Polly Pry: The Woman Who Wrote the West

by Julia Bricklin

Overview

In 1900, the young and beautiful Leonel Ross Campbell became the first female reporter to work for the Denver Post. As the journalist known as Polly Pry, she ruffled feathers when she worked to free a convicted cannibal and when she battled the powerful Telluride miners’ union. She was nearly murdered more than once. And a younger female colleague once said, “Polly Pry did not just report the news, she made it!” If only that young reporter had known how true her words were. Polly Pry got her start not just writing the news but inventing it. In spite of herself, however, Campbell would become a respected journalist and activist later in her career. She would establish herself as a champion for rights of the under served in the early twentieth century, taking up the causes of women, children, laborers, victims and soldiers of war, and prisoners. And she wrote some of the most sensational stories that westerners had ever read, all while keeping the truth behind her success a secret from her colleagues and closest friends and family.  

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781493034390
Publisher:	TwoDot
Publication date:	09/01/2018
Pages:	216
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Julia Bricklin is also the author of the only biography of female sharpshooter Lillian Frances Smith (University of Oklahoma Press: April 2017) and Burmah Adams and Tom White’s 1933 LA crime spree in Blonde Rattlesnake (Lyons Press: June 2019). She has authored a dozen articles in well-respected commercial and academic journals, such as Civil War Times, Financial History, Wild West, True West and California History.

Table of Contents

Author's Note v

Introduction 1

Chapter 1 Old Mexico, New York 9

Chapter 2 Colorado, A Cave of Whispers 21

Chapter 3 A Cannibal and Ol' Plug Hat 37

Chapter 4 Around the World with Polly Pry 51

Chapter 5 Tom Horn and Vincent St. John 61

Chapter 6 Parting Ways with the Post 77

Chapter 7 Tell the Truth and Shame the Devil 101

Chapter 8 Mining Wars, Murder, and Mother Jones, Part I 107

Chapter 9 Mining Wars, Murder, and Mother Jones, Part II 119

Chapter 10 The Business of Polly Pry 129

Chapter 11 Polly Pry and Pancho Villa, Part I 145

Chapter 12 Polly Pry and Pancho Villa, Part II 157

Chapter 13 Lakeshore, Englewood, and Poppies 173

Notes 185

Index 199

About the Author 207