Cosmopolitan Magazine, more or less, created the legend that was Pearl Hart in an article they published in October 1899.
They said the lady bandit “directed the affair. The woman held a revolver in one hand, the muzzle of the weapon looking threateningly, now on one person and now on another. The woman was in a man’s garment, and in the moonlight, her slender (read between the lines: sexy) figure and the masses of hair escaping from beneath the broad sombrero were plainly discernible.”
It was a story that was too good to ignore.
Within a few days, papers from all over the country borrowed quotes from the article, telling readers about the brash, cigar-smoking, hard-drinking “lady bandit” who masterminded the daring daylight stage robbery.
Pearl told readers she came from a good home and had attended a private boarding school, but she hooked up with a fast-talking conman and gambler at the tender young age of sixteen. “Marriage to me was but a name,” she said. “We ran away one night and were married.”
It
didn’t take Pearl long to figure out her new husband, Frank Hart, wasn’t
exactly marriage material. He drank, gambled to excess, and frequently beat and
abused her. They broke up and got back
together at least three times.
 |
| Pearl Hart robbing the stagecoach |
The couple headed to Chicago in 1893. They planned to fleece visitors to the Columbian Exposition, but before that happened, Pearl attended a performance of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. After that, she became enamored with cowboys and the Old West.
After taking another drubbing from Frank Hart, Pearl decided enough was enough. She abandoned her husband, sent her son back home to live with her mom in Ohio, and hopped a train to Colorado and then to Arizona.
Pearl took a job cooking (some reports said she gave the men more comfort than food, but no proof exists that she prostituted herself) in a mining camp in the Pinal Mountains. After a short spell cooking, Pearl hooked up with Joe Boot. They staked a claim in the Pinal Mountains, but the takings were slim.
In May 1899, Pearl received word that her mother was dying. She grew desperate to get home to see her. Money was tight, so they hatched a plan to rob a stagecoach.
They rode out to a bend in the road that the stagecoach would have to pass. It seemed like the perfect spot, so they waited and listened for the stage.
They approached it at a slow trot. Joe Boot pulled his Colt .45 and screamed at the driver to “throw up his hands.”
Pearl Hart robbing passengers on the stagecoach
Pearl pulled out her .38, got off her horse, and went to work collecting booty from the passengers. All the while, Joe remained on his horse and kept everyone covered.
Pearl couldn’t understand “why men carry revolvers because they almost invariably give them up at the very time they were made to be used.” She took two revolvers from the passengers that day.
The most frightened passenger carried the most money. Pearl snatched $390 out of his pocket. She told reporters the man was trembling so hard that she had difficulty getting her hands in his pockets.
Pearl described the other fellow as a “dude” who parted his hair in the middle. He “tried to tell me how much he needed the money, but his sob story didn’t stop her from rustling through his pockets. Pearl took $36 from him. The last passenger was Chinese. He was plenty scared and trembling, but was easy to search because he was a little fellow, close to her size. All he had on him was $5.00.
They decided not to take the driver’s money. Instead, Pearl took his pistol. That proved to be a big mistake, but we will get to that in its own time.
When they were finished robbing the passengers, Pearl gave them “a charitable contribution of a dollar apiece and ordered them to move on.”
Pearl Hart escaping from jail
Their getaway was a bungled mess. The duo traveled fast, and what they thought was far, but mostly, they rode around in circles. Eventually, they found a quiet space to bed down. “About three hours after laying down, we were awakened by yelling and shooting. We sprang up and grabbed our guns but found we were looking straight into the mouths of two gaping Winchesters in the hands of the sheriff’s posse. Resistance was worse than useless, and we put up hands.”
Most times, that would have been the end of the story, but Pearl was a novelty. She was a pretty, young female stage robber, and the press played the story for every extra reader they could wring out of it.
Then, in October 1899, the Cosmopolitan story catapulted Pearl into the national limelight.
The magazine described Pearl as “a small woman, weighing less than a hundred pounds, with features of the most common type. Donning a set of men’s clothes and taking the necessary revolvers, and securing a male companion, she appeared on the highway. The leveled revolvers quickly brought the coach and its occupants to a standstill.”
A short time after the article’s publication, Pearl and Ed Hogan made a daring escape from the Pima County Jail in Tucson, Arizona. He had been locked up for public drunkenness a few weeks before the escape, and Pearl somehow charmed him into helping.
Hogan snuck out of prison on the morning of October 12, 1899. Later that night, he crawled up on the balcony and cut a hole in the wall outside Pearl’s cell. The following day, the headline in the San Francisco Call read, “Famous Woman Bandit and Stage Robber Once More at Liberty: Helped By a Man.”
The couple made their way to Deming, New Mexico, but got captured a few weeks later. Again, Pearl fell victim to her fame. A detective in Deming recognized her from the pictures published in the Cosmopolitan pictorial. Authorities quickly arrested Pearl and sent her back to prison in Tucson.
Not long after her capture, Pearl stood trial for the stage
robbery. She walked into the courtroom wearing a pretty dress and charmed the jury. She told them she didn’t want to do it.
It was all Joe Boot’s idea. She just wanted to get up enough money so that she
could visit her dying mother.
Pearl Hart charming the jury
Whatever she said, the jury bought her story hook, line, and sinker. Pearl was acquitted after less than an hour of deliberation.
Judge Fletcher Doan was outraged by the verdict. He quickly empaneled a new jury and tried Pearl for stealing the stagecoach driver’s ten-dollar revolver. In the new trial, Pearl received a five-year sentence. Joe Boot received a thirty-year sentence to the Yuma Territorial Prison.
Boot escaped two years later and was never heard from again. Pearl received a pardon from Governor Alexander Brodie in 1902 on the condition that she immediately leave the Arizona Territory.
The prison superintendent told the Herald Democrat, “Pearl had been a model prisoner, complying well with the regulations of the penitentiary, and was therefore entitled to lenient consideration.”
Rumors on the street had it that Pearl was pregnant, and officials were eager to get her out of Dodge before they had to explain how she got into that situation.
In 1903, Pearl attempted to cash in on her fame by acting in a play, “The Arizona Bandit,” written by her sister. It failed miserably. A year later, Pearl was running a cigar store in Kansas City. After that, she faded into oblivion and was never heard from again.
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