Read The Life and Legacy of Annie Oakley Online

Authors: Glenda Riley

Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Women, #History, #United States, #19th Century, #test

The Life and Legacy of Annie Oakley (26 page)

BOOK: The Life and Legacy of Annie Oakley
10.08Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

 

Page 146
insisted on adopting Annie to replace a daughter who had died after the Little Big Horn. To Annie, like the women on the westward trail who laughed when Indian men offered ponies in trade for them, the whole thing seemed just a lark. Annie knew she would never go to Dakota Territory, even though, as a chief's daughter, she could claim ponies, cattle, and other benefits.
Frank Butler proved quicker in recognizing the tremendous advertising possibilities in the incident. After all, if people all over the United States hoped to glimpse the chief whenever he left the reservation, why would they not throng to see his adopted daughter? This would prove to be the beginning of Annie Oakley as the "girl of the western plains," as many fans and reviewers liked to call her. Annie had already displayed a number of the qualities often associated with western women: she was independent yet was a helpmeet to her husband; she was aggressive yet was a civilizer as well. Now, a year before she joined Buffalo Bill, the great Sioux chief put her on the path toward identifying herself with the Old West.
Two weeks after the meeting between Annie and Sitting Bull, Frank placed an advertisement in the
New York Clipper
announcing that "the premier shots, Butler and Oakley," had made friends with the most fearsome Indian chief of all. Frank added that, in front of numerous witnesses, Sitting Bull had given them, along with other gifts, the pair of moccasins he had worn at the Little Big Horn. But the friendship was short-lived. Sitting Bull returned to the Standing Rock reservation in Dakota Territory and Annie turned eastward, first to visit her mother, then to join the Sells Brothers Circus for a season.
Frank had no hesitation about identifying Annie with the West to attract people caught somewhere between the disappearing frontier and the emerging machine age. Sitting Bull and Frank Butler ignited a flame that turned into a bonfire. Annie's relationships with Native Americans, her participation in the Wild West show, her stage appearances, and film and fiction between 1885 and 1913 fueled her western image into a blaze seen all over the world.
Annie and Sitting Bull reunited in 1885 after William E Cody's press agent, John Burke, escorted Sitting Bull from Standing

 

Page 147
Rock to tour with the Wild West. Legend has it that Sitting Bull leapt at the chance to be near his beloved "Little Sure Shot" every day, but the reality is far more complicated. Cody was not the first entertainer to think about taking Sitting Bull on the road. As early as 1883, Reverend Joseph A. Stephan asked the Indian agent Major James McLaughlin's permission to display the chief at his church fair in Jamestown in the Dakotas. McLaughlin refused the request and turned away other petitioners as well. McLaughlin had allowed the chief to visit cities only to impress him with the benefits of "civilization" so that Sitting Bull would encourage his people to engage in farming and start attending school. But McLaughlin feared that fame and publicity would make Sitting Bull conceited and unmanageable.
When Cody's request came in, McLaughlin refused permission as a matter of form. He noted that he had received so many similar proposals that they had become "considerable of a bore." McLaughlin did offer Cody a thread of hope, however. He wrote that if the "late hostiles" were ever given permission to leave the reservation with a show, he preferred to have them join the Wild West, which, in his view, presented worthy entertainment.
In the meantime, Stephan had taken over as head of the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions and had persuaded Secretary of the Interior Henry M. Teller to allow him to take Sitting Bull on tour to benefit the missions. McLaughlin, who feared that the irascible chief and the touchy priest would ignite their own personal conflagration, decided to intervene. Handling Sitting Bull with great care and tact, McLaughlin encouraged him and eight others to tour on their own, as the Sitting Bull Combination, to twenty-five cities between Minnesota and New York. But when the group returned from the nearly two-month-long tour on October 25, 1884, they had little to show for their efforts.
McLaughlin believed that Cody and his flair for publicity could do far better by Sitting Bull. He gave his blessing to Cody, who on April 29, 1885, wired the secretary of the interior that Sitting Bull had "expressed a desire to travel" with him. Cody promised to treat the chief well and "pay him a good salary." The secretary directed the commissioner of Indian affairs, John Atkins, to "make a very emphatic
No
" to Cody. Atkins tried, arguing that the

