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 (27 page)

Page 152

his own and his people's defense. ''His disposition was neither aggressive nor cruel," she continued, "nor would he have molested any one if he had not been first molested." Anyone who knew him would feel pity for his fate, Annie continued, to die knowing the lands of his people had been invaded and "their means of subsistence impaired, and faith not kept with them." Years later, shortly before her own death in 1926, Oakley still railed at the unfairness of the situation. "Had he been a white man someone would have been hung for his murder."

Cody too mourned Sitting Bull's death; he swore he could have saved him if given a proper chance. Yet Cody traded on the chiefs growing reputation. Although his personal, humanitarian side sympathized with Sitting Bull, his entrepreneurial, entertainer side recognized the value of Sitting Bull's image. In addition, rather than heading off further trouble by replacing the Indians with actors, Cody continued his drive for authenticity and requested more and more Indians from McLaughlin.

In 1893, the Wild West played on a plot of ground outside the entrance to the world's fair. Because the Board of Fair Managers objected to Cody's representation of Indian history and culture, it refused to let Cody into the grounds of the World's Columbian Exposition. Cody's partner, Nate Salsbury, leased a fourteen-acre site outside the entrance and built stands designed to hold eighteen thousand people. Although the show already featured seventy-four Indians from Pine Ridge, Cody hired an additional one hundred from Pine Ridge, Standing Rock, and Rosebud. He also rode Sitting Bull's gray trick horse. After all, the tragic wars between whites and Indians during the 1880s and 1890s made Indians a premier attraction.

President Grover Cleveland opened the first show in 1893, and Cody introduced the Congress of Rough Riders of the World to American viewers. Despite the Panic of 1893, Cody and Salsbury enjoyed their most prosperous season ever.

Oakley found herself caught in a bind similar to Cody's. She clearly liked and respected Sitting Bull and other Native Americans, as well as sharing such values with them as honesty, hard work, and service to others. Should she, then, trade on Sitting

Page 153

Bull's image, or should she let his memory rest in peace? No evidence exists that Annie protested or in any way objected to advertisements and posters to bill her as "Little Sure Shot," "Watanya Cecilla," and "Sitting Bull's Adopted Daughter." She also frequently spoke with reporters about Sitting Bull, his adoption of her, and his moccasins and other gifts.

At the same time, Annie seemed to care sincerely about Native Americans. She often tried to help those in the troupe with their problems. Because of her concern for them, many Indians went to Annie for advice or solace. Others asked her to help them navigate a show world filled with temptations and things they could not comprehend. For instance, Pawnee Long John, who had been, according to Annie, "shaking dice with a Mexican," asked her to hold his money for safekeeping so that he could avoid games of chance.

Frank Butler also supported and shared Oakley's attitudes toward Indians in the Wild West troupe. Some of Frank's contemporaries claimed that he learned to speak the Sioux language. He also liked to tell stories that placed Indians in a favorable light. For instance, when in 1894 the Wild West's weather forecaster predicted a tornado and ordered all the tents lashed down, Chief Rain-in-the-Face pointed out that the sky was clear of rain and wind. According to Frank, the practical-minded chief pronounced the "white men" big fools. Butler also developed a game for the Indians to play in camp, which involved pitching arrows at a bottle. Many of his native friends adopted it enthusiastically.

But Annie and Frank were not the only champions of Wild West Indians. During the 1890s and early 1900s, in show program after program, Cody expounded his philosophy regarding Native Americans and the misfortunes they had suffered. In his autobiography, Cody also spoke on behalf of Native Americans, imploring the U.S. government to treat them with justice and fairness. He argued that they had owned the land when Europeans arrived and thus had some claim to it, even though they were incapable "of developing it, or of really appreciating its possibilities." Besides, he continued, Indians are "real Americans" whose blood had "added a certain rugged strength to the characters of many of our Western citizens."

