Notorious Canadian Stage-coach Bandit

She was born Lillie Naomi Davy in 1871 in the village of Lindsay, Ontario, set among the lakes, woods, and farmland of the Kawartha Highlands. She was the daughter of Albert Davy, a roughneck, farmhand, and fisherman. Lillie was the third-eldest of nine children. Despite the fact that her mother, Anna Davy (née Duval) was a kind and caring woman, the Davy family was very troubled. Albert Davy was an extremely abusive husband. As Lillie often declared, “My father is a worthless wretch.” When Lillie was a small child, Albert Davy was arrested several times in Lindsay for drunk and disorderly conduct. But that was only the start. 

On a summer day in 1877, when Lillie was six, Albert spotted a fourteen-year-old girl, Alice Timms, picking wild berries in an isolated field outside of Lindsay. Armed with a large knife, he rushed out of the nearby woods, seized Alice, and started tearing off her clothes. She fought back, screaming for help, but Davy overpowered the girl. Then, in a fortunate turn of events, Alice’s large pet dog, which had been roaming the woods, suddenly appeared at a run. The animal lunged forward and tore into Albert Davy, ripping gashes into the assailant’s flesh. Davy managed to free himself and flee to safety. Alice and her father promptly reported the crime to the Lindsay police, who identified Albert Davy and placed him under arrest. He was convicted and sentenced to a lenient one year in the Toronto Central Prison plus a flogging of twelve lashes. After Albert’s release from prison his wife, Anna, like so many abused women before and after, took him back. Albert was now disgraced in Lindsay, so he moved his family 150 kilometres southeast to Belleville, on the shore of Lake Ontario, where they lived in poverty. 

Because they often did not have enough to eat, the Davy children became sneak thieves. Despite their impoverished upbringing and limited education, all of them were intelligent and creative, and they loved books, music, and poetry. In 1882 Lillie, aged eleven, and her older brother Willie, thirteen, got into their first serious trouble. The pair stole a cow from a farmer near Belleville, then drove it into town and sold it for nine dollars to a hotel owner. Then Lillie and Willie crept into the hotel stable, stole the cow again, and resold it for thirty dollars. Local police soon arrested the siblings. A judge released Lillie to her parents but sent Willie to the Ontario Reformatory for Boys in Penetanguishene for three years. Much more trouble lay in store for the Davy family. Albert’s drunken and abusive behaviour continued unabated. Given his brutality and his attack on Alice Timms, it is possible that he molested Lillie and her sisters. 

In 1884 Albert demanded that Anna agree to sell a small house they had purchased in Orillia on the shore of Lake Simcoe, 150 kilometres north of Toronto. Anna, pregnant with their ninth child and fearing homelessness, refused to sign over her dower rights. Her enraged husband threatened to kill her, so Anna and the children fled to the home of a friend in Campbellford, Ontario, one hundred kilometres east of Lillie’s birthplace of Lindsay. They soon got permission to move into a rundown shack on the Trent River north of town. Rumours that the thirteen-year-old Lillie and her seventeen-year-old sister Saphronia were working as prostitutes to make ends meet made the penniless girls vulnerable to sexual aggression by men who considered them an easy target. Gossip began to spread that the wood shanty was a brothel. 

One night that fall, four young farmers, drinking heavily, approached the Davy shack. They were William Keating, Narcisse Fauchier, Alexander Armour, and Philip Hearn. Unknown to them, the eldest Davy siblings — Willie, Saphronia, and Lillie — were not home. “I heard a noise outside,” Anna later said in court. “I raised up the curtain and looked out. I saw four men outside, two of them came up to the door. One of them shoved the door open. The two went in. I tried to get out [and] got past them.” She rushed to a neighbour for help, and he walked to the shanty and scared away the four ruffians. When the neighbour went back home, the men returned and forced open the door. Ignoring the fact that Anna was five months pregnant, and that young children were present, the four sexually assaulted her.

Several of the children, including eleven-year-old Katy, raced out of the shack and ran to the neighbour’s home for help. The neighbour, armed only with a large rock, burst into the shack. Together, he and Anna fought off the attackers. The four ruffians were getting the worst of it when one cried out, “Skin out of this!” With that, they all fled into the blackness. 

When daylight came, Anna and her kindly neighbour reported the attack to the justice of the peace in Campbellford. The assailants were arrested and brought to trial, where a jury promptly found them guilty. 

