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 (30 page)

BOOK: The Life and Legacy of Annie Oakley
10.17Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

 

Page 169
cured Especially for this
GREAT PLAY
," which was the old Leadville stagecoach. It would be pulled by four horses with authentic western trappings. The spectacular scenery, painted on high-grade linen cloth, would reproduce the "days of the wild and wooly West." Including even the canyon of the Colorado River by moonlight, the scenery would add a touch of realism to this "startling picture of the Wild West.''
According to the plot of
The Western Girl
, Oakley, as the heroine Nance Barry, foiled a half-breed bandit named LaFonde and defeated a variety of other villains. Predictably, Nance Barry and her confederate, Lieutenant Hawley, ended up in each other's arms by the end of the play. Along the way, the play featured Oakley shooting, riding, and defeating evil at every turn. In case all these elements did not suffice, the play also featured singing and yodeling specialties.
As products of their era, reviewers inevitably overlooked the play's many stereotypes, including a German scientist and an Irish miner with a talkative wife. In one especially classic scene, a Chinese laundryman rescued the heroine. Another stock character was a treacherous Mexican dance-hall girl, Pancheta, played by Jeannette Farrell, an Anglo woman born and raised in Syracuse, New York.
Nor did anyone question the authenticity of the play's representation of the Old West. When
The Western Girl
played Atlantic City in December 1902, one reviewer applauded the play's recreation of "the western hills in the days before the railroad brought civilization to the early pioneers, and bandits and outlaws had only the small check of scattered United States troops." Neither did critics question Oakley's audacity at presenting herself as "the" western girl.
Annie either failed to notice the show's stereotypes or accepted them as show business conventions of the day. Oakley had a role to play and directions to follow, so rather than worrying about accurate images and portrayals, she was more concerned with giving a quality performance and continuing to perform under even the worst of circumstances. Whether she intended to or not, Annie thus reinforced her image as a strong, durable western woman. For instance, in Atlantic City during the fall of 1902,

 

Page 170
Annie's spirited horse, nervous in small spaces, ran Oakley into a piece of projecting scenery that gashed her nose. Annie bled, reeled momentarily, then regained self-possession and rode off the stage. After a doctor in the audience hurried backstage to dress the deep gash and pull it together with adhesive, Oakley returned to the stage and, with what one viewer called ''grit," continued the play, thus proving herself a courageous western woman in fiction and in fact.
Not surprisingly, audiences packed theaters to see Oakley as the western girl and often went wild with their applause, demanding as many as six curtain calls. The play succeeded despite some tough competition; in 1903, Victor Herbert's
Babes in Toyland
opened, and Millie De Leon launched her burlesque career by throwing garters to members of the audience. The
Wilkes-Barre Record
put its finger on the appeal of
The Western Girl
, saying the show was a "dashing, sparkling, not to say sensational, melodrama" that remained "clean and wholesome throughout."
Because the play proved less successful financially than critically, it closed in March 1903. The large cast and elaborate scenery cost a great deal to transport and often overwhelmed theater stages when they arrived. As a result, Annie and Frank disbanded the troupe and sent the scenery to Annie's sister Hulda to store on her farm.
Despite its short run,
The Western Girl
and its attendant publicity added one more building block to Annie's western image. The play presented Oakley as a western woman who demonstrated courage and toughness at the same time that she remained feminine, compassionate, and family-oriented. As Nance Barry, Annie provided a perfect heroine, one that both women and men could respect.
Combined with Oakley's association with Sitting Bull and Cody's Wild West, Annie's stage appearances, especially in
The Western Girl
, ensured her triumph as the archetypal western woman of the age. She represented a strong, brave, and self-reliant woman, yet a soft, pretty, and sweet one who fittingly ended her adventures in the arms of a deserving hero on stage and in those of her husband in real life. Oakley combined the best of older, revered American values with newer, expanded ideas re-

 

