Secret Love Lives on in Canberra Suburbs, Even Long After Death

Australian poet Judith Wright at her Hermes 3000 typewriter

It's more than 10 years now since the Australian Capital Territory's Place Names Committee announced that among the new suburbs to be built in the Molonglo Valley outside Canberra would be planned adjoining developments called Wright, after the Nobel Prize-nominated Australian poet Judith Wright, and Coombs, after "Nugget" Combs, an economist who had been Director-General of Post-War Reconstruction, Chancellor of the Australian National University and the first Governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia. All well and good, given this pair had been two of Australia's most well-known and well-loved public figures. But there was far more to the Place Names Committee's decision than met the eye. Indeed, it provided an extremely rare glimpse of bureaucratic romanticism. Someone on the committee was "in the know".

Wright had passed away in Canberra, aged 85, on June 25, 2000, 7½ years before the suburb naming honour was bestowed upon her, on January 2, 2008. Coombs had died and been given a state funeral almost 2½ years earlier, on October 29, 1997. But it wasn't just because they were both long out of the local limelight that the significance and poignancy of this naming decision was lost on almost all Canberrans. Even today, many people - even among those now living in the growing suburbs of Wright and Combs - would be unaware that for a quarter of a century, Wright and Coombs were secret lovers. Yet, as Wright once wrote to a friend in England, confessing to the affair without naming names, "Love is love, no matter what the problems, and always joyful even in the pain."

Coombs and Wright picnic in the bush.

In revealing the affair in her article "In the Garden" in the The Monthly in June 2009, Fiona Capp pointed out that although Wright had helped care for Coombs in the two years before his death, following a series of strokes, she was unable to attend Coombs's funeral because their relationship had never been made public. "Coombs and his wife, Mary, were separated, but his loyalty to Mary and to his children meant that he never contemplated a divorce. Wright was even more determined to keep the affair a secret. She'd been in a similar position with her late husband, the philosopher Jack McKinney, when they first met and she still carried guilt about the pain she felt she'd caused his family. One of the most remarkable things about this relationship [between Wright and Coombs] is the silence that has continued to surround it ... It is a measure of the respect in which they are held that their desire for privacy, even after death, has been observed."

Judith Arundell Wright was born in Armidale, New South Wales, on May 31,1915, and spent most of her formative years in Brisbane and Sydney. She attended New England Girls' School and studied Philosophy, English, Psychology and History at the University of Sydney. For the last three decades of her life, she lived near the New South Wales town of Braidwood, so she could be closer to Coombs, who was based in Canberra. She spent her last few years living in a small bedsit in Canberra. Herbert Cole Coombs was born in Kalamunda, Western Australia, on February 24, 1906.

A page from one of Judith Wright's typescripts, seen in the National Library

of Australia's 50th anniversary exhibition.

Wright was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1967, coming up against a daunting field of 69 other contenders, including W.H. Auden, Samuel Beckett, Saul Bellow, Lawrence Durrell, E.M. Forster, Robert Graves, Graham Greene, Katherine Anne Porter, Ezra Pound, Georges Simenon, J.R.R. Tolkien, Robert Penn Warren, Thornton Wilder and Edmund Wilson. Only eight on the formidable nomination list ever won the prize, and with Wright, those who failed to win included Auden, Durrell, Forster, Graves, Greene, Porter, Pound, Simenon, Tolkien, Warren, Wilder and Wilson. (See the full list below, as well as a list of all winners from 1967-2017). 

Wright also has a street named in her honour, in the suburb of Franklin, which is named for the great Australian writer Miles Franklin (typewriter left). Indeed, Canberra has a habit of saluting writers and

journalists with the names of its suburbs and streets. The streets of McKellar are named for journalists, including Charles Bean (typewriter above right), Kenneth Slessor (typing left), Hugh Buggy, the cricket writer who used a Remington portable to coin the phrase "Bodyline", and Sir Frederick Lloyd Dumas. The streets in Garran are named after Australian writers, and the suburb of Richardson is named for Henry Handel Richardson (real name Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson, typewriter below right). 

The suburb of Fraser is named after the political correspondent and later politician James Reay Fraser, who used an early Remington portable. The suburb called Taylor is named after magazine publisher and journalist Florence Taylor. I live in Hughes, which is named for former Prime Minister Billy Hughes, who used a Corona 3 folding portable (and banned the import version of the Erika folding, the Bijou). Lawson is named for the great writer Henry Lawson and Gordon for the poet Adam Gordon Lindsay. 

