“Praise the Lord and place your bets. I’ll take your money with no regrets.”
- Alice Tubbs
In one of those unrepeatable down-the-rabbit-hole internet searches—you know, the ones where you start by looking up something legit for your WIP and two hours later find yourself in the cyberspace equivalent of an empty parking lot outside the bus station in Albuquerque at three in the morning—I recently came across a blog post about paranormal activity in the Bullock Hotel in Deadwood, South Dakota.
Most people, including me, only knew about Deadwood by way of the HBO series, so even apart from the possibility of ghosts, it was fascinating to learn that many of the main characters in the series were based on actual people. Obviously I knew Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane were real, but so were Seth Bullock, Sol Star, Al Swearengen, E.B. Farnum, and Charlie Utter. This discovery forced me to the next step—looking into the real histories of these folks and the infamously lawless town where they lived, and often died. (Suddenly! and with much malice aforethought)
That’s how I discovered that Calamity Jane wasn’t the only famous woman connected with Deadwood. There was also “Poker Alice” Tubbs, who was every bit as extraordinary.
Alice was born in Sudbury, England, in 1851. Her family moved to the eastern United States when she was young and she was educated as a proper young lady, but then she married a mining engineer and moved to Colorado. Apparently, the Wild West life suited her, because she took to smoking cigars and playing poker. When her husband was blown up in a mining accident, she became a professional gambler. She moved around Colorado for many years, supporting herself by working as a dealer in gambling establishments for a few hours a day and playing poker the rest of the time. She moved to Deadwood around 1890, where she married her second husband, whom she’d routinely beaten at the poker tables. They homesteaded a ranch near Sturgis and had seven children. Although Alice never stopped gambling, she now devoted most of her time to her family—she later said this time was one of the happiest of her life.
But poor Alice had much better luck at cards than marriage, and her second husband died of tuberculosis at the end of 1910. Forced to earn a living on her own once more, she hired a man to look after the homestead and moved to Sturgis proper, where she went back to gambling (not clear what happened to the kids, but the math says they were probably old enough to take care of themselves). The hired man was madly in love with Alice and proposed to her several times. Eventually she agreed, saying she owed him so much in wages it would be cheaper to marry him than pay him. But Alice’s bad luck with marriage struck again, and she was widowed once more after only a couple of years.
Eventually she set up her own saloon and brothel between Sturgis and Fort Meade, called “Poker’s Palace.” In 1913, during a ruckus at her popular establishment, Alice shot and killed a soldier. Alice wound up in jail, where she smoked her cigars and read her bible until the shooting was ruled self- defense (a friend later said she felt terrible about the young man’s death for the rest of her life).
She continued to run her business for many years, despite Prohibition and frequent arrests and fines for “keeping a disorderly house.” She was eventually sentenced to prison for her repeated convictions, but since she was 75, she was pardoned by the governor on grounds of age. Four years later she died while undergoing gall bladder surgery. She’s buried in Sturgis.
Yet for all her larger-than-life qualities, it’s the small details of Alice’s life that intrigue me the most:
She was petite—only 5 foot 4.
She never cheated because she said it would take all the fun out of it.
She carried a .38 and knew how to use it.
Men came from all over to play against her and usually lost.
She once won $6,000 in Silver City (about $181,000 today); and she never gambled on Sundays.
But the one fact I keep coming back to is that, despite the constant presence of a cigar in her mouth, Alice always dressed like a fashionable lady. At the risk of sounding like one of those authors who relates everything to their own works, this echoes a plot point in my YA novel, The Criminal Gene: the great aunts of my MC, Nina, make her dress like a preppy so she can steal more effectively. Nina calls it “hiding in plain sight.” I like to think Alice wore her frilly dresses for similar reasons—to give her an edge by discomfiting the men she played against, to play on their (low) expectations of what a woman could do. A card sharp hiding in plain sight.