Pistols, Petticoats & Poker: The Real Lottie Deno
by Jan Devereaux, High-Lonesome Books, Silver City, N.M., 2009, $25.
It is human nature to romanticize bygone times, to regard our forebears’ hardscrabble lives through the clouded pane of Old West myth. Few notions have persisted as long as that of the happy hooker, the saloon girl who, despite daily degradations, shines like a Silver Eagle on green felt. Print the legend, urges the heart when confronting the often-ugly truth.
Jan Devereaux sheds the white gloves in Pistols, Petticoats & Poker, a candid biography of Carlotta Thompkins (1844– 1934), aka Lottie Deno—poker-playing, trick-turning, gold-digging and, ultimately, social-climbing survivor of the Southwest frontier. Deno may have inspired the fictional Miss Kitty character of Gunsmoke fame, but her own life was no romantic fiction. No Lies or Alibis, promises the book jacket, and Devereaux launches straight into an unapologetic account of Deno’s mercenary youth as a cow town gambler and “disorderly house” doyenne.
“When Lottie Deno looked into a mirror during those days wasted in the Texas nightspots, she did not see an unsullied halo,” writes Devereaux. “The reflection did reveal a rather attractive young girl, but that image could not replicate her insatiable lust for dollars. Emptying a fellow’s pockets by one means or another was Lottie’s aspiration; it guaranteed survival.”
In this exactingly footnoted account, Devereaux follows Deno from San Antonio across West Texas as she entertains soldiers and hide-hunters, flouts the law, dodges gunfire and reportedly wins a few hands from Doc Holliday. The paper trail documents a licentious lifestyle, but it also records the moment at Fort Griffin in 1877 when Lottie began investing her hard-earned cash, charting a new course. “Many of the [working] girls were hopelessly mired in the quicksand of poverty,” writes Devereaux. “Deno had recalibrated her sights a great deal higher, aiming for much more than twilight years spent in squalor and shamelessness.”
Within a few years Lottie married Frank Thurmond, her onetime saloon boss, and “began keeping an orderly house” in Silver City, New Mexico Territory. Devereaux’s final chapters chart the Thurmonds’ relocation to Deming, Lottie’s gradual acceptance into polite society and her rebirth as Aunt Lottie, beloved grandmother to all—the exception, concludes Devereaux, as “many of Lottie’s former female friends and acquaintances would never find their way out of that sordid life.”
Originally published in the October 2009 issue of Wild West. To subscribe, click here.