 

Page 148
Indians had to plant crops and could not travel and exhibit themselves "where they would naturally come in contact with evil associates and degrading immoralities."
Cody next rallied General William T. Sherman and Colonel Eugene A. Carr to his cause and petitioned again. On May 18, the secretary capitulated; he wired McLaughlin that Sitting Bull and a few other reservation Indians had permission to tour with the Wild West. John Burke picked up the men two weeks later. Burke brought with him a contract stipulating that Sitting Bull would receive a bonus of $125 in advance and a salary of $50 per week while the others would receive $25 per month. Apparently, Sitting Bull had thought of all the angles, for the contract had a handwritten note appended: "Sitting Bull is to have sole right to sell his own Photographs and Autographs."
When Burke arrived in Buffalo, New York, Sitting Bull in tow, he boasted: "He is ours. I have captured him." Burke and Sitting Bull must have made a startling couple, for Burke styled himself after Cody, including the long, flowing hair, whereas the chief wore a buckskin tunic weighted with beads, a forty-feather bonnet, a crucifix around his neck, and a medicine bag slung at his side. Sitting Bull probably looked as happy as Burke, however, for he believed he was about to make much-needed money and possibly get the opportunity to convey his people's troubles to what he called "the new White Father at Washington," President Grover Cleveland.
Annie welcomed Sitting Bull into the Wild West troupe. She marched up and asked him about some coins and a red silk handkerchief she had sent him. Through his interpreter, Sitting Bull replied that he had received the gifts but left them behind for safekeeping. He added: "I am very glad to see you. I have not forgotten you and feel pleased that you want to remember me."
During the following months on the road, Annie formed a fast friendship with Sitting Bull. She also listened to his complaints. Some members of the troupe claimed that Annie was the only one in camp who could lift Sitting Bull out of his frequent depressions. The chief's foremost grievance concerned army troops that trespassed on the hay and timber lands at Standing Rock. He feared that in a few years his people would face utter poverty. He also told Annie that cattle ranchers encroached on the reservation

 

Page 149
and counted twice each cow intended for Sioux consumption. And the agents, Sitting Bull confided, gave Indians "half-and-half instead of sugarthe other half being sand."
Annie also sympathized with Sitting Bull when he gave away much of his salary to the poor urchins who haunted every show lot. She understood his desire to help others. Too, Sitting Bull failed to understand the white people he met who, in his view, refused to take care of their own. He feared for the Indian, for what would such stingy, selfish people be willing to share with Native Americans?
Oddly enough, John Burke failed to turn the chief and Annie's friendship into a publicity gimmick. Neither did Oakley join the various publicity events that Burke staged for Sitting Bull that season. Since Burke never missed an opportunity, it is conceivable that Annie, out of respect for the chief, refused to cooperate.
After the final performance of the season on October 11, Sitting Bull told a reporter through his interpreter, "The wigwam is a better place for the red man." He added that he was "sick of the houses and the noises and multitude of men" who stared and poked their fingers at him. Sitting Bull went to Annie to say good-bye. Before he departed, in appreciation of her friendship, he gave her some invaluable Indian artifacts. In return, Annie wrote to Sitting Bull after he returned to Standing Rock.
But Oakley could not help the chief with the problems he encountered. Back on the reservation, McLaughlin judged the returned Sitting Bull a major nuisance. "He is," McLaughlin wrote, "inflated with the public attention he received and has not profited by what he has seen." McLaughlin claimed that Sitting Bull told the "most astonishing falsehoods" to other Indians and inflated his own authority over them. Consequently, McLaughlin refused to let Sitting Bull tour again the next season, arguing that the chief spent his earnings extravagantly to impress other Indians and was "too vain and obstinate to be benefitted'' by the tour.
Oakley leapt to Sitting Bull's defense in 1887. She minimized her own contributions to the chiefs welfare and said instead that he "made a great pet of me." Annie added, "He is a dear, faithful, old friend, and I've great respect and affection for him." She now regarded his adoption of her as a wonderful compliment.

