These Are The Wild West's Most Notorious Female Outlaws

The American frontier of the late 1800s is called the Wild West for a reason. Shortly after the Civil War until nearly the turn of the century, men and women flocked to the large swathes of untamed land west of the Mississippi in pursuit of freedom and fortune, not necessarily law and order. In the many rough-hewn towns that cropped up around gold claims, silver seams, and oil wells — think Deadwood, Dodge City, Cripple Creek, Tombstone — it wasn't hard to find a card game or a drink or a...

The women of the Wild West might have pioneered suffrage laws, but they could also be lawless. In fact, they could be a lot of things. PBS describes …

Rose Dunn, the Rose of Cimarron, was an infamous outlaw in Oklahoma. Or was she?

"Girls will be boys and boys will be girls, it's a mixed up muddled up shook up world," sang The Kinks back in 1970. The tune, "Lola," shocked the world but the truth is, gender swapping has been going on for a long time—even in the long-ago Wild West, when men and women frequently donned each other's clothing. Sometimes it was a matter of convenience, like when women began "wearing clothes similar to" those worn by the menfolk to make performing chores easier around the homestead. On the opposite side of the spectrum were men like James Powellson, "an alleged man" who favored hanging around the demimonde of Sacramento, California in "lavender colored pantaloons" and other fancy-man garb during the 1880's...

Many of us love tales of the Wild West, full of rollicking adventure, dramatic landscapes, and colorful characters. Yet, the truth of life in this place and time was rarely easy for the people who actually had to live there. Things like medical care or law enforcement could be hard to find in the dispersed landscape of the American frontier...