High Plains Drifters

Took hold of my sweetheart and away we did drive,

Straight for the hills, the black hills of Dakota,

Sure was glad to get out of there alive.

- Bob Dylan, "Day of the Locusts"



While the overwhelming majority of 19th-century players were men, a tiny number of smart, determined women, including Kitty LeRoy, Lottie Deno, Belle Siddons, and especially Alice Ivers, made names for themselves on the western frontier playing vingt-et-un, faro, and poker.



Ivers was born on Feb. 17, 1853, in Devonshire, England. The only daughter of a schoolmaster, Alice received quite a bit more education than the average girl of that time and was raised to become a respectable member of Victorian society. But the sedate garden path of her life took a slight detour when, while Alice was in her late teens, her family moved to the wilds of Colorado. Though no surviving pictures confirm this, Alice was described then as a "petite 5'4" beauty with blue eyes and long, lush brown hair." Having attracted several suitors, she decided to marry Frank Duffield, a handsome mining engineer and poker aficionado who was by all accounts the love of her life. The couple set up their household in Leadville, a silver-mining boomtown in the heart of the Rockies. In an act of surprising open-mindedness for 1873, Frank taught Alice to play poker, too, not long before a dynamite charge he was setting in a mine tragically left her a widow.



In the days before unions and life insurance, the beautiful Mrs. Duffield now had to fend for herself in a place about as far removed from Devonshire as it was possible to imagine. With a population topping 40,000, Leadville was the largest town in the Colorado Territory and, according to crime historian Herbert Asbury, "the most lawless." Women of Alice's breeding were unaccustomed to physical labor, especially 10,350 feet above sea level. And once she'd ruled out prostitution, a job in a casino seemed the only alternative. Her preference was to deal and play poker, but she also learned to buck the faro tiger. Her distracting English Rose complexion, firm control of her facial muscles, and who knows what other devices all helped to maximize her yield at the tables. Few if any games in these boomtowns were strictly on the square; and while it's impossible to know the extent to which Alice cheated, most professionals took every advantage they could get away with. Alice's motto was, "Praise the Lord and place your bets, I'll take your money with no regrets," though because of her Anglican upbringing, she refused to ever gamble on Sunday. On her best nights, she could take three or four thousand dollars from a poker game, and it's been estimated that she netted about $225,000 in her career. Whatever the tally was, she earned enough to fund shopping trips to places as far away as New York for the latest Gibson Girl fashions – high necks, puffy sleeves, fitted waistlines. Yielding to her less girlish side, she developed a taste for black stogies. But whatever she was wearing or smoking, the nickname "Poker Alice" became her.



As a rare professional who was also a good-looking woman, Alice was wooed by casino proprietors to deal in a string of estrogen-starved towns and mining camps. In Creede, Colorado, she was hired by Bob Ford – who had killed Jesse James for a $10,000 bounty in 1882 – to lure miners into his big-tent saloon. After drifting down to New Mexico, Alice won $6,000 in a single night as a faro banker for the Gold Dust in Silver City. The owners hired her as a regular attraction, much as Hickok was paid to play in Saloon No. 10, but she soon headed north for the summer.



While dealing in the Dakota Territory, she met and fell in love with Warren G. Tubbs, a fellow dealer who became her second husband. Tubbs changed Alice's life even more than Duffield had, not only because they produced three daughters and four sons together, but because Alice and Warren gave up gambling to raise them. To make their more modest ends meet, they started a chicken farm on a homestead near Sturgis along the south fork of the Moreau River, and Warren supplemented the farm's proceeds as a house painter. Mrs. Tubbs loved the tranquility of their spread, claiming she never once missed the card tables. During the winter of 1910, however, the already tubercular Warren came down with pneumonia and died in her arms. Leaving their oldest children in charge of the younger ones, she loaded his body onto a wagon and drove the team 48 miles through blizzard conditions to Deadwood, where she pawned her wedding ring to pay for his burial. She left herself just enough cash to begin playing poker again.



Soon enough she was hosting three or four games in the parlor of a brothel on Bear Butte Creek in Sturgis. Called Poker's Palace to rhyme with her nickname – and not, alas, the Bear Butte Bordello – the majority of its clientele was from the 4th Cavalry Regiment stationed three miles away in Fort Meade. Demand for the action upstairs quickly outstripped the supply. As Alice tells the story, "I went to the bank for a $2,000 loan to build on an addition and go to Kansas City to recruit some fresh girls. When I told the banker I'd repay the loan in two years, he scratched his head for a minute then let me have the money. In less than a year I was back in his office paying off the loan. He asked how I was able to come up with the money so fast. I took a couple chaws on the end of my cigar and told him, 'Well, it's this way. I knew the Grand Army of the Republic was having an encampment here in Sturgis. And I knew that the state Elks convention would be here, too. But I plumb forgot about all those Methodist preachers coming to town for a conference."



The next salvo she fired, in 1913, was less funny. A group of soldiers got so out of hand that Alice felt compelled to discharge her rifle to get their attention. Unfortunately, the bullet passed through two of the revelers, killing one of them. The police closed the Palace and took Alice into custody. At her trial, the shooting was ruled accidental and Alice was released. But she had earned the enmity of both the Sturgis police and the officers at Fort Meade, which spelled the swift demise of the Palace.



