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Women of the Wild West, 3-6
Our list of renowned women of the Wild West continues with a stagecoach driver and a sharpshooter.3. Charley Parkhurst
Times were rough for ladies in the Wild West, so this crackerjack stagecoach driver decided to live most of her life as a man. Born in 1812, Parkhurst lived well into her sixties, in spite of being a hard-drinking, tobacco-chewing, fearless, one-eyed brute. She drove stages for Wells Fargo and the California Stage Company, not an easy or particularly safe career. Using her secret identity, Parkhurst was a registered voter and may have been the first American woman to cast a ballot. She lived out the rest of her life raising cattle and chickens until her death in 1879. It was then that her true identity was revealed, much to the surprise of her friends.
4. Calamity Jane
Born Martha Jane Canary in Missouri around 1856, Calamity Jane was a sharpshooter by the time she was a young woman. She received her nickname, Calamity Jane, when she rescued an army captain in South Dakota after their camp was attacked by Native Americans. Jane was said to be a whiskey-drinking, "don't-mess-with-me" kind of gal. She is reported to have saved the lives of six stagecoach passengers in 1876 when they were attacked by Native Americans, and she joined Buffalo Bill's show in the mid-1890s. Though she married a man named Burk at age 33, when Jane died in 1903, she asked to be buried next to Wild Bill Hickock. Rumor has it that Hickock was the only man she ever loved.
5. Josephine Sarah Marcus
A smolderingly good-looking actor born in 1861, Marcus came to Tombstone, Arizona, while touring with a theater group performing Gilbert & Sullivan's HMS Pinafore. She stuck around to marry sheriff John Behan, but when Wyatt Earp showed up, her marriage went cold, and she and Earp reportedly fell in love. This young lady was supposedly the reason behind the famous gunfight at the OK Corral -- a 30-second flurry of gunfire involving Wild West superstars Doc Holliday, the Clayton Brothers, and the Earps. She passed away in 1944 and claimed until her dying day that Wyatt Earp was her one and only true love.
6. Laura Bullion
More commonly referred to as "Rose of the Wild Bunch," this outlaw was born around 1876 in Knickerbocker, Texas, and learned the outlaw trade by observing her bank-robbing father. Eventually hooking up with Butch Cassidy and his Wild Bunch, Bullion fenced money for the group and became romantically involved with several members. Most of those men died by the gun, but "The Thorny Rose" gave up her life of crime after serving time in prison and died a respectable seamstress in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1961.
More renowned women of the Wild West on the next page.
