Wicked Women Read online

  Kate Horony

  The Hungarian Madam

  “It’s laughable how some people will talk. I laugh at how often I turn up dead and buried.”

  Big Nose Kate, 1883

  Kate Horony pulled a crystal stopper out of a glass container filled with brandy and poured herself a drink. The svelte, well-dressed nineteen-year-old took a big gulp, then poured herself another. She slammed the second brandy back before training the derringer in her right hand on a man’s body stretched out before her. Jonas Stonebreak was lying in a pool of blood with a bullet in his upper torso. He stirred a bit, struggling to lift his head off the floor. He glanced around the bedroom at the Tribolet parlor house until his blurry eyes came to rest on Kate.

  She stared down at him, her eyes filled with contempt. The lifeless frame of Madam Blance Tribolet was slumped over in a chair next to Jonas. Kate motioned to the dead woman with her empty glass.

  “You had no cause to kill Blance,” she told him. “You’re a miserable cur,” she added, blinking away a tear. Kate poured another drink and Jonas tried to sit up.

  “She was asking for it,” he offered, spitting blood.

  “No she wasn’t,” Kate responded pointing the gun at his head, “but you sure as hell have.” She squeezed the trigger, firing off a shot that lodged a bullet in Jonas’s forehead. He collapsed in a heap. Kate threw back another drink before pocketing her gun and leaving the room.

  Blance Tribolet was the first madam for whom Kate Horony, better known as Big Nose Kate, had ever worked. She was more than an employer to the young woman; she was a friend and surrogate mother as well. The revenge Kate sought for the murder of her benefactor was one of many defining moments in the life of one of the West’s most notorious prostitutes.

  She was born on November 7, 1850, in Budapest, Hungary, and named Mary Katherine Horony. Orphaned at the age of fifteen, Kate, along with her four siblings, went to live with their guardian, Otto Schmidt, in Davenport, Ohio. Schmidt was a farmer who instantly put the Horony children to work on his property. He was a strict taskmaster who physically abused the Horonys and attempted to rape Kate. She managed to escape his attack, hitting him in the head with an ax handle and rendering him unconscious. Fearing for her life, Kate ran away. She ended up at the bank of the Mississippi with no money and, with the exception of her curvaceous figure and sharp mind, no prospects.

  The river docks were crowded with boat crews, fur trappers, and gamblers, all of whom would take advantage of Kate if given the chance. She managed to avoid their pervasive come-ons and snuck aboard the steamship Ulysses. “Burlington” Fisher, the vessel’s captain, found the teenager and questioned her about why she was there.

  The trapped orphan made up numerous stories about her situation before confessing the death of her parents. She told the captain that she was trying to get to a nun’s convent in St. Louis where she hoped to live. Fisher agreed to transport Kate to her destination and keep her safe during the trip. He was her brave protector and she was his appealing ward. The voyage had barely begun before the pair became lovers. Once the ship arrived in St. Louis, Captain Fisher helped place Kate in the Ursuline Convent.

  Living in a convent was not the ideal setting for the strong-willed Kate, and in a matter of days she ran away. While on the run this time, she met and fell in love with Silas Melvin. The two married, settled in Missouri, and eventually had a son. A cholera epidemic claimed the lives of her husband and child less than a year after the latter’s birth.

  Devastated and alone, on the streets and penniless, Kate found a home at Tribolet’s parlor house. Madam Tribolet introduced the disenfranchised youth to the lucrative prostitution trade. With Blance’s instruction Kate became one of the house’s busiest ladies.

  The lifestyle suited Kate. She kept herself adorned in the finest fashions and carried herself with a modicum of class other women didn’t have. Historians suggest her inviting Hungarian accent enticed a fair number of men to seek out her company. Madam Tribolet doted over her protégé and helped guide her career.

  After avenging the death of her mentor at the hand of her lover, Kate wandered about the cow towns of Missouri and Kansas. In 1874 she settled in Wichita and went to work at a parlor house owned and operated by Wyatt Earp’s sister-in-law, Bessie. Kate claims to have had an affair with the famed lawman, but there is no historical proof to support that assertion. Letters written between Kate and her niece alleged that Wyatt made frequent calls on the soiled dove while working at Bessie’s house. Wyatt eventually ceased calling on Kate and reunited with his common-law wife, Mattie Blaylock.

