Some of the petticoat prisoners of may have been a threat to society: Eliza "Big Jack" Stewart shot a man in the neck at a dance; Anna Bruce baked poison into her father's plum pie; Minnie Snyder and her husband killed a man in a shootout with neighbors.

Many of these women's crimes might draw our sympathy -- like that of Stella Gatlin whose kleptomania didn't mix with her work as postmistress or Anna Trout who abandoned her baby grandchild in a train depot or Annie Groves who shot at, but missed, a man who had given her an infectious disease.

These twenty-three women, wearing frills, lace, and their best bonnets, became guests at the Gray Bar Hotel.

Imagine this. Once high-spirited women shared the same drab and drafty room. Day and night. Cheek by jowl. Only bars and a grid of strap-iron veiled their most intimate moments. They awoke each morning to the harsh, metallic call of a bell. The clang of a clapper, rather than a voice, directed each lock-step during the rest of their strict, cloistered day. Many of the women bathed in cold water from the same bucket...lathered with the same bar of lye soap... ate the same bland food ... used the same stained toilet. Neither flagellants nor nuns of a medieval order, these petticoat prisoners, convicted by the courts for committing felonies, suffered imprisonment in the territorial penitentiary and, later, state prisons of Old Wyoming for their sins against society. Here are some of those women.

If you click on Viola Biggs' photo, you can read her entire story. And if you click on Anna Florence Bruce's photo, you'll see her typed confession. Whoo hoo!

Hattie LaPierre (Inmate #965), according to some accounts, figuratively shot herself in the foot when she, literally, fired two lead slugs into the body of Frank McKinney, alias "Harry H. Black," who forced her into prostitution to help support his drinking and gambling.

Twenty-seven year-old Caroline Winfield-Hayes (Inmate #259 and #365) has the dubious distinction of being the only woman to serve more than one tern in Wyoming's "Gray Bar Hotel." First she torched a Rock Springs washhouse and then she robbed a neighbor's home. Only a judge's loose leash and her fast feet saved her from a third trip to the "Big House" for stealing two blankets from a store.

Seventeen year-old Anna Florence Bruce (Inmate #1206) confessed a crime so chilling, so compelling and unbelievable that it left the jury hearing her case with an aftertaste as bitter as the strychnine she poured into her father's plum pie. Only by "the grace of God" was her brother spared their father's torturous death when he refused to eat the pie.

Twenty year-old Viola Biggs (Inmate $817) and her mother Anna Trout found their way into prison on kidnapping charges when the couple conspired to abandon Viola's child -- Anna's grandson -- at the railway station in Denver, Colorado. Sandwiched in a cell amongst the rowdy male inmates, they begged officials to move them to another location. They got their wish and were moved to the Laramie County Jail for the duration of their sentences.