The suburb of Gilmore is named for author and journalist Mary Gilmore (typewriter left). As well, the Australian Electoral Commission has just announced that a proposed new Federal electorate for the ACT will be named in honour of war correspondent and official war historian Charles Bean, seen below (the electorate will cover the Molonglo Valley district, including Wright and Coombs).

 Alejo Carpentier

 Alberto Moravia 

 Anna Seghers 

 Carlos Drummond de Andrade 

 Eugenio Montale 

 Friedrich Georg Jünger 

 Georges Simenon 

Katherine Anne Porter

Ezra Pound

Lawrence Durrell

Eugène Ionesco 

 Miguel Ángel Asturias

 Konstantin Paustovskij 

 Ernst Jünger 

Robert Penn Warren

 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 

 Bob Dylan

 Doris Lessing

 Derek Walcott

 Günter Grass 

Gabriel García Márquez 

 Heinrich Böll 

 Isaac Bashevis Singer 

 Jorge Amado 

 Väinö Linna 

 Pietro Ubaldi 

 Saul Bellow

Simon Vestdijk 

Mario Vargas Llosa

 Max Frisch

Nadine Gordimer 

Joseph Brodsky 

An Electric Sholes & Glidden? Puzzle with an Unmistakeable Typewriter

'Typewriter Jim' Brosnan Pitched Other Sports Writers Out of the Ball Park

Pensacola News-Journal, February 21, 1964

Quad City Times, February 21, 1964

Dayton, Ohio, Journal-Herald, February 21, 1964

The Elmira, New York Star-Gazette's nod to Hemingway's influence on Jim Brosnan.

Now that "The Long Season" - 2018 Major League Baseball - is underway, it's timely to recall the greatest typewriter-wielding baseballer of all-time, Cincinnati's legendary James Patrick "Jim" Brosnan. Brosnan, in his writing prime, used Royal, Olympia and Olivetti Lettera 32 portable typewriters, and in the case of at least two, the Olympia and the Olivetti, belted them till they went bust (admittedly the Olivetti fell off a shelf in early 2004). After that Big Jim refused to touch anything that buzzed and hissed at him, or tried to tell him how to construct his one sentence paragraphs. An original Apple computer gathered dust for want of a user. Jim just refused to write anymore.

Cincinnati Enquirer, May 6, 1960

Without question, this year's World Series will not be covered by sports writers with anything like the insightful style Jim Brosnan brought to LIFE during the 1960 world championship (see below). And in a way the like of Brosnan and Ireland's soccer pundit Eamon Dunphy might be blamed for that. The sad demise of print newspaper sports writing can, to a very large degree, be put down to the misconception of media proprietors that the weak-kneed musings (more often than not ghostwritten) of players and former players is more attractive to readers than those of actual sports writers. These misguided proprietors no doubt failed to grasp that Brosnan was an exception who offered absolutely no rule.

Jim Brosnan was born in the Fountain City on October 24, 1929, and grew up first at 1326 Manss Avenue at West Price Hill and later at 3420 Millrich Avenue, Westwood. His father, John Patrick Brosnan (1894-1970), rose from lathe operator to accountant and later inspector for the Cincinnati Milling Machine Company and his grandfather, Maurice Brosnan (1865-1927), at one time a Cincinnati policeman on the "Sausage Row" and "Rat Row" beats, came from Tralee in County Kerry, Ireland.

Jim Brosnan attended Elder High School in West Price Hill and developed his own writing skills by reading Joseph Altsheler’s early 1900s novels, James Thurber, the war books of Ernest Hemingway, Irwin Shaw, James Jones and Norman Mailer (like all good sports writers, he preferred one sentence paragraphs) and Ogden Nash poetry. He was fond of Mark Twain, too, and of finding new words by doing crossword puzzles. The 6ft 4in Brosnan went on to graduate from the Cincinnati American Legion team to play 385 MLB games from 1954-63 (interrupted by army training at Fort Meade, Maryland, in 1955), mostly as a right-handed relief pitcher for the Chicago Cubs, St Louis Cardinals, Cincinnati Reds and Chicago White Sox. On February 20, 1964, the White Sox released Brosnan because he refused to give up his writing career. He was literally told to "take your typewriter and go". Newspapers across the US splash headlined the story (see above) in their own amused ways, but what they didn't report was that when Chicago general manager Ed Short said, "You can't use your typewriter here either, period", Brosnan promptly replied with the old Anglo-Saxon sent-off, the four-letter one starting with 'F'.