  Kate left Wichita in 1875 and headed to Dodge City. News of the money to be made by public women in Fort Griffin, Texas, drove her south. Fort Griffin was a popular settlement filled with cowboys, buffalo hunters, and outlaws. Doc Holliday was one of the outlaws who frequented the boomtown outside of the army post. Kate was smitten the moment she met the legendary figure.

  John Henry Holliday had blond hair, a neatly trimmed mustache, and pale blue eyes seething with anguish. He had an air of sophistication about him and a devil-may-care attitude that drew Kate to him. He despised “sporting girls” with light-colored hair, painted faces, and exposed legs. Kate’s dark features, voluptuous form, and determined nose, which prompted colleagues and clients to refer to her as “Big Nose Kate,” better suited the outlaw. Doc was also attracted to Kate’s fiery temper, fiercely independent nature, and marvelous vocabulary of curse words. Doc and Kate shared many of the same qualities, and their combination made for a rocky relationship.

  By the time Big Nose Kate and Doc Holliday’s paths crossed, Doc had made a name for himself as “the gambler dentist with the fast gun.” Kate was starstruck and made herself available to the gambler dentist anytime, night or day.

  When he wasn’t with her, she would search the gambling halls and watering holes in the area looking for him. Kate was not satisfied with the occasional rendezvous. Doc was suffering from advanced tuberculosis, and Kate was determined to make him see that she was good medicine for him. She eventually wore him down and became a permanent fixture in his tumultuous life.

  Kate Horony, known as Big Nose Kate, was infamous throughout the West as a madam, but also for her relationship with equally infamous Doc Holliday.

  A.W. Bork and Glenn Boyer Collection, Sharlot Hall Museum, Prescott, Arizona

  No matter who her full-time lover was, Big Nose Kate never relied on any of them for financial support. She was a self-sufficient woman who worked in parlor houses or ran her own brothel to earn a living. Doc Holliday was indeed the one man she truly loved, but he did not pay her way.

  Any questions Doc might have had about Kate’s devotion to him were answered one evening after a poker game involving the gambler turned deadly. Doc had shoved a knife into the chest of a fellow card player he had caught cheating. The Fort Griffin sheriff arrested Holliday and took him away to a makeshift jail at a local hotel. Kate helped Doc escape by setting fire to the building. While the authorities were preoccupied with the blaze, Kate rescued her paramour from the hangman’s noose.

  After Doc and Kate fled from the burning Texas hotel, they headed for Dodge City, Kansas. Once there, Doc set up a dental practice, and the two moved into Deacon Cox’s Boarding House, registered as “Mr. and Mrs. J. H. Holliday.” Despite their registration as man and wife, Kate and Doc were never legally married.

  Doc played nightly card games with his new friends, Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson. He began to spend less and less time with his dentistry practice, and late-night drinking brought on long bouts of sickness. Kate would stay by his side and help him get well. He loved her for it, but he also resented her good health. They fought constantly; and even though they lived as common-law husband and wife, Kate continued to work as a prostitute. Her job influenced Doc’s view of her, and he oftentimes treated her as inferior, but Kate didn�
�t care enough to quit. She liked her occupation because it provided her with her own income and she didn’t have to answer to anybody.

  Kate managed to make herself indispensable to Doc. He needed her. She knew how to ease him through his coughing attacks, and he actually enjoyed the volatile relationship they shared. He liked her coarseness and vulgarity. Wyatt Earp was witness to many of their fights and on several occasions suggested to Doc that he should “belt her one.” Doc would reply, “Man cannot do what he wants to in this world, but only that which will benefit him.”

  From Dodge City the couple moved to Colorado, then on to Las Vegas, New Mexico. Doc continued to work as a dentist during the day and ran a saloon at night. Kate plied her trade at a dance hall in nearby Santa Fe. In 1879 Wyatt Earp rode into town on his way to Arizona and convinced Doc to go along with him. Kate was furious with Wyatt’s interference in their relationship. She tried to talk Doc out of going, but his dedication to the Earp brothers proved to be stronger than any hold Kate had on him.

