Page 13 - Winter 2012 magazine-1

Bedside Book of Bad Girls

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These books available at Elements Gift Store

If you are ready to meet a rowdy and bawdy group of women who are
despicable, likable, unlucky, colorful, or sad, then Michael Rutter’s Bedside

Book of Bad Girls: Outlaw Women of the American West is the perfect
reading choice for you.

Let’s begin with the despicable bad girls. Between them, fellow Kansans and

contemporaries Ma Steffleback and Kate Bender murdered about eighty
people (maybe more). Kate and her gang escaped capture, along with about
$5,000 in cash, gold, and other items stolen from their victims. Ma committed her crimes on visitors to her brothel.
Fortunately for her customers, Ma spent her last years in prison after one of her girls turned her in.

Moving on to a likable bad girl, we are introduced to Elizabeth Basset. The year 1877 found Elizabeth, her husband
Herb, and their two daughters settling in Green River, Wyoming. An early feminist, she ran their ranch while her
husband took care of their children and home. During the 1880s, large cattle companies started moving into the valley
that Elizabeth and her neighbors had homesteaded. In an effort to remove the smaller ranchers, they would steal any

cattle they found and mix them with their own. To retaliate, Elizabeth hired ranch hands to hustle back the stolen
cows. Even Butch Cassidy worked for her. When Elizabeth died at the age of 37, her daughters Josie and Ann took
up her cause.

Elizabeth Potts was unlucky enough to be the first woman executed by hanging in Nevada. Some historians believe
that Elizabeth might not have been the one to shoot and hide the body of Miles Faucet; but lawmen didn’t care for
Elizabeth’s overbearing personality and decided the crime was her idea. That’s what makes her unlucky.

The Rose of Cimarron, Belle Starr, Laura Bullion, Annie Rogers, Etta Place, Little Britches, and Cattle Annie are the
most colorful women in the book. Because of their alliances with famous outlaws, much of what has been written
about these women is fiction. Laura Bullion, Annie Rogers, and Etta Place were all involved with members of Butch

and Sundance’s Wild Bunch and lived exciting, adventure-filled lives as a result.

However, the story of sixteen year old teen’s Jennie Stevens (Little Britches) and Anna McDoulet (Cattle Annie), is
the strangest. The two girls so wanted to be members of the outlaw Doolin Gang, they did any job from cooking,

mending, and washing to serving as lookouts during robberies. They soon worked their way up to cattle rustling and
bootlegging whiskey. Luckily, they were arrested before they got themselves shot.

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