Minnesota's Notorious Nellie King: Wild Woman of the Closed Frontier

By Jerry Kuntz

This true crime biography chronicles the misadventures of a lady outlaw who caused havoc across the late-19th century northern plains.
 
The American historian Frederick Jackson Turner famously declared the 1890s to be the close of the American Frontier. But from 1887 to 1893, a young woman known as Nellie King was far from being tamed. King scandalized the residents of the Dakotas, Minnesota and northern Wisconsin with her fetching appearance, eccentric behavior, and criminal misdeeds. In Minnesota’s Notorious Nellie King, biographer Jerry Kuntz pieces together King’s legendary life—as well as the clues to her true identity.
 
King employed more than a dozen aliases throughout her career as a fake detective, horse thief, laudanum fiend, and general disturber of the peace across the northern plains. She attracted sensational headlines, love-struck suitors, and stray revolver shots with equal abandon; her story’s Dickensian cast of characters included a hapless counterfeiter, a dashing physician, a battle-hardened magician, and a determined mother.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Sep 17, 2013
• ISBN: 9781625846761

Book preview

Chapter 1

NELLIE THE FEMALE DETECTIVE

The September 30, 1887 edition of the Aberdeen (Dakota Territory) Weekly News featured the following article on its first page:

MYSTERIOUS NELLIE KING: The So-Called Detective in the City—Her Side of the Story

Nellie King, the female detective, who is causing so much ado in the western press, arrived from Frankfort Wednesday evening, and a News representative interviewed her yesterday. She says she is twenty years old and has been connected with the Kingsford Detective Association of New York City, and that the article in the Minneapolis and Saint Paul papers saying that she had ran away from her home in Minneapolis is not true. My home, says she, is in New York City. I came west the 10th of last February in search of a valuable horse which had been stolen from a leading stock barn of New York City. The horse is a bay mare 12½ hands high; six years old and has a record of 2:15, valued at $8,000. I found the horse well blanketed on the streets of Redfield, and I now have him in the city, but where he is no one but myself shall know. I will start with the horse for Chicago in a day or two, and from there I go to New York. At Frankfort, I saw a horse which I thought was the one I was in search of, and I demanded the same from the man driving it; he refused to give up the animal, and I drew my 38-caliber revolver, when he immediately obeyed. After a closer examination, I found the horse was not the one I was after and returned it. The papers got it that I drew a revolver on a young gentleman that came from Minneapolis or St. Paul with me, but that is a blank lie.

Miss King looks about 23 years old, has keen blue eyes and rather inclined to be good looking. She has a very determined manner but is of a nervous temperament. There is a deep mystery connected with the woman which has not yet been discovered, and judging from her shrewdness in language and manner, it will remain a mystery for some little time.¹

The Aberdeen Weekly News writer was prescient, as the mystery of Nellie King has endured for over 125 years. The puzzle over her identity and background has been a product of the scarcity of historical evidence, contemporary reporting inaccuracies and, most of all, Nellie’s own determination to mask her origins. As the following chapters trace her adult life, the mystery will appear to deepen with conflicting information, false leads and new aliases. Once all the clues are in hand, this text will then work toward a revelation of her secrets. This arrangement of facts is not artificially contrived; the solution to the enigma of Nellie King depends on evidence that accumulated through her life and culminates with disparate clues that surfaced near the end of her days.

Nellie King’s public record began ten days earlier than the Aberdeen newspaper account quoted above. On September 19, a lone bareback rider galloped along a wagon path that led to the settlement town of Frankfort, Dakota Territory. Much of the farmland the traveler passed was bare. Most of the spring wheat had been harvested, and sowing of the winter wheat crop was underway.

Each farm was a uniform tract mapped out by the federal government’s 160-acre homesteading program. In order for a settler to gain full title to his lot, the grant needed to be occupied and actively worked for several years. Some of the settlers’ sod, log or framed houses were set close to the wagon road, and no doubt the rider drew curious stares from families engaged in their outdoor chores.

