http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36%257E53%257E2582542,00.html?search=filter
What a gal!!
December 08, 2004
Lowery got the gun to fend off intruders after a rash of break-ins at her place along U.S. 491. She sawed off the end so the gun would be lighter and easier to handle. She has several other guns and really can't remember a time when guns and outlaws weren't part of her life.
"We've always had to have guns to protect the chickens from coyotes and hawks," says the trim, straight-backed, lipsticked and turquoise-bejeweled octogenarian. "And Dove Creek was a hideout for outlaws for a long time."
Lowery wanted her new shotgun because she figures that just the sound of the mechanism being pulled back to load the chamber would alert most would-be burglars to the error of their ways.
"I don't think I'll ever have to pull the trigger," she says.She's been married and divorced twice and widowed once. She says she wouldn't "have another man around if he were gold-plated." So she bought another gun.
Sheriff Jerry Martin says he's not concerned about Lowery's guns because she knows how to use them, and "she's a sweet lady." Her gun-toting ways don't make her particularly notorious in the small community north of Cortez, he says.
Lowery allows that "you don't hardly need guns anymore." But when she was a girl in the 1920s and early 1930s, she says, "nearly all the men packed a pistol" for their personal protection. Bootlegging was a revenue source for many local farmers, who shipped moonshine to miners in Rico and the Dolores area during Prohibition.
Lowery is convinced that, one summer in the early 1930s, a local bootlegger played host to one of the country's most notorious bank robbers - Charles "Pretty Boy" Floyd - while he was on the run from federal agents.
The young man from out of town said his name was Joe Smiley.
"We all liked Joe Smiley," says Lowery. "There were so many bootleggers when I was a kid, everybody just knew to keep their mouth shut."
Biographer Michael Wallis has documented that Floyd spent some time around Pueblo, but his trail would disappear altogether at times. But nothing is written about Floyd being in Dove Creek, to Lowery's knowledge.
But Lowery says Floyd slept in a nearby barn. He would saddle up every morning and ride all day. Her father, a farmer and watchmaker, often ran into Smiley on local trails.
"One day Pop brought home a Denver Post. He said: 'They killed Joe Smiley.' But the paper said it was Pretty Boy Floyd in the picture."
Police and federal agents gunned down Floyd along Sprucevale Road between East Liverpool and Rogers, Ohio, on Oct. 22, 1934. Floyd was 30 years old.
"Too bad things turn out like that," Lowery says. "He was a good-looking guy.