Locked and Loaded!

Pearl Hart and a posse of sharpshooting Western women shaped the West from the barroom to the courthouse.

- JANA BOMMERSBACH

In 1899, Pearl Hart and her boyfriend, Joe Boot, gained national attention for robbing the Globe to Florence, Arizona Territory, stagecoach. While jailed during her trial at the Pinal County Courthouse in Florence in November 1899, Hart wrote her life story and posed for a series of photographs dressed as a man with an unloaded rifle and pistol. The photos were featured in the October 1899 issue of Cosmopolitan magazine.

Sharpshooter. If that word immediately conjures the image of a man with a gun, think again. History is peppered with female sharpshooters, and a gun wasn’t their only weapon of choice— some used their sharp tongue and wits to hit their marks; some used it all.

Among the most notorious was Pearl Hart, who never even pulled a trigger.

Under-five feet and a hundred pounds, this “Lady Bandit” ambushed her way into the history books in 1899: the only known female stagecoach robber pulling off one of the last stagecoach heists in America.

But it was her castrating tongue that captured the attention of the nation and made her a celebrity. Men hated what she had to say; women loved it!

Pearl Hart’s celebrity began about 5 p.m. on May 29, 1899, in Arizona Territory. She was masquerading as a man in a gray shirt and dungarees with her long hair tucked under a dirty white sombrero and her feet in boots that were obviously too big. She and her boyfriend, Joe Boot, laid in wait in Cane Springs Canyon between Florence and Globe, waiting for Henry Bacon’s stage with its three passengers. As she ordered them out of the stage, one of the men left his revolver lying on the seat. Henry never tried to draw the gun he carried.