Joe Boot

Joe Boot was an outlaw from Arizona. A farmer by profession, he lived in Globe, east of Phoenix.

In Mammoth, Arizona, he met Pearl Hart, who worked for the miners there. She was the instigator of Boot's downfall. On May 30, 1899, they held up a stagecoach at Cane Springs, on the Globe to Florence stagecoach route, near the present day town of Kearny, AZ.It was the last known stagecoach robbery in Arizona.

Boot and Hart managed to take only about 400 dollars and a revolver from three train passengers. They escaped, but five days later, they were found in Benson, Arizona.

Boot was sentenced to thirty years in the notorious Yuma Territorial Prison. Hart, who had pleaded her case to the all-male jury (as was the law at the time: women weren't allowed to serve on juries), was acquitted of the stage-coach robbery, but retried immediately and found guilty of theft of the stage driver's handgun. She got 5 years and got out early at that. Joe Boot escaped after two years and was never recaptured. [Stanley, John: "The Arizona Republic", 3/16/2008, Article Yuma Park, page T9]

After spending the five years in the Yuma jail, she lived a quieter and much more private life. She married a rancher and became a dedicated wife for the last 50 years of her life. They settled in Dripping Springs, Arizona, where she used the name Pearl Bywater. It was in 1940 that newspaper writer Clara Wooly accidentally discovered that "Pearl Bywater" was actually Pearl Hart. Wooly was conducting a census when she made her discovery.

Pearl Hart died in 1956, after spending most of her life as a free citizen gardening and writing in a diary.