Leonel was born on November 11, 1857 on a Mississippi
Plantation. She was educated at a private school in St. Louis until, at the age
of 15, she scaled a wall to elope with George Anthony.
In 1878 she left her husband and arrived in New York City
where she asked a friend of the family for a position at the New York World. She did such a great work that they sent her
to Panama as the Latin American correspondent.
After twenty years she moved to Denver, Colorado to be near her parents,
and began writing for the Denver Post.
She assumed the pen name “Polly Pry” which was a rhyming tribute to her
role model, Nellie Bly.
While writing an article on Colorado prisons, she met Alfred
Packer who was serving a reduced sentence of forty years in prison for eating
five prospectors to save himself from starvation. She argued his case as an
investigative journalist stating that he had not killed them but only eaten the
men after they were already dead. She secured Packer’s release in 1901.
When union workers boycotted the Post for her stance on
labor issues and immigration, Leonel started her own liberal feminist magazine
named “Polly Pry”. In January of 1904 answering
a knock on her door, she was shot twice by an unknown assailant. Luckily the bullets missed her and she
claimed it was organized labor trying to silence her.
She closed her magazine in 1905 and married Denver Lawyer
Harry J. O’Bryan who died four years later while she was on assignment in
Mexico doing a story on Pancho Villa.
She spent World War I in Greece and Albania, an advocate for free speech
and as director of publicity for the Red Cross. She also came to the aid of French
war orphans. After the war, she settled
again in Denver, where she continued work for the Red Cross.
