History is often a mystery. It isn’t always a straightforward ordeal. One can almost describe it like a collection of puzzles. Some of the puzzles have all the pieces, and are packaged in a nice little box. Other puzzles appear as if a toddler found the collection and decided to do what they do best with puzzles; make a mess. In the aftermath, what we have then are some puzzles that are missing pieces, some that have extra pieces that don’t seem to fit anywhere, and some where the pieces have been mangled and destroyed.
It gets a bit more complicated though. We have to imagine that these puzzles all go together as well. They all combine to show a larger picture. Now, portions of that picture can be pretty clear, as that section of the puzzle had all of its pieces. But other portions have pieces missing, or at times, pieces switched around. Other portions are just black holes, where maybe a guess can be made, but it’s iffy at best.
Aa a historian, one of the things we do to try to make sense of all of this mess is to rely on probability. All historical research relies on probability. At times, the level of probability reaches close to 100%, and we can safely say that those events are historically accurate. There is a chance that new information will come to light that will switch all of that, but we can still be quite sure of the reliability of the data.
Many times though, the probability is much less. We can give the most likely explanation of the data, and build the history out of that, but we also have to realize that new material can always be found. And there will always be information that we are simply lacking, like personal insight from those individuals who were involved.
That doesn’t mean that history is inaccurate, or that we should doubt actual historical research. Because good historians bring a number of tools to the table that can help better determine the probability of a historical piece of information. By doing so, they can lay out some of those pieces of the puzzles and fit them where they most likely belong.
This is the process that I’ve been working with while dealing with Poker Alice. If we were to describe her history as a puzzle, it would have been one of those the toddler got to and had a bit too much fun with. To make matters worse, in this case, it’s as if the toddler’s parents decided they would try to fix the mess, and create puzzle pieces themselves that they threw in with the others, while not telling anyone what they did. Which was then repeated time and time again.
The process then becomes a search for not only the right pieces, but also shifting through not only the incorrect pieces that belong elsewhere, but also tossing out all the pieces that were made up by others. And there are a lot of made up pieces in this puzzle.
Shedding the made up pieces often is quite easy, as often they have no sources to back them up. When it came to Poker Alice, a lot of these pieces also contradicted other pieces, and a mass cleaning could be done all at once since all of the information wasn’t credible.
The more difficult part is shifting through authentic pieces, and trying to determine if they belong to the right puzzle or not. In order to do this, a broader look at the surrounding puzzles, the surrounding history, is needed. One has to try to understand a variety of factors, and what could cause those factors in order to help determine where, or if, the pieces fit.
Now, this is part of the process that one has to come back to time and time again, as new possible pieces are found. If those pieces are a match, then the picture gets a little bit larger, and at times, this leads to going back to pieces that were dismissed as their place in the puzzle can now be seen.
It also means at times, correcting information one thought was correct. When I first began writing about Poker Alice, I made the argument that her and Warren Tubbs were only married for a short time. But the picture that is being painted is one that is much more complicated, but also a lot more revealing.
My argument for Warren and Alice having been married only a short amount of time was based on a 1905 census record. On it, W.G. Tubbs, our Warren Grant Tubbs, is listed as being single. So, I assumed, that Warren and Alice could not have been married until after that, meaning their marriage was only a few years.
Having dived back into the Alice story just a little while back, I decided to see if I could locate a marriage announcement in the Sturgis Record. I searched through the five years of what I believed were the relevant newspapers, and found nothing. Well, nothing about the Tubbs wedding.
This in itself was not out of the ordinary. Searching the Sturgis Record, no announcement about Alice’s wedding to George Huckert could be found either, even though we know when that one occurred as we have the marriage certificate. While it was disappointing, it didn’t necessarily mean anything.
It did make me want to relocate the 1905 census record though. I had first come across it through Ancestry.com, and while it’s a great source, I’ve come to learn that it often contains errors when dealing with it’s transcription of handwritten information. Thus, I thought maybe the information they laid out may have been incorrect. Maybe the record wasn’t marked well and things got mixed up in interpretation.
The record that Ancestry had though did not contain the actual document, the actual census card. So instead, I dug through the digitized records until I found W.G. Tubbs. And it turns out, Ancestry was right here; he was in fact marked as single in 1905. Through this digging though, I came across another census record that I had previously dismissed, this one from 1900.
Listed under 185, there was a Warren G. Tubbs and an Alice Tubbs. The reason I had dismissed the census previously though was because it recorded them as living in Thermopolis, Wyoming. However, there is reason to believe that it may be correct.
The details between the two Tubbs records appear to coincide with each other. There also isn’t a good alternative candidate for the Tubbs listed in 1900. But why would the Tubbs move to Thermopolis? The answer to that question could lie in Warren’s death.
In Warren’s obituary, we are told that he had died from consumption, or what we know today as tuberculosis. In 1900, Thermopolis, with its access to hot springs, as well as multiple hotels to house patients, was a destination for many who suffered from tuberculosis. For the Tubbs to move there for a short period of time would make sense.
This would also fit into the rough timeline that can be constructed for both individuals. But it does cause some other issues.
The first issue is with the marriage itself. Many later sources would claim that Warren and Alice were married in the 1890s, generally in the first half of that decade. This census puts their marriage in 1896, which does give credence to a longer marriage as if often assumed. But it also suggests that the marriage was most likely rocky.
Looking through newspapers from the 1890s, what is clear about Alice is that she was often in trouble with the law, and had gained a poor reputation because of that. The crime most often cited was theft. Interestingly, she is never referred to as Alice Tubbs in any of those articles, but instead is either referred to as simply Poker Alice or as Alice Cummings who is known as Poker Alice.
There are a few possible reasons for this if Warren and Alice were truly married. The first being that the newspapers knew her as Alice Cummings, and thus kept reporting it as such. No wedding between Warren and Alice seems to have been announced, so it wouldn’t have been out of the question for newspapers to just continue reporting stories about her with the name they knew.
The second possibility is that there was another woman in Deadwood, around that time, that was also known as Poker Alice. There are records of a lady, an Alice Cummings, who is attached to a George Cummings, that lived in Rapid City at the time. It is doubtful that this Alice is the one in question though, as Alice and George appear to have been married, and eventually moved out of South Dakota.
Most likely, our Poker Alice was in fact known as Alice Cummings when she first came to South Dakota. That she had an alias is not a big surprise considering that she had changed her first name from Eva to Alice. That she was a thief fits with later recollections about her, and how she got her moniker Poker, as she poked her nose where it didn’t belong.
The bigger issue though is the 1905 census, which list Warren as single. Did the couple have a temporary split? Was it simply a mistake on the census record, which were aplenty? It’s one of those questions we may just never figure out. Locating a census record for Alice would help shine some light on this topic, but from the census of 1900 until the time of Warren’s death, Alice seems to have vanished from the record.
But there is always the chance something will pop up, and until then, I’ll continue to search.