When Prohibition was enacted in 1920, she supplemented her income as a madam and gambler by selling whiskey and beer. Other arrests, for bootlegging and "keeping a bawdy house," followed. She paid the fines and tried to stay in business, but in 1928 she was sentenced to a term in the South Dakota State Penitentiary. Being 75 and a woman, she was pardoned by Gov. Bill Bulow, but her days running brothels were over.



By this point the old Gibson Girl had taken to wearing men's hats and work shirts to go with a lit robusto clamped between her teeth. "At my age I suppose I should be knitting," she said, "but I would rather play poker with five or six 'experts' than eat." She was often seen playing in Deadwood until just before she died, at 77, in a Rapid City hospital. She was buried in St. Aloysius Cemetery in the Black Hills, just down the road from the partially sculpted face of Mount Rushmore.



A less famous Dakotan than Alice, the attorney and freemason Richard F. Pettigrew served as a Republican delegate to the 47th U.S. Congress (1881-1883). It was during this session that Pettigrew acquired his reputation as a maniacally fortunate draw player, and among the least skillful. The most damning evidence emerged during a private game in a Washington, D.C., hotel room. Toward the end of the evening, one player raised the pot $50, and Pettigrew raised him $50 more. When his opponent raised $50 back, Pettigrew raised him again.



Once the initial round of betting was over, his opponent stood pat and was startled to watch Pettigrew discard four. Pettigrew looked at his new hand, paused for a couple of seconds, then bet $50. His opponent raised him with his last $100 and turned over kings full of sixes. When Pettigrew showed him a royal flush in clubs, the loser became apoplectic. "What in thunder did you draw to!?"



"That typewriter," said Pettigrew cryptically while pointing to the queen of clubs. Commercial typewriters had only begun to be manufactured – by the Remington Arms Company – in 1873, and it's possible the queen of clubs had picked up a secretarial nickname. Or perhaps he meant, "None of your business."



When South Dakota became a state in 1889, Pettigrew was elected as one of its first two U.S. senators. Rumors of how the poker gods rewarded his incorrigible play spread through the District, and his fellow senators refused to invite him to what was known as the Statesmen's Game, having deemed his blind-pig reliance on luck to be altogether unstatesmanlike.



Another Dakota legend, a drifter who always insisted on being called Poker Jim, was less lucky. Most reports have him working as an itinerant ranch hand, though he also was described as both an outlaw and a gentleman. We know he had an inordinate fondness for both whiskey and the card game he took as his moniker, but like most frontier cowboys, he was happiest while enjoying them together. While modern psychologists would diagnose him as a gambling addict, the pathological byproduct of a genetic predisposition, Jim's contemporaries simply said "it was almost impossible to drag him away from a poker table. Winning or losing, the game had a fascination for him."



He arrived in the Dakotas around 1890 as part of a cattle drive and was later hired by Pierre Wibaux to work on his vast W Bar Ranch. During the ferocious winter of 1894, Poker Jim and his friend Cash Lantis were assigned to Wibaux's Hay Draw camp on the Little Missouri River. By February their food supply was so short that Jim volunteered to ride to Glendive, Montana, 65 miles away, for provisions. After fitting out a pack horse, he set off into the drifting white landscape with beans, bread, tobacco, coffee, kerosene, matches, and whiskey on his shopping list and another staple much on his mind. Because Jim most likely had volunteered for the hazardous trip in hopes of finding a poker game in Glendive, Cash might have to wait a few extra days for his grub.



The distance between line shacks was 15 to 20 miles, and it would have taken Jim about three days to reach Glendive. After bunking overnight at Smith Creek, he began the second leg of his frigid little run to the store. But the Smith Creek camp foreman reported that Jim appeared seriously hung over when he set out that morning. When he failed to show up at the next camp in a timely fashion, a search team rode out. They eventually found his body nine miles from camp; it was sitting against a scoria rock, "frozen solid." Burnt matches near the corpse indicated that Jim had been desperately trying to build a fire. His horse, still tied to a tree, had been pitifully gnawing the bark.



Because the ground was too hard to dig a grave until spring, the ranch hands wrapped Jim's body in a blanket and placed it in cold storage across the rafters of one of their unheated shacks. A few weeks later another group of cowboys gathered there for a stud game, unaware of the body above them. Their wood fire warmed up the shack well enough that Jim's body started to thaw. Before it began to reek, some of its weight shifted and its balance on the ceiling beams tipped. It finally crashed onto the rickety table below, sending chairs, cards, and cowboys ricocheting off the four walls. Only one other game in the history of poker ever broke up with as much utter shock and finality.



After his unscheduled wake in the line shack, Jim was interred in the W Bar burial plot, which is now called the Poker Jim Cemetery. Instead of a headstone, his grave is marked by what is said to be the very rock his body was leaning against. The cemetery's vistas take in the wetlands and ridges of McKenzie County, North Dakota, not far from Theodore Roosevelt National Park. There is also a dime novel or two bearing Jim's nickname, to go with the Poker Jim Oilfield, the Poker Jim Ridge Research Natural Area, and Poker Jim Butte, all this to commemorate a player whose last earthly act was – just like Bill Hickok – to gruesomely smash up a poker game.