Page 154

When Chief Luther Standing Bear served as interpretor of the Wild West Indians in 1903, he found Cody staunchly behind the native performers. On more than one occasion, Cody stated that the Native Americans were the "principal feature" of the Wild West and were not be be misused or neglected. After Standing Bear and Cody spent hours discussing tribal matters, Cody even offered to hire attorneys and bring Sioux grievances to the attention of President Theodore Roosevelt. Also, when Standing Bear and his wife bore a daughter in Birmingham, England, Cody served as her godparent and arranged for mother and daughter to earn extra funds.

When Annie joined the Young Buffalo Show in 1911, she again confronted the issue of "show Indians." Red Shirt and Flat Iron, also veterans of the Buffalo Bill Wild West, were among the cast, and the Indian-policy debate was escalating. By the time she left that organization in 1913, the debate had turned into a national outcry against "exhibiting" Indians in Wild West shows. Sioux Chauncy Yellow Robe, for example, pointed out that Columbus had staged the first Indian show by shipping Native Americans to Europe to amuse and amaze the nobility. Now the U.S. government, the supposed protector of Indians, let them participate in Wild West shows, fairs, and moving pictures that presented them to the public as savage beings. In 1914, another supporter of this position, E. H. Gohl, an adopted clan-member of the Onondagas, agreed that touring with Wild West shows was clearly "demoralizing and a menace to the Indians." Such "show'' Indians hurt spectators as well, for viewers saw ''burlesque" war dances rather than gaining any real knowledge of Indian customs.

Whether this issue influenced Annie Oakley's retirement in 1913 is unknown. But she seemed to distance herself from Indian concerns during following years, turning instead to raising money for the Red Cross during World War I, teaching women to shoot, and campaigning for women in shooting sports.

Annie's relationship with Chief Sitting Bull may have initiated in the public mind her identification with the Old West, but it was her participation in Cody's Wild West exhibition that clearly

Page 155

labeled her a western woman. In the days before radio, motion pictures, and television, the dime novel and other books, western art, and Wild West shows stood supreme as the mythmakers of the American West. Such authors as Ned Buntline and Prentiss Ingraham, along with such artists as Frederic Remington, did their part in making the West appear wild and woolly, but Cody and others took the image on the road.

Because Wild West shows presented clean, family entertainment, everyone could go and everyone could believe. After all, who could resist the appeal of a melodrama, a circus, the story of common Americans who overcame great odds, and a saga of patriotism and nationalism all rolled into one amazing tent show that came to your vicinity, whether you lived in a large city or a nearby small town?

Buffalo Bill's Wild West incorporated three major dimensions: exhibitions of cowboy and Indian skills, such as riding, shooting, lassoing, and racing on foot; historical reenactments of life in the Old West, such as the attack on the Deadwood Stage, the Pony Express, the burning of a settlers' cabin, and the Battle of the Little Big Horn; and western heroes in the guise of the Honorable William F. Cody, "Champion All-Round Shot of the World," Annie Oakley, "Little Sure Shot," Johnny Baker, "the Cowboy Kid," and Buck Taylor, ''King of the Cowboys." Of these, Cody appeared as commentator throughout the show and also performed as a shooter, downing clay pigeons while holding his rifle in one hand, shooting from horseback with a Winchester rifle, and splintering glass balls with an ordinary Colt army revolver.

Neither Cody nor the Butlers ever stated that Annie hailed from the West beyond the Mississippi River, but audiences, fans, and reporters assumed as much. Annie's association with the famous Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West sealed her identification with the Old West of Kansas, the Dakotas, or even Colorado in most people's mind. In reality, however, Annie traveled west of the Mississippi River only with the Wild West show. Route schedules of Buffalo Bill's Wild West during the 1880s and 1890s indicate that in the United States it toured largely in Connecticut, Delaware, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, New York, Pennsylva-

Page 156

nia, Rhode Island, and Vermont in the Northeast; in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin in the Midwest; and in Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, Tennessee, Virginia, Washington, D.C., and West Virginia in the South.

