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Alice Ivers Duffield Tubbs Huckert (February 17, 1851 – February 27, 1930), better known as Poker Alice, Poker Alice Ivers or Poker Alice Tubbs, was an English poker player in the American West.

Her family moved from Devon, England, where she was born, to Virginia, United States, where she was reared and educated. As an adult, Ivers moved to Leadville, Colorado, where she met her first husband, Frank Duffield. He got Ivers interested in poker, but he was killed a few years after they married. Ivers made a name for herself by winning money from poker games in places like Silver City, New Mexico, and even working at a saloon in Creede, Colorado, that was owned by Bob Ford, the man who killed Jesse James.^[1]

Early life[edit]

'Poker' Alice Ivers was born in England, to Irish immigrants. Her family moved to Virginia when Alice was twelve. As a young woman, she went to boarding school in Virginia to become a refined lady. While in her late teens, her family moved to Leadville, a city in the then Colorado Territory.

Personal life[edit]

It was in Leadville that Alice met Frank Duffield, whom she married at a young age. Frank Duffield was a mining engineer who played poker in his spare time. After just a few years of marriage, Duffield was killed in an accident while resetting a dynamite charge in a Leadville mine.

Ivers was known for splurging her winnings, as when she won a lot of money in Silver City and spent it all in New York. After all of her big wins, she would travel to New York and spend her money on clothes. She was very keen on keeping up with the latest fashions and would buy dresses to wear to play poker, partly as a business investment to distract her opponents.

Alice met her next husband around 1890 when she was a dealer in Bedrock Tom's saloon in Deadwood, South Dakota. When a drunken miner tried to attack her fellow dealer Warren G. Tubbs with a knife, Alice threatened him with her .38. After this incident, Tubbs and Ivers started a romance and were married soon after.

Alice Ivers and Warren Tubbs had four sons and three daughters together. Tubbs and Ivers did not want their children to be influenced by the world of poker, so they moved to a house just northeast of Sturgis on the Moreau River in South Dakota. Tubbs was not only a dealer, but a housepainter as well. It was most likely this house painting that caused him to fall sick with tuberculosis. Warren Tubbs died in 1910 of pneumonia during a blizzard. Alice drove her husband's body in a wagon 50 miles to get him a decent burial. To pay for his funeral, she had to pawn her wedding ring, which led her back to the poker tables.

Alice's 3rd husband was George Huckert, who worked on her homestead taking care of the sheep. Huckert was constantly proposing to Ivers, yet for a while she did not agree. Eventually, however, Ivers owed Huckert $1,008, so she married him figuring that it would be cheaper than paying his back wages. Huckert died in 1913.

Poker career[edit]

After the death of her first husband, Alice started to play poker seriously. Alice was in a tough financial position. After failing in a few different jobs including teaching, she turned to poker to support herself financially. Alice would make money by gambling and working as a dealer. Ivers made a name for herself by winning money from poker games. By the time Ivers was given the name 'Poker Alice,' she was drawing in large crowds to watch her play and men were constantly challenging her to play. Saloon owners liked that Ivers was a respectable woman who kept to her values. These values included her refusal to play poker on Sundays.

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As her reputation grew, so did the amount of money she was making. Some nights she would even make $6,000, an incredibly large sum of money at the time. Alice claimed that she won $250,000, which would now be worth more than three million dollars.

Ivers used her good looks to distract men at the poker table. She always had the newest dresses, and even in her 50s was considered a very attractive woman. She was also very good at counting cards and figuring odds, which helped her at the table.

Alice was known always to have carried a gun with her, preferably her .38, and frequently smoked cigars.

Poker's Palace and jailtime[edit]

In 1910, Ivers opened 'Poker's Palace', a saloon in Fort Meade, South Dakota, which offered gambling and liquor downstairs, and prostitution upstairs. The saloon was always closed on Sundays because of Ivers' proclaimed religious beliefs. However, in 1913, some drunken soldiers disobeyed Ivers' 'no work on Sunday' rule and started to get unruly, chaotic and destructive of the house. It was then that Ivers shot her gun, supposedly to quiet down the soldiers. The shot ended up killing one of the soldiers and injuring another, resulting in Ivers' arrest, along with the arrest of six of her prostitutes.

