Details You Didn't Know About Rose Dunn

According to True West magazine, there has been much doubt about the sensational account of Rose Dunn as a young, female outlaw. The tale was first told in the 1915 book Oklahoma Outlaws, and told and told again for the next four decades, but no one knew who the "Rose of Cimarron" really was until James D. Horan published his book Desperate Women in 1952. However, a book published the following year, Glenn Shirley's Toughest of Them All, would claim that a 14-year-old Rose Dunn was never involved in the Ingalls gunfight. Dunn's second husband, who outlived her after she died in 1955, said that she had been "a true friend of the outlaws... but she was never the sweetheart of any." True West magazine came to the conclusion that despite all the differing accounts of Dunn's life, all those writers and filmmakers wouldn't have wanted to tell such a story "if there was not some basis of fact."

One thing we do know for sure, however, is that the photo that people believed for years was of Rose Dunn (the one at the head of this article) isn't actually of Rose Dunn. Author Michael Rutter revealed in his 2008 book Bedside Book of Bad Girls: Outlaw Women of the American West that the woman in that photo was actually a prisoner who had been asked to pose for the photo in exchange for a reduced sentence.