Frontierado is Friday, August 2nd! In honor of that upcoming 3-day holiday here is a look at female gunslingers who don’t get as much attention as the big names like Calamity Jane, Belle Starr and Annie Oakley.
Queen Kitty
QUEEN KITTY – Kitty LeRoy was also known as Kitty the Schemer, Dancing Kitty, the Female Arsenal and much later as Deadwood Kitty. Queen Kitty is the most appropriate nickname in part because of her last name but mostly because she was variously known as “the Queen of the Hoofers”, “the Dancing Queen”, “the Queen of the Barbary Coast” and “the Queen of the Faro Tables”.
Kitty was born in 1850 and by the age of 10 was earning money for her family as a professional dancer and novelty act in her home state of Michigan. By 14 she was performing exclusively at adult venues and had added trick shooting to her repertoire.
Her most famous shooting trick at this time was shooting apples off the heads of volunteers. At age 15 Queen Kitty was performing in New Orleans and married her first husband – the only man in the city brave enough to let Kitty shoot apples off his head while she was riding around him at a full gallop.
LeRoy loved flirting and sleeping around, however, and this led to the breakup of her first marriage within a year. By 1870 Queen Kitty had married a second time, to a man named Donnaly, with whom she had a daughter. The Queen had gravitated more and more to the Faro tables, making a killing as a celebrity dealer.
With Dallas as a home base Kitty and her husband would travel throughout Texas with LeRoy earning money dancing and dealing Faro. Kitty also earned a name for being able to handle any violence that came her way from sore losers and was involved in multiple gunfights and knife fights in dangerous saloons. Continue reading
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After a few days in jail, Kid Russell’s case comes up and he is found not guilty on self-defense grounds and released. While cooling his heels in stir the Kid got to talking to some cowhands getting ready for the upcoming Judith Basin Cattle Roundup, an annual event which was, even then, achieving legendary status. 
For starters, the irrational haters of de facto Third Party President Donald Trump lied again when they claimed it was “unprecedented” for a President to address the nation during a Fourth of July celebration and that by doing so he was making the holiday “about himself.” Presidents Woodrow Wilson (D), Harry Truman (D), John F Kennedy (D), Gerald Ford (R), Ronald Reagan (R), Bill Clinton (D) and George W Bush (R) all addressed the nation on July 4th. 
Second, when even the rabidly anti-Trump Washington Post can admit that Trump’s speech was, as the Post put it, “not partisan, but unifying” we see once again how shrill and out of touch so many Trump critics are. The man has done more for the working class and the poor than any other president in my lifetime. 
It may be my fondness for mythology that makes me love to watch particular movies around particular holidays. I say that because many of the well- known myths were recited on ancient holidays when their subject matter was relevant to those holidays. The stories helped accentuate the meaning of the special events and that’s the way I use various movies. 
Betting on political election outcomes has become more challenging than at any other time in history, possibly. Over the past three years longshots and dark horses in the U.S. and around the globe have been winning with ever-greater frequency as political polling seems to have fallen from a science to a crap-shoot. 
Brain-dead Frederica Wilson, Democrat member of Congress (aka “bought and paid-for whores”) openly called for people who ridicule members of Congress to be prosecuted. For what, the little imbecile apparently couldn’t say. 
AMAZING ADVENTURES Vol 2 #23 (March 1974) 
REVISION: Writer Don McGregor had not yet hit his stride writing about Killraven’s adventures and I feel he messed up the story structure to this three-parter. I would have had ALL the Freemen – including KR – escape with Mint Julep and her band. 
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