Ivers' time spent in jail was short, but she got through it with the help of reading the Bible and smoking cigars. At the trial, she claimed self-defense and was acquitted. After the trial, her saloon was shut down.

While in her sixties, Alice Ivers was arrested several times after the 'Poker Palace' incident for being a madam, a gambler and a bootlegger, as well as her drunkenness. She would comply with the law and pay her fines but kept her business. In 1928, she was arrested again for bootlegging and her repeated offenses of conducting a brothel. Despite this sentence to prison, Ivers did not end up confined because she was pardoned by then-GovernorWilliam J. Bulow of South Dakota, who took this action because of her old age.

Legacy[edit]

After being forced to retire by the anger of the military and other people who were upset with her blend of religious elements at her house in Sturgis, Alice's health began to fail her. Alice Ivers died on February 27, 1930 in Rapid City after a gallbladder operation at the age of 79. Ivers was buried at the St. Aloysius Cemetery in Sturgis, South Dakota.

In 1960, Barbara Stuart played Poker Alice in a three-part episode of the Rory CalhounCBS western series, The Texan. Calhoun as series character Bill Longley, a heroic figure rather than the real outlaw of the same name, pursues the bandit El Sombro to the fictitious corrupt community of Rio Nada. In the episodes 'The Taming of Rio Nada', 'Sixgun Street', and 'The Terrified Town', Poker Alice is shown as an unlikely frontier gambler, the mother of seven children who had once been a dealer for Bob Ford in Colorado and spent her later years in Deadwood and Sturgis, South Dakota.^[2]

Ivers has been fictionalized in several films, including the 1978 TV movieThe New Maverick with James Garner as Bret Maverick and Susan Sullivan as Poker Alice Ivers. In another television film, Poker Alice, Elizabeth Taylor plays the cigar-smoking and bordello-owning poker player. The film is so fictionalized that the character is given another surname.

References[edit]

1. ^'OLD WEST LEGENDS;Poker Alice - Famous Frontier Gambler'.
2. ^Billy Hathorn, 'Roy Bean, Temple Houston, Bill Longley, Ranald Mackenzie, Buffalo Bill, Jr., and the Texas Rangers: Depictions of West Texans in Series Television, 1955 to 1967', West Texas Historical Review, Vol. 89 (2013), p. 111

External links[edit]

“At my age I suppose I should be knitting. But I would rather play poker with five or six ‘experts’ than eat.”
— Alice Ivers Tubbs; aka Poker Alice

Perhaps the best known female poker player in the Old West, Alice Ivers Tubbs, better known as “Poker Alice”, hailed from England. Born on February 17, 1851, in Devonshire, she was the daughter of a conservative schoolmaster who moved the family to the United States when she was still a small girl. First settling in Virginia, Alice attended an elite boarding school for young women until the family moved again in her teenage years, to the silver rush in Leadville, Colorado.

While there, Alice met a mining engineer by the name of Frank Duffield and the two married when she was 20. Gambling was a way of life in the many mining camps of the Old West and when Frank, an enthusiastic player, visited the many gambling halls in Leadville, young Alice went along with him rather than stay home alone. At first, the pretty young girl stood quietly behind her husband, simply watching the play. However, a quick study, it wasn’t long before she was sitting in on the games, quickly demonstrating proficiency for poker and faro.

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Leadville, Colorado at Dusk by Carol Highsmith.

A few years after their marriage, Alice’s husband, who worked as a mining engineer, was killed in an explosion and she was left alone with no means of support. With her education, she might have taught school; however, even though the mining camp flourishing with some 35,000 residents, it didn’t have a school. The few remaining jobs available to women in a mining camp did not appeal to Alice and she soon decided to try to make a living with her gambling skills. Though she preferred the game of poker, she also learned to deal and play Faro and was soon in high demand, both as a player and a dealer. At this time, Alice was a petite 5’4” beauty, with blue eyes and lush brown hair. A “lady” in a gambling hall that wasn’t of the “soiled dove” variety was rare in the Old West and bedecked in the latest fashions, she was a sight for the sore eyes of many a miner.