Dayton, Ohio, Journal-Herald, February 21, 1964.

This AP story appeared right across the US on the same day.

In his playing days, the bespectacled, pipe-smoking Brosnan, an avid book reader, was dismissively nicknamed "The Professor" and called a "Kooky Beatnik". At the very peak of his baseball career, with the Cincinnati Reds in 1960, Brosnan embarked on a brilliant writing career with the publication of his first book The Long Season, rated by Sports Illustrated as the 19th best sports book of all time. It included a passage Brosnan later recalled as coming from one of his best writing days ever, one which finished at 5am. The passage read, "“To get to [Cincinnati’s] Crosley Field, I usually take a bus through the old, crumbling streets of the Bottoms. Blacks stand on the corners watching their homes fall down. The insecurity of being in the second division of the National League - in the cellar - leaves me. For 25 cents, the bus ride gives me enough humility to get me through any baseball game, or season.” Under the headline “No Comic Books for Brosnan", John Corry reviewed the work for The New York Times, writing, “Traditionally there are two kinds of baseball players - tobacco-chewing, monosyllabic hard rocks and freshly laundered heroes too young to appear in razor-blade commercials. Jim Brosnan, a pitcher for the Cincinnati Reds, is in a third class. He wrote a book about the other two kinds.” Brosnan was later that year controversially commissioned by LIFE magazine (along with Ted Williams) to cover the World Series, when the Pittsburgh Pirates upset the much more fancied New York Yankees to take their first world title since 1925. 

The quality of Brosnan's coverage was underlined by this letter to the editor of LIFE, published in the issue of October 30, 1960:

Here is the article in question:

Oddly enough, the pitcher married a Pitcher, Anne Stewart Pitcher (1925-2013). The couple lived in the same house in Morton Grove, a suburb of Chicago, for 58 years. Brosnan died on June 28, 2014, aged 84, while in hospice in Park Ridge, Illinois. At the time he was recovering from a stroke when sepsis set in.

The Coober Pedy Opal Gouger From Renaissance City, Michigan

It has taken me a year or more to publish this image, which I stumbled across in the National Library of Australia archives. I had often been sorely tempted to use it, given it's a rare shot of someone operating a Traeger Morse typewriter in an underground chamber carved from rock on the opal fields of Coober Pedy in South Australia. (To find out more about the Traeger typewriter, see my blog post here.) What stopped me was a determination to first positively identify the operator.

The Traeger typewriter I uncovered in Museum Victoria's ScienceWorks at Port Melbourne some years ago.

Two things I knew for sure: a) the photograph was taken at the Australian Inland Mission Wireless Transmission Installation, which was put into the Post Office at Coober Pedy in about August 1935; and b) the operator was almost certainly not an Australian. I surmised that he was either an African American or a West Indian who had perhaps come here from Britain. Either way, I assumed it would be easy to find the name of a non-white, non-Australian working on the opal fields. How wrong I was!

E.O.Hoppé's famous image of the Coober Pedy post office, taken in the early 1930s. I am now wondering whether that is my mystery man standing in the doorway!

My earliest attempts to track down this gentleman were entirely fruitless, and for the time being I gave up the search. But eventually things started to fit into place. Some weeks ago I was contacted by an Adelaide researcher, Stuart Wattison, who was coming to Canberra for a stamp collectors' convention. He wanted to talk to me about Minnie Berrington, a blue blood English typist who became an opal gouger in South Australia in the late 1920s and about whom I had posted almost two years ago. One of the things Stuart was able to tell me was that in her later life, living in Adelaide, Minnie had returned to her first profession as a typist. While he was here, I gave Stuart a copy of the image of the Traeger typewriter in use, hoping he might be able to offer some clue as to who was using it. On his return home, Stuart got in touch with Coober Pedy historian Sue Britt, who immediately identified our man as one Alfred Simmond, known on the opal fields as "Black Alf".