The judge ordered that each serve ten years at hard labour in the Kingston Penitentiary. Then Anna, with eight children to feed and one more coming, and to avoid starvation, returned to her abusive husband in Orillia. Lillie and her sister Katy had no intention of doing the same. 

Though Lillie was still only thirteen and Katy eleven, they cut off their hair, put on their brothers’ clothing, and fled south to Lake Ontario. There they crept onto a lake steamer and stole a ride to Buffalo, New York. Posing as boys, they got jobs working in a factory. Two months later, Anna managed to find the girls and bring them home. For Lillie Davy, that pattern of dressing like a man and fleeing brutality would happen again and again.

A year later, Albert and Anna Davy moved with their children to Rochester, New York. They found it a modern, industrial city of one hundred thousand inhabitants, with numerous businesses and railroads — and even more numerous opportunities for trouble. In Rochester, Lillie loved to dress as a boy and hobnob with young ruffians and criminals. At the same time she had numerous boyfriends, one of them a daring burglar to whom she was briefly married. When another of her boyfriends was shot dead during a burglary, sixteen-year-old Lillie went west, looking for a past sweetheart who had jilted her. She was accompanied by Katy, her best friend. The sisters dressed as boys for disguise and for self-protection, as they stole rides on westbound freight trains. After many escapades, Lillie and Katy were arrested in Chicago. A newspaperman for the Chicago Inter Ocean described Lillie as “a pretty, big-blue-eyed lassie” who appeared older than her sixteen years. 

The pair escaped from the upper storey of a woman’s jail in Chicago by climbing down a rope they made from bedsheets. The police soon recaptured the girls and returned them to Rochester. Before long Lillie and her older sister Saphronia were arrested on prostitution-related charges and locked up in the State Industrial School in Rochester, a home for “vagrant and destitute children.” 

Lillie was released early in 1888. Instead of reforming, she associated with a young Rochester thief named Thomas O’Hara. The two stole a ride on a freight train to Hamilton, Ontario. Lillie later told a newspaperman from the Hamilton Spectator that in Rochester “five or six boys got her ‘full’ [drunk], had her hair cut off, dressed her up in boy’s clothes, and suggested that they would all go to Chicago.” Instead, she and O’Hara jumped off the train in Hamilton. O’Hara was soon arrested for burglary, and two police officers picked up Lillie for dressing in men’s clothing. In that era, almost all communities had laws against cross-dressing.

Lillie, who could easily alternate between literate speech and street slang, told the Hamilton Spectator, “A policeman came up on each side of me, and one said, ‘My girl, you had better com wid me.’ I says, ‘What do you want wid me? I ain’t no girl.’ Den they arrested me.’” A judge in Hamilton convicted Lillie of vagrancy. Due to her prior record, he sentenced her to a punitive twenty-three-month term in the Andrew Mercer Reformatory for Women in Toronto. A newspaperman from the Whitby (Ontario) Chronicle reported: “Her appearance in the police court today caused considerable excitement, and a crowd assembled to see her taken away in the patrol wagon. She seemed to enjoy the sensation she was creating, and laughed and waved her hat as the wagon drove off.” 

Lillie Davy served her time in the Mercer Reformatory without incident and was released in the spring of 1890. She promptly joined her sister Katy, then sixteen, in Buffalo. Katy was running a small bordello situated above a saloon in The Hooks, Buffalo’s red-light district. One of the best known madams in Buffalo was Pearl Hart, and Lillie soon adopted that name as her alias. After several run-ins with the police, she and Katy left for Toledo, Ohio, where members of their mother’s family lived. There she met Dan Bandman, the black-sheep son of a prominent New York family. He eked out a precarious living playing piano in gambling houses and saloons. Lillie — now calling herself Pearl — later claimed that they married, but it was probably a common-law relationship, as there appears to be no record of such a marriage. 

Bandman, addicted to smoking opium, was abusive, just like Lillie’s father. “We lived together for three years, and I was happy and good, for I dearly loved the man whose name I bore,” she later told a writer for Cosmopolitan magazine. “I was happy for a time, but not for long. My husband began to abuse me, and presently he drove me from him.” She eventually fled west to Phoenix, in Arizona Territory. There, as Pearl Hart, she became a well-known prostitute in Block 41, the town’s red-light district. Dan Bandman followed her to Arizona. As Hart later explained to Cosmopolitan, “I came face to face with my husband on the street one afternoon. I was not then the innocent schoolgirl he had enticed from home, father, mother, family, and friends — far from it. I had been inured to the hardships of the world and knew much of its wickedness. Still, the old infatuation came back. I struggled against it. I knew if I went back to him I should be more unhappy than I was, but I lost the battle. I did go back.” 