Traveling from one mining camp to another, the talented young beauty soon acquired the nickname “Poker Alice.” In addition to playing the game, she often worked as a dealer, in cities all over Colorado including Alamosa, Central City, Georgetown, and Trinidad. As time went on, Alice began to puff on large black cigars, while still in her fashionable frilly dresses; however, she never gambled on Sundays because of her religious beliefs. She also carried a .38 revolver and wasn’t afraid to use it. As her reputation grew throughout the west, she always found willing players and she attracted men looking for a challenge. As such, she was quickly welcomed in gambling halls because the crowd she drew was good for business.

Alice soon left Colorado and made her way to Silver City, New Mexico, where she broke the bank at the Gold Dust Gambling House, winning some $6,000. Sometime later, she made a trip to New York City, which she often did after a large win, to replenish her wardrobe of fashionable clothing.

Afterward, she returned to Creede, Colorado, where she went to work as a dealer in Bob Ford’s saloon – the very same Bob Ford who had earlier killed Jesse James.

Alice eventually made her way to Deadwood, South Dakota around 1890. While there, she met a man named Warren G. Tubbs, who worked as a housepainter in Sturgis, but sidelined as a dealer and gambler.

Though she routinely beat Tubbs at the gaming tables, he was taken with her and the two began to see each other outside of the gambling halls. On one occasion when a drunken miner threatened Tubbs with a knife, Alice pulled out her .38 and put a bullet into the miner’s arm. Tubbs and Alice eventually married and the couple would have seven children. A painter by trade, Tubbs, along with Alice’s gambling profits, supported the family. The couple eventually moved out of Deadwood, where they homesteaded a ranch near Sturgis on the Moreau River.

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During this time, Alice significantly reduced the amount of time spent in gaming houses as she helped with the ranch and raised her children. But, Alice was doomed to be luckier at cards than at love. When Tubbs was diagnosed with tuberculosis, she was determined to stay by his side and nurse him back to health. Tubbs; however, lost the fight and died of pneumonia in the winter of 1910. Alice then loaded him into a horse-drawn wagon to take his body to Sturgis for burial. At least one legend says she had to pawn her wedding ring to pay for the funeral and afterward, went to a gambling parlor to earn the money to get her ring back.

Alice would later say that the time spent on the ranch were some of the happiest days of her life and that during those years, she didn’t miss the saloons and gambling halls, but liked the peace and quiet of the ranch. However, after Tubbs’ death, she was required to once again make a living. She then hired a man named George Huckert to take care of the homestead and moved to Sturgis to earn her way. Huckert was enamored with Alice and proposed marriage to her several times. Finally, Alice married him, saying flippantly, “I owed him so much in back wages; I figured it would be cheaper to marry him than pay him off. So I did.” But the marriage would be short, as Alice found herself widowed once again when Huckert died in 1913.

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Sometime later, during Prohibition, Alice opened a saloon called “Poker’s Palace” between Sturgis and Fort Meade that provided not only gambling and liquor but also “women” who serviced the customers. While here, a drunken soldier began to cause havoc in the saloon, destroying the furniture, and causing a ruckus. Alice responded by pulling her .38 and shooting the man. While in jail awaiting trial, she calmly smoked cigars and read the Bible. She was acquitted on grounds of self-defense, but her saloon was shut down in the meantime.

Now, in her 70s and with her beauty and fashionable gowns long gone, Alice struggled in her last years, continuing to gamble, but now dressing in men’s clothing. She occasionally was featured at events like the Diamond Jubilee, in Omaha, Nebraska, as a true frontier character, where she was known to have said, “At my age, I suppose I should be knitting. But I would rather play poker with five or six ‘experts’ than eat.”

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She continued to run a “house” of ill-repute in Sturgis during her later years and was often arrested for drunkenness and keeping a disorderly house. Though she paid her fines, she continued to operate the business until she was finally arrested for repeated convictions of running a brothel and sentenced to prison. However, Alice, who 75 years old at the time, was pardoned by the governor.

At the age of 79, she underwent a gall bladder operation in Rapid City but died of complications on February 27, 1930. She was buried at St. Aloysius Cemetery in Sturgis, South Dakota.

In her later years, Alice claimed to have won more than $250,000 at the gaming tables and never once cheated. In fact, one of her favorite sayings was: “Praise the Lord and place your bets. I’ll take your money with no regrets.”

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© Kathy Weiser/Legends of America, updated October 2019.

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