Kitty Leroy at Deadwood’s Mint Saloon

 

 During her abbreviated life, Kitty Leroy (sometimes given as LeRoy) was by turns a dancer,  faro dealer, gambler, sharpshooter, and finally saloon owner.  Shown here, Kitty blazed a trail from Michigan to Texas to California to Deadwood, South Dakota, where she became proprietor of the Mint Gambling Saloon.  In her wake were five husbands, one of whom she shot and killed, another who shot and killed her. Women like Kitty Leroy make Western legends. 

With her drive and ambition, Kitty in another day, another time, might have been a nationally known American entertainer, perhaps with her shooting skills, another Annie Oakley.   Of her early life little is known.  She was born in 1850, but opinions differ on where.  My guess is Michigan where she first attracted attention as a 10-year-old performer in dance halls and saloons. There, as one writer has observed, “…She either picked up or augmented an innate ability to manipulate, along with gambling and weaponry skills that would serve her well for most of her life.”

Living in Bay City, Michigan, by 15 she was married and had a child,  Local lore says she wed because her husband was the only man in Bay City who would allow her to shoot apples off his head as she rode by on horseback.  Apparently finding family life too dull, Kitty soon abandoned her male target and infant son to head west to Dallas, Texas. 

Once again taking to the stage, she became a star attraction at Johnny Thompson’s Variety Theatre, a dancer know as “Kitty Leroy, Queen of the Hoofers.”  Easily bored, Kitty next tried her hand at gambling and became a faro dealer, said to have stepped to the tables well armed, sometimes dressed in cowboy attire, sometimes as a gypsy.

Always attractive to men, in Dallas she married a saloonkeeper. Soon bored in  Dallas, she was drawn to California and the two decamped for San Francisco hoping to make it big in there.  When that bubble burst, she was forced back to the gambling tables for money.  Kitty somehow shucked husband No. 2 and gained a Frisco reputation for promiscuous behavior.  When one panting suitor proved too ardent, she challenged him to a duel.  Unwilling to shoot a woman, the man refused to draw.  Kitty shot him anyway.  Then, apparently stricken with guilt, she called a minister and married him as he lay badly wounded.  He died shortly after.

"Wild Bill"

"Calamity Jane"

Now a widow and wanting to put San Francisco behind her, Kitty impetuously joined a wagon train traveling four states and 1,370 miles east to a new boom town, Deadwood, South Dakota.  In the caravan she met two of the West’s best known figures, “Wild Bill” Hickok and “Calamity Jane” Cannary.  All three had the same objective, shared by many in the wagon train:  Strike it rich as fast as possible.

Arriving in Deadwood in July 1876 after a long and arduous journey, Kitty was immediately entranced by a community bustling with energy and excitement.  Once Indian land, everything changed after Colonel George Armstrong Custer led an expedition into the Black Hills and in 1874 announced the discovery of gold at French Creek. A gold rush ensued as miners and entrepreneurs swept into the area. They created a new and untamed town they called Deadwood.  It quickly reached more than 5,000 residents; by 1876 the population was estimated at 25,000.  Deadwood was Kitty’s kind of town.

She went to work at the Gem Theater where she was an instant success as a performer.  Her beauty was legendary.  One contemporary wrote that: “Her brow was low, her brown hair thick and curly…[Her] teeth were like pearls set in corals.”  Gem Owner Al Swearengen was notorious for luring young women to hire on as waitresses and then forcing them into prostitution.  While Kitty seemingly escaped that fate she may have been complicit in grooming the Gem’s young women in their roles.  Within a few months she had earned sufficient money to open her own “watering hole.”  She called it Leroy’s Mint Gambling Saloon.

The Mint Saloon proved to be successful.  In addition to the booze available, Kitty provided gambling, entertainment and women, a combination that the prospectors and other fortune seekers found highly attractive.  I have been unable to find a picture from the Mint, but the interior of another Deadwood saloon probably mirrors much of what went on there.  Note the drinking men, the gambling tables, and above them another kind of entertainment waiting.

Kitty married a fourth time.  This time her husband was a German prospector who had made a rich gold strike.  His money may have helped stoke the Mint’s prosperity. When the prospector’s cash ran out, Kitty acted quickly.  She is reputed to have hit him over the head with a bottle before throwing him out of the house.  Knowing firsthand that Kitty owned seven revolvers, multiple Bowie knives and seldom if ever went unarmed, the German, once warned, wisely disappeared.  Kitty went back to the gambling tables, said at times to have raked in $8,000 in a single turn of the cards.

Sam Bass

Husband No. 4’s retreat apparently allowed Kitty to wed a fifth time.  On June 11, 1877, she married 35-year-old Samuel R. Curley, a Deadwood gambler and card shark. This time she had picked a husband besotted with her and a very jealous man.  Curley learned that Kitty had never divorced one or more of her earlier spouses and heard rumors of her having affairs with Hickok and  the notorious gunman, Sam Bass.  After a stormy confrontation with Kitty, he stormed out of the Mint Saloon and hied 400 miles to Denver.

Later moving to Cheyenne where he dealt faro in a saloon, Curley learned that Kitty had taken a new lover. He swore revenge on the couple and returned in a rage to Deadwood.  Although the lover refused to see him, Kitty agreed to meet Curley in her rooms upstairs at the Lone Star Saloon.  Curley was waiting for her, drew his revolver, and fired once. The bullet killed Kitty instantly.   He then turned the gun on himself.

The Black Hills Daily Times  of December 7, 1877, reported the scene.  Kitty, 27, lay on her back, her eyes closed, looking as if she were asleep.  Curley lay face down, a bullet in his skull and his Smith & Wesson pistol still in his hand.  “Suspended upon the wall, a pretty picture of Kitty, taken when the bloom and vigor of youth gazed down upon the tenements of clay, as if to enable the visitor to contrast a happy past with a most wretched present,” the newspaper reported. “The pool of blood rested upon the floor; blood stains were upon the door and walls…”

After a perfunctory funeral, the pair were buried side by side, husband and wife,  slayer and slain, in the same grave in Deadwood’s Ingleside Cemetery.  Their bodies later were moved to the more upscale Mount Moriah burying ground, shown above. Apparently to discourage curiosity seekers, their graves were left unmarked.  Upon assessment, Kitty’s estate amounted to $650.  Some of it went to pay  expenses and the rest to a previously unmentioned daughter named 

Kitty Donally.  

The editor of the Black Hills Daily had an intense personal interest in the Leroy-Curley doomed marriage.  After an onsite review of the tragedy, he waxed lyrical:  “Whatever may have been the vices and virtues of the ill-starred and ill-mated couple, we trust their spirits may find a happier camping ground than the hills and gulches of the Black Hills, and that tho’ infelicity reigned with them here, happiness may blossom in a fairer climate.” 

Notes:  There is a plethora of information on the Internet about the tumultuous life and untimely death of Kitty Leroy.  This post draws from at least five individual accounts.  Similarly the photos are from multiple online sources.  I have tried to bring together what seem to be the most salient facts about the life and death of this extraordinary woman.