September 1998
September 1998
POKER ALICE 1851-1930
Poker Alice was the West's premier lady gambler for several decades. She stated "I would rather play poker with five or six experts than to eat." Alice Ivers was born in Sudbury, England. The only daughter of a schoolmaster, she was educated at a female seminary and instilled with strong middle-class values. The family eventually moved to Colorado, where Alice married mining engineer Frank Duffield. When he spent evenings at a card table, Alice refused to stay home. She began to sit in on games while Frank was at work, and quickly demonstrated an affinity for poker. When Frank was killed in a dynamite explosion, she turned to the poker tables for a living, thus she got the name Poker Alice.
Alice moved from one promising western community to another over the years. Like most professional gamblers, Alice went heeled, packing a .38 on a .45 frame. While dealing cards in Deadwood, South Dakota, the dealer at the next table was W. G. Tubbs, and one night a drunken miner pulled a knife on him. Alice deftly palmed her .38 and pumped a slug into the miner's arm, triggering a romance between Tubbs and herself. Alice Ivers Duffield married Tubbs in 1907, and the couple abandoned the tables for a homestead north of Deadwood.
In 1910, Tubbs contracted pneumonia and died in Alice's arms during a blizzard. Alice drove his frozen corpse in a sled 48 miles to Sturgis, where she had to pawn her wedding ring to get the $25 to pay for her husband's burial. She then took a table in a gambling hall and resumed her old profession.
While she gambled in Sturgis, she hired George Huckert to tend her sheep. He continued to propose to her, and when his back wages totaled $1,008, she married him, saying, "It would be cheaper to marry him than pay him off. Alice spent her last years quietly in a Sturgis house that today is open to tourists. She passed away February 27, 1930 and was buried in the Sturgis cemetery. Female gamblers were not rare in the Old West, but the queen of them all was cigar-smoking, gun-totin' Poker Alice!"
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