Finally having a name should have meant everything. But the only reference I could find to Alf Simmond in the National Library's newspaper archives, Trove, was a very sketchy report of his death, in mid-December 1935. It seemed to confirm my earlier thought that Alf was a West Indian, "and had been in Australia for many years. He worked on all opal fields in Australia, and made several trips to America, selling opal and precious stones, on which he was an expert." Among other places where he'd mined was the old gold rush town of Arltunga in the East MacDonnell Ranges of the Northern Territory.

Another of Hoppé's photographs shows Minnie Berrington, seated left, watching opal gougers weigh their finds at Coober Pedy. As with the post office image, I am now thinking the man bending, right, is Alf Simmond.

At the time of his death, Alf was in Tennant Creek, north of Coober Pedy, where he had been lured by the gold rush. He died of beriberi, a thiamine deficiency resulting from a lack of vitamin B1. Risk factors include a diet of mostly white rice, alcoholism and chronic diarrhoea. Because Alf was "coloured" but not an Aboriginal, he could not be admitted for treatment to the Australian Inland Mission Hostel. It fell to Dr Patrick John Reilly, the Government Medical Officer at Alice Springs and Deputy Chief Protector of Aboriginals, and his wife, Betty Irene (née Loft), a former Adelaide Hospital nurse, to care for Alf in their own home, more than 300 miles from Tennant Creek, but he was too far gone to be saved. Tennant Creek in the Northern Territory is where in 1872 the Overland Telegraph Station (below) linked Melbourne to London. Tennant Creek was the site of Australia’s last gold rush, starting in December 1932 and petering out within a decade.

Stuart Wattison was able to send me information which showed Alf had been issued with opal mining permits at Coober Pedy from at least 1919 until 1927 (the first opal find was in February 1915 and since then the town has been supplying most of the world's gem-quality opal), and Sue Britt sent me another image of Alf, apparently taken of an outback dance party "organised by the assistant post master" in about 1926:

But I continued to search for information about Alf until today, when I came across an item written by Adelaide journalist Maurice Stephen Fisher (1887–1968) under the pseudonym of "Vox" in his "Out Among the People" column in the Adelaide Chronicle in August 1935. The item, about newcomers to the Tennant Creek gold fields, confirmed the majority opinion that Alf was an African American, and not the Alfred Simmonds born at Christiansted on St Croix in the American Virgin Islands in 1870. That Alf died in Kings, New York, in October 1934, 14 months before our Alf died in Australia. Our Alf was born in Detroit, Michigan, on January 9, 1876, so was just short of his 60th birthday when he passed away.

The only other known image of the Traeger typewriter being used is this one:

50 Hours at an Underwood Typewriter: The 1924 Rhode Island Senate Filibusters

There's been many a post on this blog about the sprinters in typewriting history - the men and women who won world speed typing championships from the 1880s until the early 1940s. That these speedsters could maintain their impressive rates for up to an hour at a time was testament to their lasting power.  But when it came to out-and-out endurance typewriting, Anna Tague (1891-) of Providence, Rhode Island, had them all beaten into a cocked hat. As assistant secretary to Rhode Island Governor William Smith Flynn (1885-1966), Anna, above, was caught up in the Democrats' succession of filibusters in the Rhode Island State Senate in 1923-24. On one occasion, in June 1924, the filibuster lasted 42 hours, until a bromine gas bomb thrown into the chamber briefly interrupted the imbroglio. As the dust settled and the air cleared, Anna completed her record with a breathtaking 50 hours straight behind her Underwood typewriter. An earlier filibuster, in March, involved Democrat senators reading aloud Shakespearean plays and the entire Encyclopedia Britannica from cover to cover.

Anna was the second daughter of John and Bessie Bridget Tague (the correct spelling of the family name is actually Teague), who settled on Olney Street in Providence after arriving in Boston on the Catalonia in 1890 from Liverpool in England. The family home is at Muckros (one 's') near Ballinamore in County Leitrim in Ireland. Anna began working at 18 as a bookkeeper and later became a stenographer for the Vermont Manufacturing Company's Fancy Butterine and Cocolat store in Providence. (Butterine is artificial butter made partly from milk; cocolat is another word for chocolate). The fact that Anna was the niece of Massachusetts Congressman Peter Francis Tague (1871-1941) probably helped get her the job in Flynn's office. Peter Tague was a Democrat member of the United States House of Representatives from Boston, serving from 1919 to 1925. Both he and Flynn opposed the powerful influence of the Ku Klux Klan.