  Doc joined the Earps in Tombstone in 1880, without Kate. She moved to Globe, Arizona, and bought herself a hotel with the money she had made running a parlor house in Santa Fe. By March 1881 Kate had decided she couldn’t live without Doc and headed off to Tombstone. During their time apart Doc had grown paler and thinner. His bright eyes had faded to a cold, hard gray, and his head was topped by enough white hairs to make his hair appear ash blond. It wasn’t long after they were reunited that their romance showed signs of the usual strain. Kate was jealous of the time he spent with the Earps and never failed to make her feelings known.

  On the night of March 15, 1881, armed robbers attempted to hold up a stage near the town of Contention, Arizona. In the process they killed the driver and a passenger. An angry, drunken Kate later told Cochise County sheriff Behan and his deputy, Frank Stillwell, that Doc was responsible for the robbery and murders, and she signed an affidavit to the fact.

  When Kate was sober and realized what she had done, she repudiated the statement, and the judge dropped the charges. An angry Doc gave Kate some money and a stagecoach ticket and sent her back to Globe. But she wasn’t gone for good. She would return to Tombstone one more time to see her beloved Doc. She was on hand to witness the gunfight at the O.K. Corral from their room at Fly’s Boarding House. Once the smoke cleared, she again went back to Globe and the thriving bordello she owned.

  In 1887 Kate received word of Doc being near death, and she traveled to Colorado, where he was convalescing, to be with him. Historical records indicate that she took him to her brother Alexander’s ranch near Glenwood Springs.

  Doc died in a Glenwood Springs hotel on November 8, 1887. The following year Kate married George Cummings, a blacksmith. Kate left her husband shortly after they exchanged vows. It seems Cummings lacked the passion and ability to spar with her that Doc had. He later committed suicide.

  Kate moved into the Arizona Pioneer’s Home in 1935. She passed away five years later on November 2. The inscription on her tombstone does not list the many names she used at various times in her career as a madam and prostitute. Nor does it contain a verse or statement about her adventurous life. It simply reads “Mary K. Cummings.”

  Jenny Rowe

  The Faro Bandit

  “In a bet there is a fool and a thief.”

  Ancient proverb

  A covey of cowboys, tinhorns, and miners clustered around a faro table at the National Hotel in Nevada City, California. A pristinely dressed dealer gingerly placed a suit of spades across a brilliant green felt game cloth. Somewhere behind him a voice called out, interrupting the sound of shuffling cards and clinking chips. All eyes simultaneously turned to face the startling beauty making her way through the men, toward the table. “Excuse me, boys,” the petite woman announced. “I’ve got a feeling this is my lucky day.”

  Nineteen-year-old Jenny Rowe sashayed through the activity, smiling cheerfully as she went. She was lithe and slender and adorned in a sky-blue gingham dress that gently swept the floor when she walked. Her big, brown eyes scanned the cards on the table, and after a few moments she turned to the dealer and grinned.

  “Serve ’em up,” she invited. The man nodded and encouraged the other gamblers surrounding the game to place their bets. A frenzy of hands tossed their chips onto the spades across the felt.

  Jenny deposited a stack of chips on the green in between the numbers. “You sure about that?” one of the cowhands next to her asked.

  “I don’t know a better way to put my money into circulation,” she responded kindly.

  The lady gambler lingered at the faro table for several hours, winning more hands than she lost. When the sun started making its eastwardly rise, Jenny cashed in her winnings. A few of the men stared dumbfounded as the dealer peeled off $500 in exchange for her chips. After leaving a generous tip with the bartender and the dealer, she slowly made her way toward the swinging doors of the saloon.

  “It ain’t natural,” one prospector said in disbelief. “Nobody keeps laying down a bet between the numbers and wins.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong, mister,” Jenny retorted. “They don’t call me ‘Jenny on the Green’ for nothing.”