Page 171
garding women and the West to establish herself as a virtually universal heroine.
In spite of Annie's widespread appeal, few films and books cast Oakley as their heroine between 1885 and 1913. Possibly, Annie's rendering of a western woman failed to generate enough excitement for novelists and scriptwriters. Certainly, Oakley's determination to remain ladylike must have made it difficult for authors to picture her as a rip-roaring, pistol-wielding western heroine. Especially after western writers turned away from James Fenimore Cooper's genteel heroines and replaced them with female desperadoes, usually attired in men's garb, Annie would have provided a poor fit. During the 1880s, 1890s, and early 1900s, Oakley's skirts, long hair, and demure behavior would have hardly been inspiration for western thrillers.
During the 1890s, however, Annie appeared in at least one motion picture. This came about as a result of Buffalo Bill Cody's close connection with Thomas Alva Edison, who designed the Wild West's six-hundred-horsepower electrical plant. Said to be the largest light producer in the world, the plant consumed two and one-half tons of coal in twenty-four hours and frequently required Edison's attentive presence.
When Edison invented his battery-powered kinetoscope moving-picture machine, he naturally turned to Cody and such performers as Oakley as subjects. In September 1894, Cody and fifteen colorfully dressed Native Americans went to Edison's "studio" in East Orange, New Jersey, to act before Edison's invention. The shoot took place in a "Black Maria," a frame building covered with black tar-paper, later referred to as the first motion picture studio.
Later that fall, Annie also traveled to East Orange, as did trapeze artist El Capitaine and the Gaiety Girls. Edison expressed particular interest in Oakley because he wanted to know if his invention could follow the flight of a bullet. Edison soon learned that his camera could reproduce Annie's shots, the smoke from her rifle, and the splintering of glass balls. Edison showed these early films, including those of Annie, in nickel-in-the-slot machines, called peep-show machines and later dubbed nickelo-

 

Page 172
deons. Crowds lined up outside the kinetoscope parlors that had opened in New York in April 1894; slipping their coins in the slot, viewers pressed their eyes against the slit and watched a ninety-second "movie." Other parlors soon followed in such cities as Atlantic City, Baltimore, and Chicago.
Thousands of people who saw Annie Oakley in a peep-show machine would remember her as one of the first "western" figures caught on film. One scene showed her repeatedly firing a Winchester rifle to demonstrate rapidity, whereas another pictured her shooting at composition balls tossed in the air. People who had never seen Annie in one of her many live appearances could now view her at last, courtesy of Edison's invention.
In addition, Oakley appeared in at least one dime novel series. Given Buffalo Bill Cody's total of 557 original stories by twenty-two authors plus reprints, which amounted to 1,700 individual issues, it is curious that Oakley did not also star in many dime novels. Apparently, Annie did not fit any of the usual female types, ranging from victim to Amazon.
Because many dime novels appealed to a male audience, they frequently presented women as victims rather than as heroines. A representative dime novel released in 1899, Edward L. Wheeler's
Deadwood Dick's Eagles; or, The Pards of Flood Bar
, presented one such female victim. When a bully accosted her in quest of a kiss she cried out, "Are there no
men
among you who will help me?" After a stalwart hero saved her, he proclaimed that he "never hesitated to face death in defense of a woman."
Wheeler's female victims, however, often turned hard and bitter as a result of their mistreatment. As early as 1878, Wheeler created Hurricane Nell in
Bob Woolf, the Border Ruffian; or, The Girl Dead-Shot
. Nell swore vengeance against Bob Woolf after he burned her home and hastened the death of her parents. She soon appeared in Colorado mining towns dressed as a man. Then, in a reversal of the usual scenario, Nell saved the hero, killed three men with three shots, and won a shooting match. Wheeler followed Nell with Wild Edna, leader of a band of road agents in
Old Avalanche
, and with Calamity Jane (Martha Jane Cannary) in several of his "Deadwood Dick" series. In
Deadwood Dick on Deck; or, Calamity Jane, the Heroine of Whoop-Up
(1885), for example, Calamity Jane

 