The term of Flynn, a progressive Democrat, was marked by the extreme partisan conflict within the senate, which was controlled by a Republican majority. A group of young Democratic legislators including Lieutenant Governor Felix A. Toupin and future Governor Robert E. Quinn staged filibusters for much of 1923-1924, attempting to get older Republicans to pass a resolution putting a constitutional convention up to a popular vote. Flynn refused to call the National Guard to restore order, saying that the executive branch should not interfere with legislative matters.

The story of the Rhode Island senate filibusters is best told here and here.

Briefly, trouble started with the 1923 election cycle, which ushered in a crop of enthusiastic and stubborn Democrats, though they remained five members shy of a majority. Rhode Island voting regulations excluded citizens who did not own property from voting in city council elections. The Republican majority allowed a vote on suffrage rights in 1923 but promptly defeated it. In 1924, Democrats wanted to get the Republicans to vote in favour of the voting amendment and have it brought to the public for approval.

The filibusters failed to have the desired effect, tensions mounted and tempers flared, and finally a fist fight was followed by the gas bomb. The chairman of the Republican State Central Committee, William C. Pelkey, was indicted on charges of conspiracy for hiring a 34-year-old Boston thug - William “Toots” Murray - to throw bromine gas into the chamber. The gas bomb was the mob’s second option - their first being to have Toots shut off the lights and shoot a few rounds of a gun into the ceiling. But at the end of the day, the Democrats were the big losers, in the ballot boxes.

Buzzby Babes

Buzz cuts before H's second full day of treatment tomorrow. I'll be spending my 70th birthday in the chemo ward with an absolute angel!

The Rootin’, Tootin’, Shootin’ Outlaw Daughter of Oz: The Australian Femme Fatale Who Scandalised America’s Wild West

As the Nevada State Journal, in June 1951, imagined Susie Raper and Robert Payne. 

Born SUSAN WARFIELD in New South Wales, Australia, September 11, 1844; died of cancer, Los Angeles, October 12, 1900, aged 56.

Also Known As –

· Susie Raper, Rapier, Rayner, Booth, Yonkers, Dawson and Black.

· The Wickest Woman in the West

· Bronco Sue

· Six-Shooter Sue

· The Pistol-Packing Mama

· Buckskin Sue

· The Female Buccaneer of the Sagebrush

· The Lady Gay Spanker on the Pacific

(Lady Gay Spanker, a “horse-riding virago", was a character in the 1841 comedy London Assurance [originally Out of Town], written by Dion Boucicault.)

· The Lucrezia Borgia of the West

(Lucrezia Borgia, the oft-married daughter of Pope Alexander VI, is regarded as the ultimate femme fatale.)

· The Mazeppa of the Humboldt

(A Mazeppa is the rider of a wild horse. It originates from Ivan Stepanovyč Mazepa, the Ukrainian Cossack leader. Humboldt is a county in Nevada.)

Australia has historically been proud of its criminal past, celebrating its convict heritage and lionising its bushranger heroes, like Ned Kelly. But not so much its female outlaws. And no Australian newspaper, writer or historian has hitherto mentioned one of this country’s most notorious murderers, Susie Raper. The Kelly Gang collectively killed four men – Susie Raper alone shot at least three, and is considered New Mexico’s first serial man killer.

For 14 years to 1884, Australian-born Susie Raper and her “coquettish swagger”, “winning ways” and foul mouth had reporters spraying purple ink around newspaper offices across the United States, from California to Tennessee and on to Vermont. Trigger-happy Susie’s legend was launched on March 12, 1870, in just such one of those colourful rags, the Sacramento Independent, in what’s now a ghost town in Colorado. It would soon spread nationwide, with papers in all corners of the country picking up and republishing the Independent’s prurient story. And the legend survived well into the latter part of the 20^th Century, revived in 1953 by yarns about her “comb stick-up” of 1869, when she convinced sheriffs she was holding a pistol at their heads. Susie was also remembered by the Nevada State Journal in May 1976 as “the brassiest, lovingest castle rustler in the West”  - comparable with Butch Cassidy, the Daltons and the James Brothers - and as a “comely cattle rustler” by the Reno Gazette-Journal in September 1998. She was indeed brassy and comely. In one of her earliest escapades, she – with “a string of curses on her lips” - stole back her confiscated horse “Humboldt” and in doing so gave, according to the Indianapolis News in June 1870, “a liberal exhibition of her well-molded extremities to the greedy street gazers in her Mencken ride through [Mineral Hill, another Nevada ghost town]”. (Actress Adah Isaacs Menken was best known for her performance in the melodrama Mazeppa, with a climax that featured her apparently nude and riding a horse on stage.)

