Poker Alice – A Tough Bird
According to his own account, Alice Ivers was born in Devonshire, England, on February 17, 1851, to a conservative schoolteacher and his family. When she was still a child, her family immigrated to Virginia, where she attended an exclusive boarding school for young women until the family moved again after the silver rush to Leadville, Colorado. ace an attractive and refined young woman who was well educated (especially in mathematics) Alice caught the eye of most eligible bachelors. But it was Frank Duffield, a mining engineer, who won her hand in marriage.
After they were married, Alice and Frank settled in Lake City in 1875. Frank was fond of cards and spent much of his spare time in one of the many card rooms. The blue-eyed brunette used to accompany him instead of staying home alone. It didn’t take long for Alice to realize that she had a good head for counting cards and calculating probabilities. At first, she just watched the players. Before long, she joined the games and became an expert poker player and lighthouse player. When Duffield was killed in a mining explosion, her Alice took over the tables, where she earned the name “Poker Alice”.
After starting in Lake City, Alice began a tour of the other Colorado mining towns, dealing faro or poker in Alamosa, Central City, Georgetown, and then Leadville during her heyday in the late 1870s. It was while dealing faro that a player named Marion Speer saw her take out a prominent player named Jack Hardesty:
“It was the best game of faro I’ve ever seen. The game oscillated back and forth with Alice always taking the edge, sometimes ending just long enough for the player to eat a sandwich and wash it down with a kettle.”
Back in the early ’80s, Poker Alice strutted around Silver City, New Mexico, quickly breaking the bank at a faro table in less than four hours. Using her $6,000 earnings, she headed to New York to spend an entire week shopping for the latest fashions, dining with the best restraints, going to the theater, and generally indulging herself. When the money ran out, she returned to the cattle towns of Kansas and then to Oklahoma Territory, where she ran her games at Guthrie. She worked at Blue Bell Saloon, Bill Tilghman’s Turf Exchange, and Reaves Brothers Casino.
In 1891, Poker Alice moved its operations to Arizona dealing cards at Midway, El Moro, and Blue Goose in Clifton. Then, when silver miners flocked to Colorado’s San Juan Mountains, he raised the stakes and turned to Creede. There she worked a faro desk six days a week (she never worked on Sundays) at Ford’s Exchange, a saloon and dance hall. The owner, Bob Ford, was none other than the man who had vandalized Jesse James in 1882. A few weeks after Poker Alice left to work for Ford, Edward O’Kelley walked into the hall of Ford’s shop on June 8, 1892 with a 10-gauge shotgun. According to witnesses, Ford had his back turned. O’Kelley said, “Hello, Bob.” As Ford turned to see who he was, O’Kelley emptied both barrels into his abdomen, killing Ford instantly. So much for the “dirty little coward who shot Mr. Howard.”
After the luster of the silver boom faded in Creede, Poker Alice moved to Deadwood, which still produced plenty of gold for the gambling dens the miners ran. She worked as a table salesperson at a saloon owned by a wealthy gambler known as “Bedrock Tom”. Another dealer who worked there was Warren G. Tubbs, a house painter by trade but a dealer by necessity. Whatever the reason, the two struck up a friendship that eventually blossomed into a true romance. Poker Alice demonstrated her affection by punching a drunken miner who was trying to disembowel Warren with a long-bladed knife. The miner had backed the dealer against a wall and was about to make the fatal leap when his lover’s .38 tore a gaping hole in the knife arm. A few weeks later, Warren proposed to her and a new life as a chicken farmer.
Poker Alice accepted his offer and after a church wedding, the newlyweds bought a nearby chicken farm and settled in to raise a family. Over the course of the next three decades, they raised chickens and had seven children (four boys and three girls). Despite the responsibility of running a farm and raising children, Alice managed to get out and play poker a few nights a week. During this time, it is said that she was able to win up to $6,000 gambling on a good night, a small fortune at the time. Alice later said that the time spent on her ranch was one of the happiest days of her life and that she did not miss gambling, but that she liked the peace and quiet of the ranch..