When large numbers of white settlers arrived in Dakota Territory in the late 1870s and early 1880s, the indigenous Yanktonnais and Santee Sioux (who had been driven westward from Minnesota and Wisconsin a generation earlier) were already constrained to small reservations in the region. Their main subsistence, the American bison, had been hunted to near extinction by market and sport hunters. Though the plains soil was rich, the climatic extremes often foiled cultivation practices that had proven successful elsewhere. The most viable option for land use proved to be the replacement of native grasses with wheat and other grains.

The settlement boom that began in the 1870s was sparked by a network of new railroads: the Chicago & North Western, the Milwaukee Road, the Great Northern, the Rock Island and others. The railways brought in the homesteaders and their supplies and took out their grain crops. Farmers were entirely dependent on their local railroad company. The railroads had the power to set transportation rates and, in collusion with favored grain wholesalers and lumber companies, offered communities little competitive choice. The railroads could cripple the agricultural economy of a town just by failing to route an adequate number of grain cars following a harvest.

Prior to harvest, a farmer’s entire seasonal crop could vanish due to drought, hail, extreme cold, locust plagues or flooding rains. Many homesteaders were in debt even before they plowed any ground in order to pay for their building supplies and farm equipment. They also had the expense of keeping livestock, since the sowing and harvesting was accomplished using the power of horses and oxen. The pressures on a family trying to maintain a homestead lot were enormous. By the late 1890s, the failure rate of single-family homesteads led to consolidation of lots and increased mechanization. Settler families had to be hardworking, with little leisure time or expendable income.

Settlement towns in eastern Dakota Territory did not resemble the freewheeling boomtowns inspired by the high-risk work and quick riches of the mining, lumber or cattle industries. There were no grand saloons or dance-hall brothels—though the same vices did exist on a smaller scale. There were no resident rowdy cowboys, prospectors or lumberjacks. For the most part, these towns offered only essential services: rail stations, land offices, post offices, banks, general stores, farm equipment dealers, livestock exchanges and grain elevators. Professionals such as lawyers, doctors, dentists and midwives served the surrounding populace. The main social centers were churches and schools.²

On that late summer day in 1887, the mysterious rider galloped into the town of Frankfort, clothed in a cowboy’s duster coat; tight, light-colored trousers tucked into a stylish pair of women’s Newport boots; and wrists adorned with bracelets. The stranger approached people in town and displayed to them a commission certificate from the Northwestern Detective Association. The new arrival was in search of a stolen horse.³

The townspeople could not help but notice the rider’s belt held the accessory of a .38-caliber revolver. Once the stranger began speaking, she made no effort to hide her sex. Taking off her cap, she let down her curls—brunette by some accounts, blonde by others. She attracted a great deal of interest due in equal parts to her mixed mode of dress, her physical attractiveness and the implausible elements of her story. Were her clothes some sort of haphazard disguise? If so, then how did that relate to her mission? Why would anyone steal a race horse and transport it across the country to Dakota Territory, where it could not be sold for any figure close to its value?

The Homesteader’s Wife, by Harvey Dunn (1916). Backbreaking work was required by every member of a homesteading family. The appearance of a female detective who offered a curious account of her doings would have perplexed most citizens. Courtesy of the South Dakota Art Museum Collection.

The Prairie Is My Garden, by Harvey Dunn (1950). Despite daunting challenges, settlers in the Dakotas could not help but see the beauty of the prairie landscape. Courtesy of the South Dakota Art Museum Collection.

Over the next few days, the woman visited several neighboring towns, alternating between full male and female attire. She gave her name as Nellie King. Those who saw her ride into town praised her horsemanship, especially since she continued to ride bareback—no easy feat. She soon caught the notice of a newspaper writer in Redfield, about eight miles from Frankfort. As she went from town to town and related her story, elements of it changed. The stolen horse’s value varied from $8,000 to $5,000, and she called the horse a mare but also referred to it as him.⁴ Wherever she went, her appearance was sensational. By putting on trousers and sitting fully astride her horse, Nellie King was breaking two related taboos: cross-dressing and riding a horse with legs straddled, as men did. Earlier in the 1800s, women almost exclusively wore long skirts and rode sidesaddle (an angled saddle aligned so that both legs were on the left side of the horse). Later in the 1800s, especially on working ranches, women might ride fully astride a saddle if they wore trousers underneath long skirts. Other dress options were a long split skirt topped by a short full skirt or a split skirt over pants. For decades—if not centuries—the notion of women riding astride a horse was thought to be damaging to the vulva, an idea that started to be challenged by working horsewomen in the last decades of the nineteenth century.⁵

