According to his own account, Alice Ivers was born in Devonshire, England, on February 17, 1851, to a conservative school teacher 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 math) Alice caught the attention of most eligible bachelors. But it was Frank Duffield, a mining engineer, who won her hand in marriage.
After getting married, Alice and Frank settled in Lake City in 1875. Frank had a passion for 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. When Duffield was killed in a mine explosion, her Alice took over the tables, where she earned the name “Poker Alice”.
After starting out 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 its heyday in the late 1870s. It was while dealing faro that a player named Marion Speer saw her eliminate a prominent player named Jack Hardesty:
“It was the best lighthouse game I’ve ever seen. The game rocked 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” .
In the early ’80s, Poker Alice strutted around Silver City, New Mexico, and promptly broke the bank at a lighthouse table in less than four hours. Using her $6,000 earnings, she headed to New York to spend an entire week shopping for the best of the latest fashions, dining with the best of 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 the Oklahoma Territory, where she ran her games at Guthrie. She worked at the 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 the San Juan Mountains in Colorado, he raised the stakes and headed to Creede. There she worked a lighthouse 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 splurged on Jesse James in 1882. A few weeks after Poker Alice left to work for Ford, Edward O’Kelley walked into the Ford store room on the 8th. June 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 Ford’s abdomen, killing Ford instantly. So much for the “dirty little coward who shot Mr. Howard.”
After the glitter of the silver boom faded in Creede, Poker Alice moved on to Deadwood, which was still producing plenty of gold for the gambling dens the miners worked. She worked as a table clerk 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 showed her affection by piercing 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 blasted a gaping hole in the arm of the knife. 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 still managed to go 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 she spent on her ranch was one of the happiest days of her life and that she didn’t miss gambling, but that she did like the peace and quiet of the ranch..
As her children grew up, Alice tried to keep them away from gambling dens, 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 her husband’s full-time caretaker 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 at her side, led a team of mules and a cart 48 miles through howling winds and large drifts to Sturgis, the nearest town. She had to pawn her wedding ring to pay for Warren’s funeral, but later that day she won enough money at the poker tables to claim her ring.
After her husband’s death, Alice was once again forced to make a living doing what she did best: gambling. She hired George Huckert to take care of her ranch while she went back to the gaming tables. Huckert was captivated by Alice and proposed to her several times. Finally she relented and said, “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, Alice soon found herself a widow once again when Huckert died in 1913. It could be said that she was unlucky 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 extra 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 for a $2,000 loan to build an addition and went to Kansas City to recruit new girls. When I told the banker I’d pay off the loan in two years, he scratched his head for a minute and then let me have the money.” “In less than a year I was back at his office paying off the loan. He asked me how I was able to get the money so quickly. I took a couple of puffs on the end of my cigar and said, ‘Well, it’s this way. He knew that the Grand Army of 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 who come to town for a conference.'”
While running her underground 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 with her in a friendly manner. Upholding her original weird set of standards, Alice didn’t gamble or let her prostitutes work on Sundays. By 1913, Alice’s business was booming, in part due to the close training of the South Dakota National Guard. It was because of her Sunday closures 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 close the gate on Sunday morning, fending off a group of lecherous soldiers. After she pushed past the troops and locked the door, the men decided to retaliate by cutting the phone and power lines to the house. Finally, when they started to break the windows with stones, Alice got tired. She fired a single rifle shot at the men. Two soldiers were injured: a sergeant who later died in hospital and a private who would eventually recover from his injuries.
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 roadside bar was back in business quickly a week later.
The shooting left Fort Meade authorities unsettled, and police began a campaign to regularly arrest Alice on charges of running a brothel and bootlegging. She was continuously arrested well into her 60s. She each 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 that 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 she was warned that at her age her chances were not favourable, she was reported to have said: “Cut, I have faced great difficulties before.” On February 27, 1930, she defied great odds and lost. She was buried in 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