The Hartford Courant, July 1953

Calling her “The Lady Gay Spanker on the Pacific”, the Sacramento Independent’s evidently enamoured editor wrote that Susie was “rather prepossessing in appearance, has a passable face, a graceful and well-rounded form and good carriage.” As a coquette, she had run many of the leading citizens of Elko, Humboldt County, Nevada, “a merry string”, driving them “spoony” and vulnerable to the badger game. “Smart, bold, and of winning ways, she seldom missed her mark. She can shoot a pistol like a sportsman; ride a mustang with all the grace and dash of a vaquero, drive a bull team equal to any Missourian, and in the parlour or ball room ‘get away’ with most women of style.”

         In almost the same breath, the writer added that in trying to escape custody in Austin, Lander County, Nevada, on January 18, 1870, Susie had shown “fight, nerve and skill in the handling of a six-shooter”. In court, “she acted as if it was fun”. But on being taken into jail, she had given “vent to a tirade of abuse upon the heads of those who had deserted her”. Naturally enough, clearly not wanting to be subjected to similar treatment, the all-male jury found her not guilty of grand larceny (for stealing a herd of cattle from the Mound Valley ranch of Nevada’s future governor, Major Lewis Rice “Broadhorns” Bradley). Susie gave the prosecutor a kiss on his cheek, threw back her head and laughed, and walked out with chin held high. It was a case of one down, one to go for Susie. A week later she faced another grand larceny charge, for stealing jewellery and gold coins worth $713 from a former employer, Carrie M. Taylor. Again she was found not guilty. One more week and a second not guilty finding for rustling. And this was pretty much to be the pattern of Susie’s outrageous ways until 1884.

         That’s when the Chicago Tribune reported that “the wilful lady is now cultivating a flower garden in Texas”. Sure enough, Susie had headed south. In the meantime, from New Mexico she had joined forces with New Yorker Captain Robert Payne to move to Wyoming and then head south to invade the Indian Territory (Oklahoma) of the Choctaw and Cherokee nations, which the United States Government had promised would be free of white settlement. This agreement was soon defied and violated (with Susie “making Payne stand guard over the wickiup with a shotgun”) and impunity awarded to Susie and Payne to advertise and sell Indian Territory land under the supervision of a US Marshal. Unhappy with this more regulated arrangement, Susie abandoned Payne to his wits and took a raft down the Red River and Rio Grande to Texas.

          Winnemucca’s Silver State newspaper, moved seven years earlier from Unionville, knew Susie’s form well. In early 1881 it gleefully quoted the Virginia Enterprise as claiming “All that is necessary is to arrest or kill Payne and capture Susie and put her in woman’s clothes, and provide her with a civilised good-looking man to occupy her time in courting her and giving her mustangs to ride. This accomplished and Susie Raper Payne may be tamed, and the incipient rebellion she and her Cher ami are endeavouring to inaugurate will be crushed out.”

Susie and Tom Raper, as the Nevada State Journal imaged them in 1951.

We’ll get back to the duplicitous Payne later … Suffice to say here that the Chicago Tribune’s Nevada correspondent weighed in by reminding readers of Susie’s “antics” – her “marvellous feats of horsemanship [sic], coupled with a keen appreciation of the value of other people’s cows and calves”. Her “brilliant, erratic career” had “carried her through a series of adventures and escapades that made her the special wonder and admiration of the Elko press … and which, if properly written up in the form of a two-shilling novel, would have made their fortunes.”

