Wicked Women

Notorious, Mischievous, and Wayward Ladies from the Old West

Published by TwoDot
Distributed by Simon & Schuster
LIST PRICE $19.95

About The Book

This collection of short, action-filled stories of the Old West’s most egregiously badly behaved female outlaws, gamblers, soiled doves, and other wicked women by award-winning Western history author Chris Enss offers a glimpse into Western Women’s experience that's less sunbonnets and more six-shooters. During the late nineteenth century, while men were settling the new frontier and rushing off to the latest boom towns, women of easy virtue found wicked lives west of the Mississippi when they followed fortune hunters seeking gold and land in an unsettled territory. Prostitutes and female gamblers hoped to capitalize on the vices of the intrepid pioneers. Pulling together stories of ladies caught in the acts of mayhem, distraction, murder, and highway robbery, it will include famous names like Belle Starr and Big Nose Kate, as well as lesser known characters.

About The Author

Chris Enss is a New York Times best-selling author who has been writing about women of the Old West for more than thirty years. She has penned more than fifty published books on the subject. Her work has been honored with nine Will Rogers Medallion Awards, two Elmer Kelton Book Awards, an Oklahoma Center for the Book Award, three Foreword Review Magazine Book Awards, the Laura Downing Journalism Award, and a WILLA Award from Women Writing the West for Best Scholarly Nonfiction Book. Enss’s most recent works are The Widowed Ones: Beyond the Battle of the Little Bighorn, Along Came a Cowgirl: Daring and Iconic Cowgirls of Rodeos and Wild West Shows, Straight Lady: The Life and Times of Margaret Dumont “The Fifth Marx Brother,” and The Doctor Was A Woman: Stories of the First Female Physicians on the Frontier.

Product Details

  • Publisher: TwoDot (February 20, 2015)
  • Length: 224 pages
  • ISBN13: 9781493008018

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Raves and Reviews

Chris Enss has put together a specular collection of colorful, powerful, and debauched bad girls who romped, gambled, whored, robbed, and shot their way through life in America's old west. I can't begin to tell you how much I enjoyed reading this book. Complete with pictures, each woman's story is told with a startling, fresh, to-the-point prose. Mincing no words, the colorful life of each woman is brilliantly portrayed. What truly impressed me is the amount of research and digging the author had to do to uncover details and facts of the lives portrayed. Loved, loved, loved this book. It's one that I will always keep on my favorites bookshelf.

– History and Women

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