for it from a wealthy San Francisco banker before leaving town. Hamlin seems to have been one of the few women who lived on the edge and spent most of her life in luxury.
Also included in The Lady Was a Gambler is the legendary Gertrudes Barcelo (circa 18001852), aka Dona Tules, a well-known monte dealer and operator of gambling saloons and entertainment houses in Santa Fe, of which there were many, beginning about 1833. Enss’s efforts whet the appetite for more information about these compelling women, whose lives were hardly the norm for women of the West.