 

Page 150
But Indian-policy reformers of the time disagreed with Oakley's viewpoint and leaned more toward McLaughlin's. They believed that touring only "spoiled" Native Americans. Reformers were spurred on by Helen Hunt Jackson's poignant novel
Ramona
, which first appeared in 1884 and championed the rights of Indian women, and by the stirring speeches and writings during the 1870s and 1880s of a Paiute woman, Sarah Winnemucca. Consequently, reformers railed against the Wild West shows' representing Native Americans as primitive savages at a time when the Indian Bureau was trying to convince people that Indians were becoming productive and, according to Anglo standards, civilized.
Reformers feared that the public swallowed wholesale Cody's assurances that the Wild West presented Native Americans realistically. Before each performance, Cody himself denounced "rehearsals" and told the audience that what they were about to see was "an exhibition of skill" rather than a performance. And, in 1885 and 1886, Wild West advertising included part of a letter from General William Tecumseh Sherman, who praised Buffalo Bill's Wild West as ''wonderfully realistic and historically reminiscent," and part of another from author Mark Twain, who stated, "Down to its smallest details the show is genuinecowboys, vaqueros, Indians, stagecoach, costumes and all: it is wholly free from sham and insincerity."
In addition, other notables publicly praised the show and further verified its representation of Indians. For instance, Elizabeth Custer, widow of General Armstrong Custer who died at the Battle of the Little Big Horn, endorsed the Wild West's view of the battle and of Cody's taking Yellow Hand's scalp in revenge. As a consequence of such endorsements, scalping and other violent acts became acceptable family entertainment and were even considered educational. In 1895, the
Boston Sunday Post
made a typical observation about one Wild West performance: "Years of study could not teach what here may be learned in one night. If geography, history, climate, arts and industries could be taught to all the youths of Massachusetts in the manner of the 'Wild West' show, there would be no dull pupils."
Still, Cody's Wild West was the least of the offenders of the

 

Page 151
circuses and Wild West shows, partly because he had his own vision, both of the problem and of its solutions. The Wild West's historical reenactments always left the audience with the message that although Indians and whites had once been enemies, they now had to live together in peace. Cody believed he was helping achieve his slogan "An Enemy in '76, A Friend in '85," by showing Native Americans and Anglos how to live and work together in the Wild West troupe. Moreover, Cody seemed to have genuine concern and affection for most Indians, especially Sioux Chief Iron Tail. Reportedly, Cody once told M. I. McCreight, a shipper of buffalo bones from the plains during the 1880s, "Chief Iron Tail is the finest man I know, bar none!"
Because of the growing deterioration of Indian-white relations during the late 1880s, Annie never saw Sitting Bull again. When, in 1889, the Sioux Commission agreed to cede some land in western Dakota Territory, Sitting Bull opposed it. And when the Ghost Dance movement developed that same year, Sitting Bull encouraged the frantic dances that would bring an Indian messiah who would, in turn, destroy all Anglo Americans and restore Native American prosperity.
Fearing violence as a result of Sitting Bull's actions, McLaughlin requested authority to arrest the chief. At that point, Major General Nelson A. Miles, commanding general of the Division of the Missouri, interceded. He asked Cody, just back from his European tour, to go to Standing Rock and reason with Sitting Bull. On November 27, 1890, Cody and three friends arrived at Mandan, then went on to Fort Yates near Standing Rock. But, after much talking, drinking, and rescinding of orders, Cody returned to Chicago without seeing Sitting Bull. The climax of the contretemps came on December 14, when the Indian police tried to arrest Sitting Bull, and the chief's followers opened fire on them. Supposedly, at the sound of gunfire, the gray trick horse that Cody had given Sitting Bull sat down and lifted its front leg to shake hands. In the subsequent melee, Sitting Bull lost his life, as did seven of his men and six police officers.
Oakley immediately and publicly defended Sitting Bull. She declared that he had numerous good reasons to take up arms in
BOOK: The Life and Legacy of Annie Oakley
10.08Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Succulent Prey by Wrath James White
Untamed by Terri Farley
One Magic Night by Larson, Shirley
Antiques Fate by Barbara Allan
El violín del diablo by Joseph Gelinek


readsbookonline.com Copyright 2016 - 2024