As her children grew up, Alice tried to keep them away from the gambling houses, and at one point, she and Warren decided to live on a ranch northeast of Sturgis on the Moreau River. The move came shortly after Warren contracted tuberculosis and Alice planned to nurse him back to health. Unfortunately, this was not the case; Alice became the full-time caretaker for her husband, and she left the gambling lifestyle behind until he died in her arms of pneumonia in 1910 during a winter snowstorm. Alice, with the frozen corpse of her husband beside her, led a team of mules and wagon 48 miles through howling winds and great snowdrifts to Sturgis, the nearest town. She had to pawn her wedding ring to pay for Warren’s burial, but that same day she won enough money at the poker tables to claim the ring for her.
After the death of her husband, Alice was once again forced to earn a living at what she did best: gambling. She hired George Huckert to take care of her ranch while she went back to the gaming tables. Huckert became captivated by Alice and proposed to her several times. Finally, she relented, saying, “I owed him a lot in back wages; I thought it would be cheaper to marry him than to pay him. So I did.” However, she Alice soon found herself a widow once more when Huckert died in 1913. She was arguably out of luck when it came to her husbands.
A few years before Huckert died, Alice had bought an old house on Bear Butte Creek, near the Fort Mead military post, and opened a brothel. This resulted in perhaps the most repeated story about Poker Alice. The house was small and needed additional rooms and “fresh girls” to encourage business, so Alice went to a bank for a $2,000 loan. As the story goes, she was quoted as saying:
“I went to the bank to ask for a $2,000 loan to build an addition and go to Kansas City to look for new girls. When I told the banker that I would pay off the loan in two years, he scratched his head for a minute and then left me the money. In less than a year he was back in his office paying off the loan. He asked me how I got the money so quickly. I took a couple of bites from the end of my cigar and said, ‘Well, that’s it. I knew about The Great Army. The Republic had a camp here in Sturgis. And I knew the Elks state convention would be here, too. But I forgot about all those Methodist preachers coming into town for a conference.'”
While running her clandestine brothel, Alice still made routine trips to Deadwood to play poker with old friends. She usually played poker in a khaki skirt, a man’s shirt, and a campaign hat. Welcome at any table, she preferred to play with people she knew, saying that others would not accept losing to her in a friendly way. Upholding her original strange set of standards, Alice didn’t gamble or let her prostitutes work on Sundays. By 1913, Alice’s business was flourishing, in part due to the close training of the South Dakota National Guard. It was because of her Sunday closings that she killed a soldier.
According to accounts of the day, she had been doing land office business on a Saturday night and tried to lock the door on Sunday morning, repelling a group of lecherous soldiers. After she pushed the troops away and locked the door, the men decided to retaliate by cutting the phone and power lines to the house. Finally, when they began to break the windows with rocks, Alice got fed up. She fired a single rifle shot at the men. Two soldiers were wounded: a sergeant who later died in hospital, and a private who would eventually recover from his wounds.
Sturgis police arrived at the scene and took Alice and her daughters into custody. Luckily, the judge was supposedly a client of Alice’s bagnio and ruled favorably on them. Although the identity of the shooter remains unclear, the charges of shooting Alice were dismissed as self-defense. However, she was convicted of keeping a messy house and the girls were charged with prostitution. Alice paid the fines and her roadhouse was up and running quickly a week later.
The shooting left authorities in Fort Meade uneasy, and police began a campaign to regularly arrest Alice on charges of running a house of prostitution and bootlegging. She was continually arrested well into her 60s. She every time she paid her fines and then carried on as usual until she was sentenced, at age 75, to a state penitentiary for repeated convictions for being a lady. South Dakota Governor Bulow immediately pardoned her in 1928, knowing he could not send the infamous white-haired old woman to prison.
Two years later, Alice became seriously ill and, after a medical examination, was told that her gallbladder would have to be removed. When warned that, at her age, her chances were not favourable, she was reported to have said, “Cut, I’ve faced great difficulties before.” On February 27, 1930, she defied the great odds and lost. She was buried in the Sturgis Catholic Cemetery, South Dakota.
In her lifetime, she buried three husbands, won over a quarter of a million dollars gambling, carried a .38 pistol, owned a brothel, bootlegged during prohibition, killed a man, and was convicted of a felon at age 75.
Yes sir, you could say that Poker Alice was a tough bird.
“Praise the Lord and place your bets and I’ll take your money with no regrets!”
alice poker