Alice Powers ~ Part One

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I have always been curious about what life would have been like for me in the American West, and what I would have done with my life in those times. School teacher perhaps or more like a Nelly Bly traveling all over and writing about my adventures. Here is the bio of an interesting person from those times: Alice Ivers Duffield Tubbs Huckert was a famous poker player in the American West of the late 1800s. Born in Devon, England in 1851 her family moved first to Virginia where she went to a boarding school. Then her father moved them to Leadville, Colorado during the silver rush. She married a mining engineer named Frank Duffield at the age of twenty. She followed him to the gambling halls which were quite popular in the mining camps of that time. At first, she just watched but was a pretty quick learner and became good at poker and faro. After his death in an explosion, she was left with no means of support for herself. She could have gotten a teaching job but there was no school. So she became a dealer and player of poker and faro. Traveling from camp to camp she soon had the nickname "Poker Alice" and was quite the rarity in the gambling rooms of the mining camps. She was often seen with a black cigar in her mouth and she carried a .38 revolver. She was always seen as a challenge and so she was always excepted in the gambling halls. She won over $6,000 when she left Colorado and went to Silver City, New Mexico. She then returned to Creede Colorado and took a job in the saloon owned by Bob Ford who had earlier killed Jesse James.