Though Hart was no innocent schoolgirl when she met Bandman, he dragged her further from the straight and narrow by introducing her to opium and morphine. When his abuse began again, she left him for good. After several arrests and other escapades in Phoenix, she moved to the mining town of Globe and met another hard case who went by the name Joe Boot. 

After a failed attempt at mining, they turned to stage robbery. Hart later said that she came up with the idea so she could get enough money to return home to her mother. Whether or not that was true, journalists rushed to the Tucson jail — where she was imprisoned while awaiting trial — to interview her. Among them were a writer and photographer for Cosmopolitan magazine. “I don’t care what the world does with me,” she declared. “I’d do it all over again if I had the chance.” 

She related many tales of her misadventures but covered up her family history to protect her mother from public shame. She also insisted that Pearl Hart was her real name. Of her early years she would only say, “I was good-looking, desperate, discouraged, and ready for anything that might come. I do not care to dwell on this period of my life.” 

Cosmopolitan ran an extremely popular feature about Pearl Hart, which included photographs of her in men’s clothing, armed to the teeth. Two images showed her holding a pet wildcat, which she was allowed to keep in her quarters. When not basking in publicity, Hart befriended the jail trusty — an inmate who enjoyed special privileges and was allowed out of his cell to clean and to do odd jobs. He was serving a term for drunk-and-disorderly conduct, and she later boasted that he was in love with her. He broke her out of the Tucson jail, and they fled to New Mexico, where Hart found work in a brothel in Deming. 

At that time the most famous lawman in the Southwest was an El Paso, Texas, gunfighter named George Scarborough. Oddly enough, he was a reader of Cosmopolitan. He spotted Hart in Deming and recognized her from the magazine’s photographs. Scarborough kept watch on the bordello, and early one morning in October 1899 he barged into Hart’s room and found her and the trusty together. She unleashed a torrent of oaths, but Scarborough handcuffed both and brought them to Tucson. 

At her trial for stage robbery a month later, Hart charmed the all-male jury and pleaded for mercy. Despite conclusive evidence of her guilt, they acquitted her. The furious judge ordered Hart rearrested, and she was promptly tried and convicted on the separate but related offence of stealing a revolver from the stage driver. The judge sentenced her to five years in Arizona Territory’s notorious Yuma Territorial Prison. Ever defiant, she declared: “I shall not be tried under a law in which my sex had no voice in making.” 

Hart’s time in Yuma was controversial. At least one ex-convict claimed that she orchestrated an unsuccessful prison break. Others falsely claimed that another prisoner got her pregnant. But behind bars she was able to kick her morphine habit. Hart was pardoned by Arizona’s governor in 1902 due to overcrowding in the women’s quarters. She moved to Kansas City, Kansas, where she ran a cigar stand. There, she and her siblings, especially Katy Davy, repeatedly ran afoul of the law. 

Hart finally married Earl Meyers, a con man who pretended to be Indigenous and ran a travelling medicine show. They had a daughter, and Hart eventually left him. In the 1920s she and Katy settled in Los Angeles, where Hart lived with her daughter and son-in-law and helped to care for her grandchildren. Katy became a writer, actress, theatre producer, and Hollywood acting coach, and she even claimed to have performed in silent films. 

After a tumultuous life, Lillie Davy lived her final years in peaceful obscurity. No one but her siblings knew that she was Pearl Hart. She died quietly in her daughter’s Los Angeles home on June 10, 1935, aged sixty-four, and was buried in Rose Hills Memorial Park in Whittier, California, under her married name, Lillie Naomi Meyers. 

Over the years her true story was long lost, obscured by her own false stories intended to protect her family. As a result, fictioneers and mythmakers created spurious narratives about her life. 

But the real Pearl Hart was not just the most notorious female bandit of the Wild West. In an era when few women worked outside the home or controlled their own lives, she broke through gender barriers: She had sexual relations outside of marriage, dressed like a man, smoked cigars, and carried a gun. At the same time, her behaviour was highly self-destructive: She stole, robbed, drank heavily, worked as a prostitute, and used addictive drugs. Her life was in stark contrast to the norms of both yesterday and today. In the end, she was a Canadian-American original, a rebel, and a woman far ahead of her time.