Howdy folks and greetings from the Great Plains of North Texas where it is a balmy 67 degrees today! No sun though and winds are supposed to be gusting up to 60 mph tonight! Gonna stir up some dust and tumbleweeds later that for sure.
I've found so many crazy, fascinating female characters from the Wild West period that I decided to do a number of posts featuring a different woman each time. Hence the name Wild Women of the Old West.
Today features a gal from Texas known as Squirrel Tooth Alice and she fits into the category of "you can't make this stuff up!" starting with her name! lol.
Well, first of all let me give you her real name. Get this..her real name was Mary Elizabeth Libby Haley Thompson. Whew! Why she had such a long name I don't know. I'll call her Libby.
The Texas State Historical Society provides this photo of her:
(that's a pet Prairie Dog she's holding)
Some people just have extraordinary things happen to them and she's one of them. Her family lived in on a farm in South Central Texas when it was raided by Comanches in 1864 and she was kidnapped by them. She was 11 years old at the time and she lived with them for three years before her family was able to buy her freedom.
By the way, this was a common occurrence out West when someone was kidnapped by a tribe. They were usually able to be purchased back by paying a ransom. Usually a couple of nice horses or something like that. Sometimes the captives were not able to be bought though, if the kids were adopted into the Chiefs family or if it was a woman and the Chief married her.
I have some incredible stories of kids and women being kidnapped by Indians and later went on to write about their experiences but I've been hesitant because I don't want to paint the indigenous people in a bad light.
The truth is...they thought the whites were terrible and the whites thought they were terrible. It was just a clash of cultures with atrocities committed by both sides.
If you want to hear some of those stories though..let me know in the comments. Some are shocking and hair-raising though. But part of our history.
You would think that being brought back to her family would have been a tremendous blessing and perhaps it was, but life was not easy for her because at age 13 she was totally ostracized and shunned because everyone assumed that she was "used" by the Indians so she was regarded as "damaged goods." Poor kid.
When she met an older man who didn't care about her past she was thrilled but her father wasn't and shot the man to death! I don't know the circumstances but apparently the father was not charged with murder.
Not a happy home life
Shortly after this she ran away from home. Can you blame her? She made her way up to Abilene, Kansas which was a wild, booming cowtown at the time.
It was also full of brothels as this was one of the destinations of the big cattle drives moving herds up from Texas. Which meant the brothels were the biggest business in town alongside the saloons.
Well, with no money, no friends and no way to earn a living Libby became a "soiled dove" in one of the brothels.
Shoot...I got a call from the furnace company and one of their service guys is coming out to check our units so I gotta get off here.
I hate it when real life interrupts my steemit adventure! lol. Anyway tomorrow I'll finish Libby's wild story.
Thanks for reading folks.
-jonboy Texas
the gentleman redneck
PS- here's something you will never hear a redneck say:
Duct tape won't fix that!