Harum-Scarum Dime Novel Cowgirls
Characters based on the real lives of daredevil cowgirls
Fictional cowgirls rode into the dime novels of the late 1800s and early 1900s, elevating the female character from a victim to the heroine of the story. Soon after their introduction to the mass market literature, the cowgirls became equal to the heroes in the swash-buckling books, taking matters into their own hands when life dealt them a raw deal.
The dime novel was introduced in 1860 by the firm Beadle & Adams. The inexpensive paperbacks appealed to readers hungry for daring exploits involving detectives, cowboys, and romantic heroines.
In the early frontier and Western dime novels women were victims in need of saving. The transformation from victim to heroine took place in the 1870s, beginning with Joseph E. Badger’s The Forest Princess; or, The Kickapoo Captives. A Romance of the Illinois, a Beadle’s Dime Novel. This was, in the words of Henry Nash Smith in Virgin Land (1950), “the earliest available case of aggressiveness on the part of a Beadle female.”
“…but she ain’t he-roic—she’s she-roic…”
—from Snaky Snodgrass; or, The Stolen Bride (43)
Edward L. Wheeler introduced the cowgirl heroine character with Baltimore Bess, who first appeared in Rosebud Rob; or, Nugget Ned, the Knight of the Gulch (Beadle’s Half Dime Library no. 80, Feb . 4, 1879).
Baltimore Bess was a secondary character in the four-story Rosebud Rob stories. ‘Bess’ is actually Pauline Grey, a gentle, womanly, tender Easterner who at eighteen is mistreated by a miscreant lover, a faithless lawyer who trifled with her affections and robbed her of her inheritance. At first Pauline is miserable and heartbroken, but ‘then she grew changed—was no longer herself, but a wild, reckless harum-scarum girl.’
Pauline leaves her kid sister Jennie behind back East and goes West to find her no-good man, who she still loves. She dresses as a man and becomes a detective, ‘Baltimore Bess.’ She is successful as a detective, teaming up with Rosebud Rob and the famous Eastern detective George Pearsons on several cases.
The author of the Baltimore Bess stories also wrote about Calamity Jane, the best-known of the cowgirl heroines in the Calamity Jane Adventures. The dime novel Calamity was based on the real cowgirl Calamity Jane, a hard-drinking, sure-shooting, opinionated cowgirl. One dime novel dubbed her “The White Devil of the Yellowstone.” Calamity Jane herself claimed that she was the most reckless and daring rider and one of the best shots in the West. She worked as a Pony Express rider and for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West in 1895 where she performed sharpshooting astride her horse.
Other heroines of the dime novels included the fictionalized characters of real life cowgirls Belle Starr and Pearl Hart.
Belle Starr was possibly the most notorious female outlaw and gunslinger of the Wild West. She wasn’t well known beyond Texas through most of her life, but that changed when dime novel and National Police Gazette publisher Richard K. Fox picked up her story. According to Maxine Carter-Lome in the Journal of Antiques and Collectibles, Fox made Starr’s name famous with his fictional novel Bella Starr, the Bandit Queen, or The Female Jesse James, published in 1889 (the year of her murder). This novel is still cited as a historical reference despite its artistic license and lack of historical accuracy. It was the first of many popular stories that used her name.
According to Carter-Lome, another real-life cowgirl named Pearl Hart was also “a staple of pulp western fiction. Pearl Hart liked to dress as a man, with hair shorn, and arm herself with a .38 revolver. Born Pearl Taylor on Canadian land in 1871, this nineteenth-century outlaw, the so-called ‘Bandit Queen,’ is most well-known for committing some of the last stagecoach robberies in the United States.” Hart’s exploits were featured in other venues, including the play Lady with a Gun and the musical The Legend of Pearl Hart, both based upon Hart’s life story.
The dime novel cowgirls, like their real-life counterparts, often discovered that dressing like a man gave them an advantage, not only in being able to ride a horse without wearing a cumbersome skirt, but also in how they were perceived in a world dominated by men. In men’s clothes, they could become hard-drinking, sure-shooting, and opinionated. And they could become the heroine of their own story, just like their real-life counterparts.
The cowgirl of dime novel fame was capable and fierce, triumphing in dire circumstances. The novels added to the real cowgirls’ fame, and their fictional parallels were adored by readers who wanted to escape to a different life within their pages.
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Cowboy/Cowgirl Lingo of the Day
Harum-Scarum – A negative term applied to flighty persons or persons always in a hurry.
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Love this: Pop! Goes The West: Where Pop Art Meets Cowboy Culture at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West
Learn more about the exhibit here.
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And, finally, the bobcat was back strolling through the garden this week. Keep hoping she’ll take some voles with her when she leaves.
