Hello, I'm Frank Turner. Welcome to Tales from No Man's Land, a podcast that accompanies my album, No Man's Land. It's about 13 women from history who you probably haven't heard of, but definitely should have. Their stories are fascinating, moving, funny,

and most importantly, worth celebrating and sharing.

Welcome back to the podcast.

This episode is about the extraordinary life and the tragic death of Dora Hand.

I came across Dora's story while I was reading about the history of the American West,

and I couldn't quite believe that no one had written a song about her already.

There's something Shakespearean about the story of her life and the way that she died

accidentally at the hands of a man who was in love with her and was trying to actually

kill her other actual lover, his rival.

Dora was a vaudeville singer.

She was a star, a local legend, in the salons of a wild west town called Dodge City,

which was in Kansas and still is, but she was famous in the late 1800s,

at which point in time Dodge City was a boom town built around the cattle industry.

I'm generally fascinated by the history of America,

and so I was very excited on a recent American tour of mine

to be able to drive to Dodge City to the Boothill Museum

and to meet the director Lynn Johnson,

who told me more about the history of the city,

the story of Dora's colourful life,

and the love triangle that led to her murder.

So here we are on Easter Monday in Boot Hill Museum in Dodge City, Kansas.

They've got a whole street of houses that are replicas built of how Dodge City would have been in the 1870s. And I'm sat

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