BOXING, BURLESQUE, BRIDLES AND BORDELLOS
The 1883–84 gold rush to northern Idaho Territory attracted a variety of men and women willing to travel far in search of the priceless metal. Among them were well-known Western figures. Wyatt Earp and wife Sadie (aka “Josie”) ventured to the Coeur d’Alene goldfields along with brother James Earp and wife Nellie (aka “Bessie”). Martha Jane “Calamity Jane” Cannary also made an appearance. Among these Western icons was a woman remarkable in her own right—Mollie Berdan. Ignoring the conventional mores of the Victorian era, Mollie broke all the rules that governed the behavior of women.
She hadn’t started life with the name Mollie Berdan. She was born Margaret (“Maggie”) Hall in England. On March 30, 1851, according to the British census, Maggie was 3 months old and living with her Irish-born parents in Darwen, Lancashire (though some sources say she was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1853). Her father, Thomas, worked as a tailor, while her mother, also Margaret, cared for Maggie and older sisters Mary and Bridget. She apparently spent her teen years in England before immigrating to the United States on her own. Although she was educated, good jobs were hard to find. The June 14, 1870, city and county census for New York indicates Mar-garet Hall was 20 years old and working as a domestic in a New York City household. Soon after she met a dashing man with the surname Berdan (sometimes seen as Burdan), and they married.
Female Fistic Warfare
Women learn to box (and fence) in this 19th-century drawing. There are no known photographs of Mollie Berdan, who toured a while as a traveling prizefighter.
Her husband is the villain in stories about Maggie, which claim he was a no-account whose father drove the couple into poverty by stopping his allowance, thus forcing Maggie into prostitution in order to support them. It was Berdan who urged her name change to “Mollie,” perhaps for a measure of anonymity.
A news bit in the Nov. 22, 1875, suggests her line of work: “Patrick
