Alice "Poker Alice" Ivers Tubbs
1851 (or 1853)-1930. Gambler and brothel owner
Almost everything colorful about Poker Alice comes from Poker Alice. The Denver Public Library’s biography is plain about this: few documents back up her accounts, and frontier figures often told wild stories about themselves. The State Historical Society’s brief profile gives her birth as February 17, 1851, in Sudbury, England; the Denver library notes that one book title has it as 1853. Her upper-class schooling also rests on her word.
Dealing
By her account she married a mining engineer, Frank Duffield, and moved to Lake City, Colorado, where she took up gambling as a hobby. When he died in a mine accident it became her living. She followed booms through Leadville, Central City and Creede, and after a big win in Silver City, New Mexico, she turned to dealing faro. The stories of meetings with Soapy Smith and Bob Ford are her own recollections. So is the explanation of her success: a poker face and a refusal to cheat.
The Black Hills
She arrived in the Black Hills in the early 1890s. Dealing stud in Deadwood, she acquired her famous nickname and met a rival dealer, Warren G. Tubbs. They married and eventually retired to a ranch near Sturgis. He died in 1909 or 1910, depending on the source.
Back at the tables to earn a living, she opened a gambling house and bordello near Sturgis for the soldiers at Fort Meade. She reportedly closed it on Sundays and taught her employees Sunday school lessons. In 1913 a bullet she fired through a window during a confrontation killed a young soldier. She married George Huckert, a hired hand, when she could no longer pay his wages, and resumed the name Tubbs after his death in 1924. Reformers finally shut her down.
A living relic
The old gambler became a fixture of Deadwood’s nostalgia. She was invited to a 1925 celebration of surviving frontier figures, and she appeared in early Days of ’76 parades in a khaki shirt and campaign hat.
She died after surgery, either on February 27, 1930, as the State Historical Society says, or on February 13, as the Denver library has it. She is buried in Sturgis, not at Mount Moriah.