The trouble with pirates is only the most famous leave behind some documentation.
This here's an honorable mention. Sadie the Goat, who I decided not to go with since the consensus seems to be that since the only documentation on her shows up in Herbert Asbury's Gangs of New York that she could be fictional.
Gangs of New York is an entertaining and vivid read but far from an indisputable source. In the words of Russell Shorto in the foreword to the edition that I read, Asbury "wasn't writing history - there are no footnotes in the book, no evidence of cross-referencing of sources - but popular entertainment. And he was working with material that would be hard to verify even if you were getting it as events unfolded."
So while some parts are heavily specific about this patrolmen dying in the Draft Riots on this and such streetcorner on this day, there are also accounts of 8-foot tall gangleaders related as fact. So it's hard to tell what is legend, and it's just got a bibliography at the end, with some of those sources agreed upon as being more folklore than fact.
So barring a discovery of Sadie's galley, or daguerreotype of a dangerous looking one-eared lady shipboard, her existence will remain unconfirmed.
That all aside, should Sadie have existed, she was a badass of high caliber.
There were pirates in New York City well into the nineteenth century. All that waterfront, all that shipping, all those cops on the take, it seems inevitable. One of those in on this burgeoning industry was the Charlton Street Gang, but they had only limited success until they were taken over by a lass called Sadie the Goat.
Sadie had previously kept her base of operations in the Fourth Ward. She gained her nickname of Sadie the Goat because her preferred method of robbery was to lie in wait for a well dressed looking gentleman, then headbutt him in the stomach to surprise and incapacitate him. Then, as he was reeling from that, her accomplice would come up from behind him and whack him across the head. They could then rob the unconscious dupe at their leisure.
But then she made the mistake of tangling with Gallus Mag, a six-foot bartender and bouncer in the Fourth Ward. If you gave her trouble while being tossed from her bar (and one wonders, just what in those bad old days, would get you kicked out of a bar) you lost your ear to her jaws, and she gained a new ornament in her collection. For you'd be tossed from the bar, but that little part of you would stay behind, pickled in a jar, as a warning.
Well, Sadie must have given her trouble. She wound up fleeing, sans one ear, to the West Side to hide out. This was around 1869, and the Charlton Street Gang were in need of some leadership. An ambitious woman, she stole them all a small sloop, raised the Jolly Roger and paced the deck as they robbed ships and farmsteads all up and down the Hudson all the way to Poughkeepsie.
Occasionally, they branched out into kidnapping as well, holding men, women and children for ransom. She was also known to make her enemies walk the plank.
For several months, this was a very successful venture, but then the farmers began to arm themselves, and match her raiding party's firepower. So Sadie abandoned her sloop, and went back to the Fourth Ward. She made a truce with Gallus Mag, declaring her queen of the waterfront.
Gallus Mag was so touched by this that she gave Sadie back her ear, though I'm not sure that it would have been so identifiable after months in the pickling jar. Sadie wore the ear around her neck on a locket for the rest of her life. And if I were an author of children's books, I'd make the touching final page, a drawing of that huge ogre of a woman and her one-eared pirate pal with that bit of macabre jewelry around her neck walking arm and arm down the filthy streets of the Fourth Ward. This is probably why I am not the author of any children's books.
So honorable mention, dear Sadie, should you have existed. I raise my glass to you.
