Some great poker trivia,
poker stories, poker myths and poker
quotes.
Poker Alice Of the old
wild west.
The Story of Poker Alice
A
lot has been written about Poker Alice whose
death in 1930 long preceeded her subsequent fame.
Like many myths of the West, those of Poker Alice
have grown in time. When she died she was a
somewhat infamous speakeasy and brothel owner with
a colorful past -- not exactly a leading citizen
of Sturgis.
Consider how her life must have
appeared to the world in
1930:
She owned a
brothel
She was a
boot-legger.
She had killed a
man
She was a
professional gambler
She was a convicted
felon
She smoked
cigars
She had been married
three times
And, she carried a
gun
...not someone who was welcomed
into polite company
Now, more than 75
years after her death, we can see that she was an
Old West character every bit as colorful as such
legendary Deadwood figures as Wild Bill Hickok and
Calamity Jane, who she probably knew. But unlike
those earlier Western figures, the details of
Poker Alice's life are fairly well documented,
although often erroneously.
Take, for
instance, the detail of her birth. Almost
every reference gives her date and place of birth
as February 17, 1851 or 1853 in Devonshire,
England, because this is what she claimed. In
fact, sources suggest she was born in Virginia in
1853 to Irish immigrants. Here's the rest of the
story:
Although she is
most famous as a madam, she did not become a
brothel operator until 1910, when she would have
been about 60 years old. Prior to that, she made a
good living for most of her life as a faro dealer
and poker player. After 1919, her main line of
business was as a speakeasy operator during
prohibition. The "girls" were more or less a
sideline.
Alice, whose
maiden name was Alice Ivers, may have been taken
to Colorado by her parents. There she met and
married Frank Duffield, sometime in the 1870s.
Duffield was a mining engineer who was killed
shortly after their marriage. He was resetting an
unexploded dynamite charge in a mine at Leadville,
Co. Duffield, a skilled poker player, had taught
Alice how to play poker and she found that she had
a good head for counting cards and figuring odds.
Alice was also good at using her looks to distract
male players. Most pictures of Alice show a gruff
woman in her 70s smoking a cigar. In fact, even
into her 50s, Alice was considered attractive and
wore only the finest clothes.
Alice often told a
story about breaking the bank at a faro table in
Colorado then using the cash to go to New York
City. She did live in New York briefly in the
1870s or 1880s and undoubtedly, it was her faro
winnings that bankrolled the trip. But, most
likely, she just saved up enough cash to go.
However, Alice, never one to miss an opportunity
to embellish a story, liked to say she broke
the bank.
Throughout the
1880s, Alice worked in saloons across the West as
a faro and poker dealer. Her skill and beauty
resulted in very good pay. She certainly had
plenty of money to buy the finest clothes with
fancy low-cut gowns, ostrich plumes and other
fancies of the day. It is likely that she worked
the gambling halls in the Colorado towns of
Alamosa, Georgetown, Trinidad, Central City and
Leadville, as well as those in Silver City, New
Mexico, before moving to Deadwood.
The exact date of
Alice's arrival in Deadwood is not known, but it
was probably around 1890. In Deadwood she met
Warren G. Tubbs, a housepainter from Sturgis and a
fellow card dealer. Their romance is said to have
bloomed after Alice shot a man in the arm who had
been threatening Tubbs with a knife. She and Tubbs
married and had seven children. During this time
Alice was reputed to have been able to make as
much as $6,000 gambling on a good night -- a huge
amount of money back then.
Alice would say
that Tubbs wasn't a very good card player, or, in
her words: "he wasn't lucky." Perhaps. But few
people could play as well as Alice.
While her children
were growing up, Alice tried to keep them away
from the gambling houses and at one point she and
Tubbs decided to homestead a ranch northeast of
Sturgis on the Moreau River. Tubbs had contracted
tuberculosis and Alice hoped to nurse him back to
health. By some accounts, Alice's time at the
Moreau Ranch were some of the happiest in her
life. She would later recount how she liked the
peace and quiet and never missed the saloons and
gambling halls. Tubbs died in the winter of 1910
apparently from pnemonia. Alice used a horse-drawn
wagon to take his body back to Sturgis for
burial.
Times were
undoubtedly difficult back then because she was no
longer making a high income at the card tables.
The story -- a legend perhaps -- is that Alice
pawned her wedding ring to pay for Tubbs' funeral,
then went into a saloon and won enough money at
poker to get her ring back.
After Tubbs died,
Alice hired George Huckert to take care of the
homestead while she went back to Sturgis to earn
some money. Huckert proposed to her several times
until she famously said: "I owed him so much in
back wages, I figured it would be cheaper to marry
him than pay him off. So I did." His back wages
were about $1,008. The marriage was short. Huckert
died in 1913. Alice continued to call herself
Alice Tubbs.
It was around 1910
that Alice bought an old house on Bear Butte Creek
near the Fort Mead Army Post and opened the
brothel. This resulted in, perhaps, the most
repeated story about Poker
Alice:
Apparently the
house was small and needed extra rooms and "fresh
girls" to perk up the business, so Alice went to a
bank for a loan of $2,000. This is how the story
is often reported, in words supposedly spoken by
Alice:
"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'."
In 1913 there was
an unfortunate incident at the bordello when a
number of soldiers became unruly. Poker Alice
fired a single rifle shot to quiet the troops,
however the bullet ripped into two of them,
killing one. When the police arrived, they took
Alice and her six girls to jail, shutting down the
brothel. Alice was later acquitted of any
wrongdoing because the soldiers were in a near
riot, and the shooting was ruled accidental. But
forever after Ft. Meade authorities harrassed her.
Many times in the
ensuing years she was arrested for drunkeness and
keeping a disorderly house. She generally paid her
fines and continued business as usual. Eventually,
however, she was sentenced to a term in the state
penitentiary for repeated convictions of operating
a house of ill fame. Alice, who by this time was
75 years old, was pardoned by the governor.
Poker Alice's
fame, or notoriety, followed her beyond her waning
years. She died on February 27, 1930 in a Rapid
City hospital after a gall bladder operation and
is buried at St. Aloysius Cemetery in Sturgis. Her
"house" stood vacant for many years and was
scheduled for demolition until a Sturgis
businessman bought it and had it moved to its
present location on Junction Avenue in Sturgis
where it is now a bed and breakfast inn.
Alice once claimed that she had won more
than $250,000 gambling over the years and that she
never once cheated. Both of these claims are
probably true. Poker Alice didn't have to cheat.
She knew how to count cards and she knew how to
figure the odds. Plus, she was always skillful at
"reading" other players while remaining
stone-faced herself.
The story of Poker Alice needs to be taken
in the context of her time. In 1910, when she
returned to the workforce, she found the demand
for her only skills in decline. The temperance
movement and religious zealots were major forces
in American politics. Alice's trade of more than
30 years was fast becoming illegal as saloons,
gambling halls and the like were closed down. In
her many years as a professional gambler, she
would have been well aware of the trade in the
upstairs rooms of saloons. Alice, herself, was
never a prostitute; as a professional gambler, she
had much higher status. It may be safe to
assume that she believed, in 1910, that the
brothel was her only economic option. We may
assume that Alice would have rather remained a
gambler. Indeed, in her last decades she was a
well-known card player in Deadwood, which,
incidentally, tolerated gambling and prostitution
until 1987. It would seem that in 1910, Alice was
caught up by the changing mores. The businesses
she had been around all her life, and which had
been perfectly legal, were now under attack. One
could say, she just did not change with the times.