  Jenny was born in 1841. The exact location isn’t known. Some historians cite New Orleans as her place of birth, and others list it as Atlanta, Georgia. The earliest records about the gambler’s life appear in the August 1856 edition of the Nevada Democrat. Fifteen-year-old Jenny and her thirteen-year-old sister, Lola, were performers with Rowe’s Olympic Circus. The circus was touring the Northern California gold mines, and the equestrian acrobatic siblings were part of the show.

  Joseph Rowe was the founder of the company that made its debut in San Francisco on October 29, 1849. The majority of the cast members involved with the circus were orphans, including Rowe himself. Rowe acted as guardian to the teenagers who joined the program. As a sign of respect and loyalty, Jenny and Lola took on their mentor and caretaker’s last name.

  The arrival of Rowe’s Olympic Circus into mining communities was marked by a clown or jester riding down the main street of town, playing a bugle and banging on a drum. The caravan of performers stretched for miles. Miners would lay down their shovels and leave their work at the canyons and streams and follow the show to its destination. The main acts of the circus were the horseback riders. Skilled riders and well-trained horses were judged with a critical eye, and the top equestrians were regarded as heroes of sorts.

  Jenny Rowe was an exceptional bareback rider. She would lead her mare in a trot around the makeshift arena while doing back somersaults in the process. At some time during their stay in Nevada City, Jenny and her sister became ill and were bedridden. They were forced to leave the circus because of their health. The show moved on, but Jenny and Lola planned to rejoin the circus on its return through the area. They were left in the care of a Mrs. Palmer, a childless widow who doted on the sisters.

  In between the time Jenny’s health improved and the circus came back around, the young woman found herself smitten with a gambler named Frank Moore. Jenny was outgoing and gregarious; Moore was quiet and reserved. Their opposite personalities made for a stimulating and passionate romance. The two spent their evenings at the local saloon. Jenny sat close to the successful cardsharp, watching him gamble. Over time she developed a fondness for faro. She studied the game closely, and whenever Moore fronted her funds to place a bet, she always won.

  This 1908 photograph of a back alleyway in San Francisco’s red-light district reveals the harsh conditions endured by some “crib girls.”

  Author’s collection

  Mrs. Palmer was appalled at her charge’s behavior. She did not approve of Frank and believed gambling and carousing in a saloon led to an eternity in hell. In spite of the objections, the couple was sincere about their feelings for one another and wanted to get married. Mrs. Palmer would n
ot consent to the union. Her disapproval did not stop the couple, however. They insisted on being together and made plans to elope. Their first attempt was thwarted by the protective sponsor. When Frank snuck into the Palmer home to liberate his would-be bride, the widow beat the persistent man over the head with a ladle.

  Even though their first try at eloping was not successful, Jenny and her paramour could not be discouraged. A year after Frank’s proposal they managed to get away and exchange vows. The Moores were wed in May 1858. Jenny refused to rejoin Rowe’s Olympic Circus when it finally returned to the mining burg. She and her husband decided to stay in Nevada City, California, and support themselves primarily through gambling. Frank was a dealer at a popular saloon, and Jenny played faro and worked as a waitress.

  In September 1859 Frank was involved in an altercation with a shady character who insisted the gambler had cheated him out of a win. The argument ended in gunplay. Frank’s aim was off when he drew on the outraged man and he accidentally shot an innocent bystander. He was arrested, tried, found guilty, and sentenced to hang.

  The newlyweds were mortified at the unfortunate turn of events. Jenny visited her husband daily, and the two commiserated over their tragic circumstances. Shortly before Frank was to be executed, he took his own life by swallowing a vial of poison. The authorities and townspeople speculated that Jenny provided him with the lethal substance. Neither wanted to be subjected to the humiliation of a public hanging and had sought another way out.

  Many amorous men hoped to mend Jenny’s broken heart, but only one captured her attention. His name was Curly Smith. Smith was an outlaw and a leader of a gang of highwaymen. Ironically, he was the same man Frank Moore had beaten at cards and attempted to gun down. Smith was fascinated with Jenny’s betting habits at the faro table. She had a fondness for betting on the green instead of the actual number or face cards. He nicknamed her “Jenny on the Green,” and the handle stuck.