Follow up to the 2004's Red Dead Revolver, Red Dead Redemption is a Western epic, set at the turn of the 20th century when the lawless and chaotic badlands began to give way to the expanding reach of government and the spread of the Industrial Age.

Red Dead Redemption recreates the American West at the turn of the 20th century: a violent and turbulent time of rapid growth and change. Players become the partially reformed outlaw John Marston; blackmailed by the government, his family threatened as he is forced to traverse the vast and unforgiving expanses of the Western frontier in search of members of his former gang. In a dangerous world full of opportunistic criminals, corrupt officials and settlers battling the elements in a struggle to survive, Marston’s journey takes him from the dusty and lawless frontier to the civilized towns of the North, and down into a Mexico on the brink of a full-scale civil war.

Utilizing Rockstar's proprietary Rockstar Advanced Game Engine (RAGE), Red Dead Redemption features an open-world environment for players to explore, including frontier towns, rolling prairies teeming with wildlife, and perilous mountain passes - each packed with an endless flow of varied distractions. Along the way, players will experience the heat of gunfights and battles, meet a host of unique characters, struggle against the harshness of one of the world’s last remaining wildernesses, and ultimately pick their own precarious path through an epic story about the death of the Wild West and the gunslingers that inhabited it.

The two dominant Western female archetypes that have emerged from popular literature and film – are the innocent and prim townswoman, versus the tawdry saloon whore.  Of course in the real Old West, historical female figures weren’t nearly so simplistic to characterize.  In Red Dead Redemption, you’ll meet a couple of complex and conflicted women such as Bonnie - a smart and strong-willed rancher's daughter known to be more than capable with a gun, and Luisa - a driven young Mexican girl doing what she has to to help her family.

Part two of the True West series of research insights, “Bad Guys Gone Good…and Vice Versa”, documenting just some of the actual stories of the West that inspired the characters of Red Dead Redemption, we examine the fascinating life of a good girl gone bad: Pearl Taylor, better known as the notorious Pearl Hart.

Who was this woman of many faces?  A soiled dove corrupted by her outlaw lovers and their wild lifestyle... a cigar-chomping deadbeat mom robbing on the run for fun… or a proto-feminist icon and early contributor to Cosmo?

Her adult life began with her rejecting high society for dashing gunslingers and Buffalo Bill shows, but it ended with the so-called ‘Bandit Queen’ going in and out of jail, then disappearing mysteriously. Here’s a look at what happened in between.

Pearl Hart (c. 1871 – after 1928)

The Bad Old Days

Born to God-fearing and well-to-do parents in Canada, Pearl Taylor was safely enrolled in boarding school when she met the on-again, off-again love of her life: a hard-drinking, and abusive gambler who gave her his surname, Hart.

He also convinced her to abandon her two kids and hit the road. Chasing the romance of the Old West, he took her to Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show at the Chicago World Fair of 1893. She left with another man; at this point she was, in her own words, “good-looking, desperate, discouraged and ready for anything.” “Anything” may have included sex for money, a taste for liquor, cigars and morphine, robbing stagecoaches with a new love interest named Joe Boot, escaping jail and even writing for Cosmopolitan magazine.

Her new life as an infamous stick-up gal landed her in a Yuma, Arizona prison under a thirty-year sentence for her robberies after famed lawman (and Cosmo reader) George Scarborough allegedly recognized her from her articles and arrested her. Two years into the sentence, her boyfriend Joe escaped, never to be seen again. Pearl wasn’t so lucky.

A Changed Woman?

In December 1902, Alexander Brodie, the Governor of Arizona made Pearl’s Christmas by pardoning her. Was it generosity, or was it the rumor that he may have gotten her pregnant (which Pearl may have fabricated to get out of prison)? Whether due to sympathy or out of fear of a scandal, Pearl was free at last.

Following her release, she managed to stay out of trouble for the most part; like many other washed-up outlaws, she put together a show about her daring deeds and her stretch in prison before graduating up to a gig with the show that inspired her lawless lifestyle, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show.

The last known record of Pearl Hart was a charge in 1904 for receiving stolen property at a cigar store that she ran in Kansas City. Competing claims cited her as living well into the ‘40s, the ‘50s and even as late as 1960.