Cross-dressing was the more serious taboo. In the nineteenth century, local laws (including statutes in Minneapolis) existed in the United States prohibiting cross-dressing by either males or females. While differences in dress bolster gender norms in nearly every culture, laws that constrain those styles can also perpetuate rigid, unequal gender roles. Women who wore men’s clothing were assumed to be challenging the role of men in society—an affront to contemporary conceptions of economic and political power.

In 1887, there were a few circumstances in which it was socially acceptable for a woman to appear in men’s clothing. One place this could occur was on a theater stage. Women playing men’s roles occurred with great frequency throughout the nineteenth century in both Britain and America and included some of the most popular productions of the century. A regular staple of the American stage in the 1860s and 1870s were equestrian dramas, in which the drawing cards were live horses and lead actresses playing male roles and displaying their legs in form-fitting breeches. Another favorite genre was light comedy, which frequently employed the centuries-old tradition of eliciting laughs from cross-dressed characters.

A cabinet card of Adah Isaacs Menken, posing in a studio shot in stage costume. The stage was one of the few settings in which it was acceptable for late nineteenth-century women to appear wearing trousers. Courtesy of Ron Sheeley.

The stars of equestrian dramas, such as Adah Isaacs Menken and Leo Hudson, were the most popular actresses of the 1860s. It is likely that a significant percentage of the American population of the 1860s–1880s was aware of the story of the mad gallop of Mazeppa, if not from Lord Byron’s poem or Liszt’s symphonic work then from the salacious equestrian melodrama of the same name.⁶ In one scene, the character Mazeppa is lashed naked to a wild stallion—an effect simulated by a flesh-colored body suit. The play Mazeppa had been produced in every major American city starting in the late 1860s.⁷

A rarer situation in which a woman could dress as a man was when a disguise was needed in pursuit of a rightful cause. It is likely that this occurred more in fiction than in reality, but there were published true-life accounts of female spies, private detectives and police informants who masked themselves in male garb. More common were the stories of women who hid their sex and enlisted as soldiers, or poor girls who dressed as young men in order to get a paying job that would have been denied to a female. While the women combatants and wage earners were unmasked if discovered, it is also true that their motives were not viewed as malicious nor their cross-dressing as degenerate. Nellie King’s public appearance in men’s clothes would have immediately been seen as disreputable were it not for her defense of being a detective.

The editor of the Bismarck (Dakota Territory) Tribune did a little investigating of his own, exchanging telegrams with someone in Minneapolis who had information pertaining to Nellie King. It is not known who that source in Minneapolis was, but the Bismarck editor printed the unattributed allegations he was given alongside the story of Nellie’s local activities. The Minneapolis-datelined article read: A woman known as Nellie King bears an unsavory reputation in Minneapolis. She is only about 18 years old, but it is said that she has been married to no less than three different men within the last year. It was also mentioned that she was currently the mistress of a clerk who worked on Nicollet Avenue in Minneapolis. The account continued, She had a sister living in Duluth, the wife of a respected man. Nellie induced her to come to Minneapolis to enter upon a life of shame in this city. The sister, it is said, is now an inmate of a First Street bagnio.⁸

It did not take long for Nellie’s story to fall apart once she reached the town of Aberdeen. Within a few days, she had taken up residence at a house of ill-repute.⁹ In the same edition of the Aberdeen Weekly News in which she mentioned the Kingsford Detective Association, the paper followed up on the first version of her story and obtained a denial from the Northwestern Detective Association that she was one of their agents. The manager

Reviews for Minnesota's Notorious Nellie King

[nx74defiant · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Short, quick read. I like seeing the newspaper articles of the time. The book includes pictures and drawings from the time of Nellie's life. There is information of the happenings in Minnesota at that period.