Nothing is known of Susie’s early life in Australia, but she probably grew up in either the Campbelltown or Windsor areas outside Sydney. She and her brother Joe Warfield first appeared in the US in Forest City, Sierra County, California. There were Warfields with Indiana links digging for gold in Sierra at the time, but it is unclear whether they were related. One different kind of gold digger, however, soon met another and in Forest City on March 6, 1860, the 15½-year-old Susie married Thomas Davison Raper from Davis County, Indiana, a veteran of the 1846-48 Mexican War. Raper was almost 16 years Susie’s senior, and it wasn’t to be a marriage made in heaven. Indeed, this was to be merely the first of at least five or six marriages Susie would go through in the next 15 years, although none of these would appear to have been entirely legal (she was still calling herself Mrs Susie Raper in 1899 and was awarded a widow’s war pension in Raper’s name in 1900). Susie and Raper did, nonetheless, have three boys - Joseph was born in California in 1861, Robert in Paradise Valley, Humboldt County, Nevada, in 1863 and William, also in Paradise Valley, in 1865. In April 1865 Paiutes Native Americans attacked settlers in Paradise Valley and on July 26, Susie’s brother Joe Warfield was killed in a clash at Willow Point. At Gueno Valley the following March 7, Raper accidentally shot himself in the arm while defending the family farm from another raid, leaving him disabled throughout the rest of his life. (Raper later lived in Montana and Arizona and died, aged 70, in November 1898, having become a deacon in the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints at Santa Maria, California.)

At Gueno Valley Susie strapped her wounded husband to a horse, killed two of the attackers and took Raper 60 miles south to Camp Dun Glen. From there the couple moved to Unionville, where Raper was treated and Susie found a teamster willing to take the family back to California.  By the time they had reached the West Coast, Susie owned the team and the teamster still owed her money. Susie left her husband in Santa Barbara and returned to Humboldt County, where, dressed as male, she lassoed a deputy sheriff and was a suspected of stage robbery.

After appearing as the “Wickest Woman of the West” in a Winnemucca theatre, in 1869 she settled in Carlin, Elko County, and was convinced by Payne that he was a kindred spirit and would make a good fellow traveller. They contracted a Morganite marriage and planned the Native American land thieving partnership of Payne & Raper. The next year Susie declared herself a dressmaker in the US census. By then she had left the overtly respectable employ of Carrie Taylor to become an out-and-out outlaw.

The Indianapolis News suggested the good citizens of Elko would miss her. “Every now and then [they were] treated to a little fun by the fair damsel. Susie has no superior in boldness, dash and intrigue – if any equals. No yellow-covered book ever pictured her equal, if all accounts are true. Susie is as gay and festive as any female troubadour who ever trod the mountains under the blue sky of Italy. Possessing a natural and graceful appearance, a keen eye, a quick intellect, a tongue that swings on a pivot, she can make up to represent any character, and has ability enough to execute any deep laid scheme. Mazzepa chief of a gang of land pirates, she boasts of her power to command, at a moment’s warning, their assistance to execute her wishes, however unlawful or diabolical they may be. The experience of the dungeon taught her no lesson, as it was hoped it would have done by her lovers”.

After ditching Payne, Susie went through three more mock marriages. The first of these was to Frenchman Jacob “Jake” Youncker, who was struck down by smallpox. A Scotsman called Robert S. Black helped Susie bury Youncker, and then became Susie’s “husband” No 4. In 1884 Susie and Black fell out over property and Black attacked our heroine with an axe – only to be shot and killed by Susie’s .44 revolver. Susie pleaded self-defence and no charges were laid (at least for the time being, until she was dobbed in by her own son). Susie next married stockman Charles Dawson, but after further family feuding Dawson too was gunned down – though not this time by Susie herself.

Detroit Free Press, March 1870

In the midst of all this, Susie’s eldest and youngest sons, no doubt led by example, turned bad, and the middle son died young. As the Yerrington Times, Nevada, said of Joe Raper in August 1875, “Susie brought her children up in the way they should go and this one seems to be going it.” Still, Susie needed the signature of the youngest, Bill Raper, in order to acquire Tom Raper’s estate “of real and personal property”, after Raper died at La Graciosa, Santa Barbara, California, in November 1898. Susie was also living in Santa Barbara at the time, and two months after Tom’s death appealed to newspaper readers in Arizona to help her track Bill down. What she failed to mention was that 11 years earlier, Bill had scarpered with $1000 worth of Susie’s jewellery.

In February 1900, Susie was one of a handful of Californians to be granted pensions, in her case a princely $8 as a Mexican War widow. But she didn’t have long to enjoy it. Eight months later she was dead. Previously, all books and articles in which Susie’s life has been mentioned have speculated that in all probability she would meet a grisly end. None of the authors imaged that she would survive until one month after her 56^th birthday, or that she would die of cancer in her own bed, alone. But she did. And even more remarkably, this notorious killer did so having spent only four months in jail in her entire life – back in 1869!