Career
Born Mary Elizabeth Haley, Libby had a difficult childhood. The family lost its fortune during the Civil War, and in 1864 Comanche Indians raided the Haley farm in Texas and took young Libby captive. From this point forward, Libby was a marked woman.
Even though she was only thirteen, many people assumed that she had sexually submitted to the Indians during her captivity.
Libby found herself shunned and ostracized from society. Libby’s reputation was soiled even further.
At the age of fourteen, Libby ran away from home in search of a fresh start. She wound up in Abilene, Kansas, but a young woman alone had few options so Libby became a dance hall girl and prostitute.
In Abilene she hooked up with a gambler and part-time cowboy named Billy Thompson, brother of the notorious Ben Thompson.
In 1870, the couple left Kansas for Texas and for the next couple of years Billy punched cows along the Chisholm Trail while Libby continued working as a dance hall girl in various towns across the southern prairie. In 1872, at the age of seventeen, Libby was plying her trade in the cattle town of Ellsworth, Kansas, while Billy worked the gambling halls. By the spring of 1873, however, the couple was back out on the prairie with a spring cattle drive.
In the summer of 1873, Billy Thompson, in a state of drunkenness, shot and killed Ellsworth town sheriff Chauncey Whitney.
He was arrested but got the cattle company he worked for to bail him out. Because he was fearful of being shot himself by vengeful family members, Billy and Libby ran.
The couple wound up in Dodge City, where Billy gambled and Libby worked as a dancer and prostitute. After Dodge City, the Thompsons drifted to Colorado but by 1876 they had moved to Sweetwater, Texas, which became their permanent home.
In Sweetwater the couple purchased a ranch outside of town and a dance hall in town.
Libby ran the dance hall which was a front for a brothel. Libby was not embarrassed by her profession, and it was as a madam in Sweetwater that she became known for keeping her pet prairie dogs. These, along with a gap in her teeth, gave her the sobriquet, "Squirrel Tooth Alice." Libby Thompson continued running her Sweetwater brothel until she retired in 1921 at the age of sixty-six.
On April 13, 1953, Libby Thompson died at the Sunbeam Rest Home in Los Angeles, California, at the age of ninety-eight.
