When I first got into the Poker Alice story, I figured it was an easy way to deep my toes into local history. I’ve researched and written a lot about other women of the old west, and expected some difficulties, but not what I found with Alice.
Part of the issue is the nature of the time period. Much of what we know about people like Alice comes to us through sensationalist media. Some of this comes through the rise of dime store novels, which were coming out during a time when literacy rates were taking off in the United States. This was coupled with a growing public interest in high action stories, which the West was full of.
This in turn led a variety of western newspapers to take up the same mindset. Publishing sensationalism increased readership, and kept people coming back for me. It was a profitable endeavor for many newspapers.
Because there was a financial incentive to promote the sensational, it led these figures from the old west to be sought out, and to have their “lives” recorded. Fact checking really was not of the utmost importance, and thus many of these individuals were able to create their own mythos.
While creating these mythos, people like Alice were able to rewrite history without any real push back. That “history” would then be repeated, built on, and then become accepted legend. This is a process that continues to happen even today. A great example of that is with the “history” of the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, which changes depending on the site, or person you’re talking to.
When attempting to capture the correct history, this causes a lot of issues. Instead of straight forward work, where one can lean on other previous historians to help fill in the information, you’re left largely starting over. This has been the case with Alice.
Things get a bit more complicated with Alice though. Alice is a rather famous local figure. Because of that, a great deal has been written about her, and disseminated. The task then isn’t to just figure out her history, but to correct the massive amount of misinformation out there, so that the real Alice can shine through.
So attempting to write a history of Alice becomes a matter of scrubbing through layers of dirt until the foundation can finally be seen. And the fact is, we will never get the full picture. There will always be some muck burying who the real Alice was. But it’s a search worth doing.
And it’s a search worth doing over and over again, as the history of Sturgis and the Black Hills is often covered under these layers of dirt. But with enough work, I think we can get a more thorough picture of our local history, and hopefully it can shine through the misinformation out there.
If you want to help with that process, I’ve set up a Patreon account, where you can support this project on a monthly basis with as little as a dollar. Or if it’s just not in the cards to financially support the project, just sharing our page, and what we are doing is great help as well. https://www.patreon.com/historicalsturgis