May Calvin, Another Female Horse Thief

Last week I wrote about Della Oxley, a female horse thief who made headlines in Southwest Missouri in the early 1890s. Shortly after Della was sent to prison, May Calvin appeared on the scene to take up the work of horse thievery. May’s exploits were sensationalized in the press even more than Della’s, and she eventually joined her predecessor at the big house in Jefferson City.  

May came to Webb City around 1890, when she was about fifteen years old. Shortly afterward, she dropped out of school and joined Robinson’s Circus in St. Louis as a rider. Before long, she came back to southwest Missouri and drifted across the state line into Kansas, where she went on a criminal spree.
About the middle of October, 1892, May stole a horse and buggy at Fort Scott and immediately started south. She was captured at Weir City, brought back to Fort Scott, and placed in the Bourbon County jail. However, her youth and good looks won her the sympathy of the prosecutors, and the case against her was dismissed on January 21, 1893.
Less than twelve hours after gaining her freedom, a May appropriated a horse and buggy from a barn near Hepler, Kansas, and drove back to Fort Scott. She then “drove furiously” to Nevada, Missouri. There she left the stolen rig at a livery as security for another horse and buggy and resumed her mad dash. The day after she passed through Nevada, a posse captured her, and she was turned over to Crawford County authorities for the Hepler heist.
Placed in the county jail at Girard, May escaped or was again released in March or April, and she soon turned up in Joplin. Calling at the livery stable of W. V. White, she hired a horse and buggy for the stated purpose of driving to East Joplin, but she conveniently forgot to return the rig. Around the first of June, White recovered his stolen horse, but there was no sign of his buggy, nor of May Calvin. Then, on June 5, May was arrested in Columbus, Kansas, for disturbing the peace. The local officers held her until a Joplin constable arrived on June 7 to take her back to Jasper County. Unable to post bond, she was taken to Carthage and placed in the same jail cell where Della Oxley had been housed in 1891.

May was charged with grand larceny, but before she could be tried, she and a fellow female inmate made a daring escape from the county jail on June 16, 1893. According to the Carthage Press, they escaped through the same opening “commenced two years ago by Della Oxley.”

May was recaptured a day or two after her escape and taken back to Carthage. On June 22, she pled guilty to horse stealing and was assessed two years in the state penitentiary. Unabashed by the punishment, May greeted reporters cheerily as she was being escorted back to jail and asked them to “write her up right.”

A Press reporter proceeded to oblige her with an embellished account of her misadventures. “She…now goes to the penitentiary for the first time,” the newspaperman concluded, “though she has stolen dozens of horses and vehicles.”
The Carthage newspaperman’s account was tame compared to some of the incredible stories about May that appeared elsewhere. May made headlines across the country and even internationally. One story, first published in the US and later picked up by a New Zealand newspaper, called May “the phenomenal girl horse-thief,” whose career “surpassed anything of the kind before known.”
The stories about May continued long after she had been sent to the state prison. In 1894, a St. Louis Republic reporter visited May at the Jefferson City facility and wrote a fantastic story entitled “A Beautiful Horse Thief.” The newspaperman’s description of May bordered on the titillating, calling her “pretty as a picture” and “a rustic beauty,” with “great blue eyes and a mass of tousled hair of Titian hint. Her form is luscious…. Her mouth is one that an impressionable artist would go wild over, with its cherry red lips of sensuous curve.”
Admitting that she was guilty as charged, May told the Republic reporter, “I have no hard luck story to tell.”
May said she didn’t know why she’d turned out so bad because her mother and father had treated her well. She added, “I’m not like other women, either, in blaming my downfall on any man.”
After serving eighteen months of her two-year sentence, May was released from prison on December 22, 1894. What happened to her after her discharge remains a mystery.
This story, like the one last week about Della Oxley, is condensed from my book Wicked Women of Missouri.