Howdy folks and greetings from the Great Plains of North Texas! Yesterday I started to tell a story about one of Dodge City's most famous, or infamous, Madames who went by the name of Squirrel Tooth Alice. lol. I burst out laughing when I first heard that name. Maybe that's just me.
She got that nick name because she was using a fake name, Alice, in her dance hall work as a prostitute but she had an odd obsession with Prairie Dogs and used to keep one as a pet. She would keep it in a cage but also took it out on a collar and leash when she went out in public.
Well, she also had a prominant gap in her front teeth and people would mistake the Prairie Dog for a squirrel.. so because of all those things they started calling her Squirrel Tooth Alice and the nick name stuck.
After a few years she was very well known, I'm sure having a name like that helped a great deal because how could you forget that name?
To catch those up who missed yesterday's post, her real name was Mary Elizabeth Libby Haley Thompson so I'm calling her Libby. She was kidnapped by Comanches in 1864 and lived with them for 3 years until her father paid a ransom and got her back and she was 13 when she came back home.
Her father was convinced that she had been used by the Indians so he shunned her and and wouldn't let her date. When she met a man twice her age and brought him home her father shot him dead on the front porch!
Libby splits
Seeing that she had no future at home she ran away to Abilene, Kansas which was a booming cowtown full of brothels and that's where she started working as a prostitute at the age of 14.
I feel sorry for her, the father was crazy. She already had a very rough start in life.
Starting a career as a prostitute at that age is horrible but obviously Libby had to grow up much faster than normal because of what had happened to her. So what seems terrible to us may not have seemed that bad to her.
She met a gambler by the name of Billy Thompson who was trouble of course, always getting into drunken fights and shooting people. He was another crazy Texas cowboy, dang it!
Here's Billy. He looks halfway normal. Mustache is kinda small.
In Austin he shot and killed a guy during a drunken fight over a card game so he fled to Rockport where he shot and killed a young man who worked in a stable and who had slapped his horse.
When a warrant was issued for his arrest he made his way to Abilene where he met Libby and the two moved in together. What a pair. Billy got into another drunken fight when a Sheriff stepped in between the two and Billy "accidently" fired his gun and killed the Sheriff!
Libby and Billy then fled back to Texas but he was picked up by the Texas Rangers on an unrelated charge of cattle rustling and was sent back to Kansas for the trial of killing the Sheriff. He was aquitted, amazingly. The jury thought it was an accident.
The couple then moved to Dodge City where Billy worked as a gambler and Libby worked as a prostitute. Does anyone else find this highly strange, bizarre and unfathomable??? I mean they both sound crazy so maybe they were meant for each other!
Libby and Billy settle down
Libby would split her earnings with Billy so he could gamble it away.
They stayed together though, as dysfunctional as it sounds. After Dodge City they moved to Sweetwater, Texas where they bought a ranch.
Libby started up a brothel in town and continued working in that profession and get this: over the years she had NINE kids! Three of them from different men, six of them were Billy's. All the girls followed in Libby's footsteps and became prostitutes and all the boys got into trouble with the law for various crimes.
Billy got sick and died from a stomach ailment and Libby ran her brothel until retiring at age 66. She lived to be 98 years old and died in 1921. Unfortunately she didn't write a book about her life, it would have been a doozy!
Thanks for reading about one of our most colorful women of the Old West..and her nutcase husband. These are good examples of our ancestors folks. Is it any wonder we have alot of crazy people running around?
-jonboy Texas
the gentleman redneck
PS- ya know..you might just be a redneck if:
You've figured out a way to put a gun rack on yur bicycle!