Wild West Women

The women who drove cattle or operated ranches in the old American West developed a set of guidelines concerning how and when to use guns. Different from cowboys’ gun creed in many aspects, the rules reflected the particular dangers that confronted women on the range:

1. Strange men will do to shoot

2. Shoot first, ask questions later

3. If you shoot a man in the back, he rarely returns fire.

4. Scare a man to death even if you do not intent to kill him

5. If a man needs killing, do it.

The following are a few gutsy woman of the old west.

Belle Starr

Myra Belle Shirley lived from 1848 to 1889. Known as the “Bandit Queen”, she dressed alternately in male drag and velvet gowns and stole countless horses, while captivating and discarding many lovers. She headed a gang in Oklahoma, then called Indian Territory, and with Sam Starr, a Cherokee whose name she took, was convicted as a horse thief and did some jail time.

On other occasions she teamed up with the notorious James-Younger gang, the baddest bad guys of the Old West, and harbored the fugitive Jesse James. She kept on rustling and stealing the finest livestock in the West until her murder by a bushwhacker in 1889.

Calamity Jane

A cohort of Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane endures as a legendary Wild West figure. She often passed as a man and claimed to have worked a variety of jobs, including a mule skinner, a cattle driver, an Indian scout for Custer, prospector, innkeeper, teamster, rancher and Pony express rider.

It is hard to separate fact from myth where she is concerned, but she certainly made a reputation as a boozer and brawler, famous in saloons throughout the American West. When she died she was buried beside Hickok in Deadwood, South Dakota’s boot Hill Cemetery.

In a final note, in 1899, famed wild west bandit Peal Hart pulled the last stagecoach robbery in U.S. History.

This is just a few woman of the old west. Infamous, depending how you look at it, but great in their own way.