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| "I would rather play poker with five or six experts than to eat." - Poker Alice Ivers, gambler [http://www.nationalcowboymuseum.org] |
Poker Alice Ivers is one of the more colorful characters in
South Dakota’s history. Originally
hailing from England, she was married as a young woman in the mining camps of
Colorado. She learned to play poker by
watching her husband, Frank Duffield, and caught on quite quickly. After his death, she made a living by playing
and dealing poker. She had a fondness
for fashionable clothing, and the lovely lady attracted quite a few men to the
halls that she dealt in—either to test their gambling skills against her, or to
gaze upon the novelty of a modest but beautiful woman working in a saloon.
After moving to the Black Hills area, she married Warren G.
Tubbs, and card games were few and far between as she helped him ranch and raise
their 7 children. It was surely hard
work, but she remembered those years fondly.
When her second husband died, however, she returned to gambling for her
living.
In her later years she owned her own saloon between Sturgis
and Fort Meade. “Poker’s Palace,” as it
was called, provided a place for gambling, drinking (during Prohibition, no
less) and prostitution. These were the
years that Katherine Soldat talked about when Gene Van Alstyne interviewed her
for the South Dakota Oral History Center.
Katherine Soldat was the first woman mayor in South Dakota (for the town
of Sturgis), and was a close friend to Poker Alice up until her death. She spoke very warmly of her, assuring her
interviewer that Alice was a good, kindhearted woman who often fed her and
anyone in need, took good care of “her girls,” and never gambled on a Sunday. Kindhearted or not, she often landed herself
in trouble with the law, and the recording that follows is Soldat’s account of
Poker Alice’s pardoning by the Governor of South Dakota when she had been
convicted of “running a house of ill-repute.”
- Jessica Neal, SDOHC Cataloger/Curator
Thank you for listening!
Contact us at sdohc@usd.edu with any questions or to hear the rest of Ms. Soldat's amazing story
Sources:
South Dakota Oral History Center [SDOHP 1247].
Thank you for this great historical post! I first started playing online poker but lately I really got into the history of the games and it's so interesting.. That made me look for poker groups in my area btw :)
ReplyDeleteThank you for preserving Sturgis history. I had heard my great-grandmother was friends with Poker Alice, but I had never been told this story.
ReplyDeleteAllison Creed
(Descendant of Kathrine Sarkis-Soldat)