Presumably Cody preferred to play in highly populated areas of the country and to easterners fascinated by his romanticized version of the American West. Only occasionally during the 1890s did the Wild West venture as far west as Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, and eastern South Dakota and as far south as Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. Finally, between 1898 and 1902, the Wild West ventured to the Southwest and the Pacific Coast, notably California.

In newspaper interviews, Annie always told reporters she came from Ohio, and she often talked about the family farm, the woods in which she first hunted, and her family back in Ohio. But even though the U.S. Census Bureau's frontier line had long since moved beyond Ohio and across the Mississippi River, and even though many Americans, especially Ohioans, realized that Ohio was no longer a "pioneer" state, Annie's fans continued to think of her as a frontier and western woman. New Yorkers seemed especially fond of viewing Annie Oakley as a "true" westerner, and from their perspective, Ohio probably seemed as far west as Colorado or Oregon. On May 13, 1894, the
New York Morning Journal
stated that Oakley was "a credit to the 'glorious country' beyond the Rockies" from which she came. Even reporter Amy Leslie, supposedly a close friend of Annie's, assured the public that Oakley had shot plenty of game, from coyote to buffalo, in the "high western mountains." Among the few American newspapers to counter this interpretation was the
Portland Sunday Times
, which in June 1900 emphatically declared Annie Oakley ''not a western girl.''

When the Wild West played London, reporters there tended to write even more outrageous copy than American journalists. After all, most Londoners knew the American West only through what they had read: the Leatherstocking tales of James Fenimore Cooper; the adventure stories written by Mayne Reid, Charles Sealsfield, and Friedrich Gerstäcker; or the writings of Karl May, often called Germany's Cooper, who did not visit the West until

Page 157

after he had written nearly all his "western" adventures. Londoners may have picked up additional ideas from viewing reproductions of the paintings of Swiss artist Karl Bodmer or American artist-explorer-naturalists George Catlin and Charles Bird King or perhaps from reading American history written by Francis Parkman. But too many of these pictures and books presented highly idealized western portraits that traded more in hyperbole than truth.

When the Wild West first arrived in England during the spring of 1887, Londoners soon accepted the exhibition as real western Americana. A member of a Wild West audience on May 14, 1887, admitted that he, an avid reader of Mayne Reid's tales and other similar books, was delighted to see Indians gallop into the arena "without a hitch" and pull up opposite the spectators with surprising suddenness. One always used to read of Indians riding up at a gallop, he remarked, and of pulling horses onto their haunches as they stopped; now anyone could go and see it done.

Londoners also accepted Annie Oakley as a true representative of the Old Wild West. One described her as "a Western girl with quiet, expressive eyes." During the following summer, many Londoners watched Annie ride on "the Row." Few would care to copy her style of dress, the
London Post
editorialized, but one had to admit that "her get-up'' was "that of the real wild West.''

When the Wild West returned to England in 1891, people welcomed the troupe and its star shooter by playing daily the "Wild West Waltz," dedicated to Annie Oakley, "Little Sure Shot," at the International Horticultural Exhibition. Even the London-based
Shooting Times
believed more than it should have. It flatly stated that shooting was the national sport in the United States and that guns were an integral part of all boys', and of some girls', lives. In fact, the
Times
continued, at one of Annie's U.S. exhibitions, "every man who passed through the gate" wore a pair of revolvers strapped to his waist, and some carried Winchester rifles.

The smaller English cities extended a similar suspension of disbelief to the Wild West exhibition. In August 1891, the
Nottingham Daily Express
said that Nottingham had "been to the Wild West, and found it good." People poured into the Wild West

Other books

Soul Keeper by Natalie Dae

Voracious by Jenika Snow

One Dangerous Lady by Jane Stanton Hitchcock

Peaceable Kingdom by Francine Prose

Through the Hole by Kendall Newman

Gingerbread by Rachel Cohn

Rath's Gambit (The Janus Group Book 2) by Piers Platt

Riding In Cars With Boys by Donofrio, Beverly

Pale Rider by Alan Dean Foster

Angel Warrior by Immortal Angel