Free Image Friday

So I mentioned cowgirls a few times in the last two weeks. Cowgirls on the brain! Like most people I create around certain themes. The last month or two- I was going back to Paris. This month I want rust and cowgirls. After doing some reading and talking with others- not to mention looking at new products that are coming out. I do believe the next big theme or fad we are moving in is going to be Metal/Rust and transparencies. I see increase in metallic products and goodies, metal letters & Numbers, More metal and soldering products coming out... Anyone agree or disagree? Either way its what I love. So I'm happy to see it. I got my metal tape out all weekend. Been cutting metal,got my patina ready to go, etc.... So here are the images for Free Image Friday. What could it be? Cowgirls! You guessed it! More coming as well. So here are a good few to start us out. Also a small story on each. Nothin tougher than a good cowgirl!
Especially old Pearl Hart! If you don't know her story-its a grand one. If you do a "google" search- the stories change as often as we put on shoes. The one thing we know- she was tough.


In the early 1900s- Mabel DeLong Strickland ‘"The Lovely Lady of Rodeo"- said she looked more like a ‘Follies beauty’ than a champion cowgirl.


May Lillie-Wife of Gordon William Lillie (who became famous as Pawnee Bill).
May traveled the country as the “Champion Girl Horseback Shot of the West.” A sharpshooter and expert “lady” rider. She was one of the first women to perform as an equestrian and shooter in American Wild West Shows. While on tour in 1907, May gave a speech to women in Chicago, she said: “Let any normally healthy woman who is ordinarily strong screw up her courage and tackle a bucking bronco, and she will find the most fascinating pastime in the field of feminine athletic endeavor. There is nothing to compare, to increase the joy of living, and once accomplished, she’ll have more real fun than any pink tea or theater party or ballroom ever yielded.”



Pearl Hart-She was born in Lindsay, Ontario, Canada, of French descent. As a youngster, Pearl was attracted to older men, and she had a number of relationships with alcoholics and other men of infamous status. After attending boarding school, she met a man at the age of sixteen and became impregnated. She endured abuse by this man and returned to her mother's home with her new baby.
By 1893, she arrived at Chicago, Illinois, where she saw Annie Oakley perform at a card show. This would turn out to be a life changing experience for Pearl, as she became inspired by Oakley. She also attended the World's Fair women's pavilion and listened to speeches by Julia Ward Howe, among others.
Inspired by the experience of seeing women demonstrating some social power, she boarded a train to Trinidad, Colorado. In Trinidad, she became a popular saloon singer. It was rumored by the press that she practiced prostitution as a way to make a living while in Trinidad, but it has been argued that the press spread such rumors to embellish her legend; nevertheless, Pearl never denied nor admitted to being a prostitute; she even went as far as declaring to Cosmopolitan magazine that she was "21, good looking, and ready for anything that might come".
Reunited in Phoenix, Arizona with her husband, Pearl endured more physical punishment by him and became impregnated for the second time. After leaving him and sending her children to her mother's home in Ohio, Pearl settled in Globe, Arizona, a city east of Phoenix. She met the equally infamous Joe Boot there.
Joe Boot had long been planning to rob a train, and Pearl felt hard pressed by the fact that her mother was sick, and her children's future was bleak at the time. After much planning, the heist finally took place, on May 30, 1899. Hart and Boot held three men at gun point, stealing 430 dollars and a revolver.
Pearl Hart became an instant celebrity after the robbery. Her name was featured on the covers of American newspapers nationwide, and she was believed to be one of the few female bandits active in Arizona at the time. She landed in the now famed Florence jail, a place that has since also been connected with controversies concerning other inmates' deaths and other legal matters.
Pearl was also a crossdresser. After the beatings she took from her husband, she took to dress like a man, probably figuring that this would serve her as a way of enforcing upon herself a look of strength, and to send other cowboys a message of power. She was a chronic marijuana user.
On June 4 she and Boot were arrested outside of Benson, Arizona. After her stay at the Florence jail, she would be transferred to a jail in Tucson, from where she became an advocate of women's rights and, later on, she escaped. Josephine Brawley Hughes, another women's rights advocate, became a supporter of Pearl, through her columns at "The Arizona Daily Star".
Pearl Hart had been a contributor to Cosmopolitan for a long time before her escape from the Tucson jail; while passing through Deming, New Mexico, she was recognized by police officer George Scarborough, an avid reader of Cosmopolitan, who proceeded to arrest her.
Pearl Hart ultimately received a sentence of five years in jail, despite trying to convince the jury that she was temporarily insane during the robbery because of a supposed desire to see her mother and children and because of her mother's sickness. She was sent to a jail in Yuma.
While at Yuma, she also became addicted to morphine and became fodder of the tabloid newspapers of the day. This led Paul Hull, an editor in chief of another leading Arizona newspaper of the time, to feel sympathy for her and to plead with these type of newspapers to leave her alone.
After spending the five years in the Yuma jail, she lived a quieter and much more private life. She married a rancher and became a dedicated wife for the last 50 years of her life. They settled in Dripping Springs, Arizona, where she used the name Pearl Bywater. It was in 1940 that newspaper writer Clara Wooly accidentally discovered that "Pearl Bywater" was actually Pearl Hart. Wooly was conducting a census when she made her discovery.

Pearl Hart died in 1956, after spending most of her life as a free citizen gardening and writing in a diary.

This Pearl Hart description was taken from a description on Wikipedia