Born: 1871
Died: 1925?
AKA: Mrs. L. P. Keele

Had Pearl Hart pulled a stagecoach robbery thirty years earlier, she probably would not have earned a spot in the history books. But because she and her accomplice botched a robbery in 1899—at the end of the stagecoach era—she staked her claim to fame as the perpetrator of the last American stagecoach robbery.

Married life and Old West shows

Pearl Taylor was born into to a well respected middle-class family in Lindsay, Ontario, Canada. One of several children, she was educated at an all-girl boarding school in Toronto. At the age of seventeen she eloped (ran away to marry) with Frederick Hart—a man who liked to gamble and had no steady job.

In 1893 the Harts attended the Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois—a large fair with many sideshows. For some time Frederick worked...