Page 173
was another female victim who adopted male clothing, profane language, and a hard manner. Like Hurricane Nell, she too rescued the male hero.
In between the victim and the desperado were strong women who dressed and acted like women, rescued the hero, and then virtually disappeared from the story line. Wheeler wrote one such character into
Deadwood Dick's Eagles
(1899). When a young woman threatened Deadwood Dick at gunpoint and insisted he marry her, his wife, believed to be dead, appeared and challenged her husband's tormentor to a duel. In the resulting fight, Dick's wife lunged at her opponent, who fell back dead "with a blade run through her heart." In a later thriller,
The White Boy Chief; or, The Terror of the North Platte
, written in 1908 by an anonymous author known as "An Old Scout," a woman rescued the young hero from a band of "cussed redskins,'' then vanished from the story.
Annie fit none of these categories; she was not a victim, desperado, or minor character. It appears, however, that during the 1900s, Prentiss Ingraham patterned one of his capable women characters on Annie Oakley, perhaps in an attempt to create a new type of female heroine. In Ingraham's
Dauntless Dell
series, his new form of heroine proved herself the equal of any man.
In 1908, for example, in Ingraham's
Buffalo Bill's Girl Pard; or, Dauntless Dell's Daring
, Dell Dauntless of the Double D Ranch appeared on the scene dressed, much like Oakley in
The Western Girl
, in a knee-length skirt, "blouse-like waist," tan leggings, and "small russet shoes, with silver spurs at the heels." In one early scene, Dell chastised two cowboys because they had chased away two bandits whom the intrepid heroine had planned to capture by leading them into a nearby draw. As Dell slapped at her brace of holsters, she explained, much as Oakley might have, that she disliked rowdyism. "I try to be a lady, both at home on the ranch and when I'm abroad in the hills. But I don't think any the less of a lady because she's able to take care of herself."
Next, Dell set out to rescue her kidnapped friend, Annie McGowan. She enlisted the aid of Buffalo Bill and so impressed him with her abilities that he accepted her as his "pard." Watching her shoot and ride, Buffalo Bill asked himself, "Was there anything . . . in which Dell Dauntless did not excel?" Along the way,

 

Page 174
with the bowie knife that swung from her belt, Dell rescued a young Indian man named Little Cayuse. Cayuse rather rudely told Dell that "squaws" were supposed to boil water, make fires, and sew beads. After Dell replied, "I'm different from the ordinary run of squaws," Little Cayuse also accepted Dell as his ''pard."
In subsequent chapters, Dell shot a rifle out of a villain's hand, rode important dispatches through armed Apaches, and broke out of Fort Grant. Dell had indeed proven herself to Buffalo Bill, "the king of the scouts," who concluded that Dell ranked "Class A among Western girls."
The story sounds improbable today, but then it taught such important virtues as bravery, assertiveness, ladyhood, loyalty, the importance of friendship, and the triumph of good over evil. More than just an adventure tale, this dime novel instructed readers in morals and values. Although most readers of dime novels remained male, some young women also read these western adventure tales. Perhaps Ingraham hoped to attract additional female readers with his creation of Dauntless Dell, who was clearly a laudable woman. Even the name Dauntless Dell carried a message; it indicated that some women were as fearless and capable of heroic deeds as men.
Because this book also impressed on readers' minds the courageous nature of such western-style performers as Annie Oakley, it helped legitimize the activities of show cowgirls and added women to the saga of the American West. Of course, Dauntless Dell was not an average western woman. Dell not only wielded firearms but also failed to end up in the hero's arms. As she assured Little Cayuse, she was different from ordinary women. Still, Dell showed readers that some women could act on their own behalf and could demonstrate bravery, decisiveness, and strength. Much as the real Annie Oakley helped open show business and sport shooting to women, her fictional prototype gave readers uncommon ideas regarding women.
During the early 1900s, Annie Oakley occasionally mentioned the possibility that she would star in a Hollywood motion picture. Although Annie appeared in at least one screen test, the project
BOOK: The Life and Legacy of Annie Oakley
10.17Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

The King Without a Heart by Barbara Cartland
A Certain Malice by Felicity Young
The Body Thief by Chris Taylor
RedBone 2 by T. Styles
Valentine Murder by Leslie Meier
The Unblemished by Conrad Williams
Prodigal Son by Jayna King


readsbookonline.com Copyright 2016 - 2024