history

MOLLIE MONROE

Mollie Monroe died a lonesome and dissolute wreck in Arizona's Territorial Insane Asylum, near Phoenix, put there by heartache, revenge, and whiskey. From the time she was about age 20 on, this unhappy triad colored every choice she made and darkened every circumstance of her life until it was forgone that the end would not be pretty.

Her story is a kind of morality play about the self-fulfillment of celebrity, human weakness, and the clash between a woman's choices and the expectations of a frontier town.

Maybe the disgust Mollie generated among solid pioneer women stemmed from her penchant for tobacco and dressing like a man, or the way she acquired and shed "husbands" with the same fealty another might show toward a worn-out coat. Or maybe the disdain Prescott's ladies showed Cowboy Mollie traces to the fact that she'd once been one of them.

When she arrived in town, around 1864, Mollie was said to be the proper wife of an Army officer at Fort Whipple, well-bred and well-mannered, a young woman of considerable charm. But when her husband was transferred, Mollie stayed behind, and an inexplicable transformation occurred. She took up the look, and it seemed, the life of a man.

Newspaper accounts describe her riding through town wearing a fringed and beaded buckskin jacket and broad-brimmed hat. She carried a Henry rifle across her saddle, a big knife under her belt, and had a brace of six-shooters bouncing on her hips.

"Strangers to Prescott would invariably take her for a boy dressed in the height of fashion," said the Arizona Enterprise for July 25, 1877, "but would be surprised at the ease and sang-froid with which the supposed boy would call for his whiskey straight, and complacently smoke his Havana."

Folks were so used to seeing Mollie in pants that in 1872, the Prescott newspaper considered it newsworthy that she appeared in town in a dress, the first time that had happened in seven years.

What drove Mollie's eccentricities, and seeded her downfall, was most likely a busted love affair. But much of her early life is unknowable, and rife with folklore. Even the place of her birth is difficult to confirm. Some sources say New York, others New Hampshire. The 1870 Territorial census for Wickenburg says that Mary Monroe, a cook, then 24 and the wife of George Monroe, was born in Mississippi in 1846.

The most often-told story of how Mary E. Sawyer, Mollie's birth name, came west begins with a teenage romance that drew protests from both sets of parents. The young man was reportedly sent away in the hope, according to Mollie's obituary, that "a long journey would gradually poison the matrimonial dart among each."

But headstrong Mollie, slightly-built, red-haired, and, according to some accounts, the product of a swank finishing school, had other ideas. Two months after her beau's departure, she threw on a set of men's clothes and stole away from her parents' home to track down her love.

She traveled under the name Sam Brewer, moving from town to town, at times working with a prospecting party. In Santa Fe she learned that her man was dead, killed in a barroom brawl only two weeks earlier.

Various accounts state that Mollie then swore allegiance to her Eastern lover's memory, and vowing to take a life for a life, recklessly pursued the fugitives in various disguises from scout to stage driver. She reportedly rode from Salt Lake City to the Mexican border without success.

But the thought of the killers, and what they'd taken away, tortured her. "While under the influence of liquor," wrote the Arizona Journal-Miner, "time and again, [she] had been heard to give utterance to her thoughts that carried her back to the days when she was pursuing the object of her hatred."

Mollie met George Monroe sometime prior to 1870. He was a well-known pioneer and miner who came to Arizona as a soldier in the early 1860s. He and Mollie spent much of their time mining in the Bradshaw Mountains and around Wickenburg.

In 1874 he discovered a warm spring south of Prescott and named it Monroe Springs. It was later called Castle Hot Springs. A resort by that name operated at the site until 1976, drawing tourists from around the country.

George found some success as a miner, and so did Mollie. Press accounts say she discovered two rich gold mines and succeeded in selling an interest in one of them for $2,500. But within 10 days, she'd gambled and boozed her way clear of that fortune. "She was an inveterate gambler," said the Arizona Enterprise.

The same paper, picking up a wild story originally published in the San Francisco Mail, recounted some of her adventures under the headline: "Fighting Mollie Monroe, the Amazon of Arizona."

The report told of her supposed fondness for riding with Army scouts in their hunts for hostile Indians, and on one occasion, her "cool nerve and dauntless courage" in saving the lives of 20 scouts: "After a long day's march through the Pinal Mountains, on a fresh trail, we went into a camp on Clear Creek about sundown, and had no more than turned our horses loose and commenced preparing supper, than all at once our camp was surrounded by yelling Indians.

"Already two of our number had bit the dust, and the rest were in a fair way to die or take the alternative of surrendering and being burned at the stake, when Mollie and Texas Johnson, who had lagged a few miles to gather some mescal, appeared on a neighboring hill and began shooting, and at the same time beckoning to another party.

"The ruse had the desired effect, for it threw them [the Indians] into confusion, and gave us a chance to gain the shelter of some bluffs close by. Texas Johnson and Mollie, after some hard fighting, succeeded in reaching us. They had to abandon their horses and fight their way on foot."

Mollie's status as an oddity, almost a circus set piece, made her a favorite of the press. The more newspapers reported her eccentricities, the louder were the demands to rein her in on charges of indecent dress, foul language, and drunkenness.

It might've been that rebel Mollie was flattered by the attention, craving fame as much as a good belt of red top rye. PolishAccording to one story, she was on a prospecting trip with a male companion when the two stopped at a ranch. After her friend went inside, the woman who lived there came out to invite Mollie to dismount and join them.

She did. When the buckskin-clad visitor answered honestly that her name was Mollie Monroe, revealing her gender for the first time, the hostess became indignant. No self-respecting woman dresses in men's clothing, she sniffed.

But the buckskin lady won admiration in many quarters, too. She was big-hearted, often taking up collections to help miners and prostitutes in the camps around Prescott and Wickenburg, where she was a visiting angel.

"She had been known to ride miles to reach the afflicted," reported the Arizona Journal-Miner, "and with her own means has generously extended help, and without any solicitation whatever."

Mollie once heard of a woman living in desperation with her two children in a mining camp near Wickenburg. Her husband had gone to town to buy supplies, and he spent the next three days in a saloon while his children went hungry.

Mollie and three men found the derelict miner, roped him to a horse, and forced him back to his family. As the story goes, the four spent the night to make sure the man stayed put.

But those who wished for her downfall eventually got it. Both before and after her time with George Monroe, she went through a string of men without getting near a clergyman, and according to the Journal-Miner, eventually "became addicted to liquor and . . . morals that are dissolute."

In 1877 she was discovered wandering aimlessly in Peeples Valley. Lawman Ed Bowers brought her back to Prescott where the court, on May 9 of that year, declared her insane. She was shipped to an asylum in Stockton, California.

But Mollie was incapable of making a quiet exit. The stage carrying her and Bowers was a few miles outside Wickenburg when it was waylaid by four masked men. Bowers lost $450 in gold coins and a fine watch, but he got Mollie safely to the sanitarium.

MOLLIE MONROE

After some violent outbursts, including trying to burn the Stockton asylum to the ground, she was reportedly packed off to incarceration at San Quentin. A year later she was back at Stockton, and taking visits from the likes of A.P.K. Safford, Arizona's ex-governor.

She swore to him that her desire to drink was gone, and if freed she'd never tip another bottle.

A different Mollie emerged two years later, one who, according to the Arizona Weekly Miner, would still "resort to any stratagem to obtain a bottle." In the same story, published January 30, 1880, she protested that what doctors were calling her craziness was in fact meanness.

"She said that she was the meanest thing on Earth," reported the Weekly Miner, "and intended to be so until she was turned out and allowed to live as she pleased."

Early in 1887, Mollie was sent to the newly built Arizona Territorial asylum. Eight years later she escaped and managed to outrun pursuers for four days, again giving the press a sensational story.

Maricopa County Sheriff Lindley Orme was unable to find her and had to offer a reward to entice Indian trackers to join the search. After a couple of days on the loose, Mollie was spotted leaving a trading post on the Salt River Indian Reservation, heading into the desert near Telegraph Pass.

As she had with her only some crackers and a bottle of water, it was assumed that Mollie would be found dead. But she walked another 15 miles, barefoot, over rocky terrain and through a cactus forest. She was found with her feet torn and bleeding, and her shoes dangling from her wrist.

Newspapers described Mollie's shocking appearance - snow-white hair above the face of a much younger woman and her elation at escaping, which she expressed with unprintable profanity. "If I'd a only had my breeches and my gun I'd a been all right," she boasted to the Arizona Republican.

But it was her last hurrah. The woman whose consuming desire for revenge made her life a public spectacle was returned to the asylum, and she died there in 1902 at age 56, wretched, after a quarter-century of confinement.