Read The Life and Legacy of Annie Oakley Online

Authors: Glenda Riley

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

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BOOK: The Life and Legacy of Annie Oakley
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Page 175
never materialized. Annie's comments indicate that she clearly realized that the nature of entertainment had undergone radical changes during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; she may even have retired from the Young Buffalo Show in 1913 because she recognized that the popularity of Wild West shows had peaked.
According to Oakley, "Fancy sometimes helps us out in this big round world." But she must have been appalled and amazed at certain entertainment innovations of the day. For instance, burlesque performers now tickled viewers' imaginations by stripping off pieces of clothing. Then, in 1913, the celebrated Palace Theatre opened in New York, setting a standard for all vaudeville theaters that followed, while Al Jolson and Eddie Cantor astounded Broadway audiences and the motion picture
Uncle Tom's Cabin
attracted crowds of viewers.
In light of these changes, Annie retired just in time to keep intact her reputation as a great shooter and her image as a model western woman. Had she continued to work in the arena after 1913, she may have been overshadowed by other forms of entertainment. As it was, all that remained after 1913 was for Annie Oakley to put the finishing touches on her sparkling image. She would prove as adept at that as at almost everything else she tackled.

 

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Chapter 6
"Why Did I give Up the Arena?"
As early as 1887, Annie Oakley had assured a London reporter, "I do not intend remaining in the profession until I become an old woman." Yet it was October 1913 before she, at fifty-three years of age and with silver-white hair, finally said good-bye to the Wild West circuit.
Within a few years after leaving Vernon Seavers's Young Buffalo Show, which had taken her to 139 towns in seventeen states, Annie posed the question, "Why did I give up the arena?" She answered in her usual succinct manner, "Because I made hay in the hay-day of my youth, and felt that I had earned a change."
But what would "change" mean for a woman who had retained her youthful agility and her athletic skills, so that she could still shoot, ride, and twirl a lariat with the best of them?
Because Annie Oakley had already become a legend in her own time, she had no further need for publicity. Her name would go down in history in many ways, for example as the term for free passes to shows. Because passes had to be punched to differentiate them from paid tickets, they were as full of holes as the playing cards, decorated with hearts and Annie's picture at one end, at which Annie shot and then threw into the audience as souvenirs. After one man said a pass looked like Annie Oakley had been shooting at it, the term "Annie Oakley" caught on in the theater, baseball, and circus worlds.
Nor did Annie Oakley have any need for further income. Because she and Frank Butler had planned well for retirement, they could choose a life of total leisure if so inclined. But the Butlers were both doers rather than watchers; they viewed retirement as anything but sitting and observing others. Instead, retirement offered the opportunity to pursue the interests and activities often denied them by their life on the road. The nature of their activities changed somewhat, but active the Butlers remained.

 

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The years with the Young Buffalo Show had taken Annie and Frank to a beautiful waterfront town in Maryland. When Frank saw Cambridge, he turned to Annie and said that he would like to live there someday. In 1913, then, they began building a house on the shore of Hambrooks Bay at the mouth of the Great Choptank River. Annie requested square rooms with no projecting closets, a sink low enough for a five-foot-tall woman to work at in comfort, and a host of other amenities. From the home's front porch, the Butlers and their guests could watch oyster boats, a ferry, and the swaying buoys that marked the boundaries.
Just as he hoped, Frank loved Cambridge and their new home. He could boat, fish, and hunt until satiated. To him, Cambridge provided a "sportsman's paradise" that lay only "two hundred miles from Broadway." He completed the picture one day when he found a black, white, and tan purebred, soulful-eyed English setter languishing in a none-too-clean kennel. Frank bought the dog, brought him home to Annie, and named him Dave after Dave Montgomery of the comedy team Montgomery and Stone.
When a friend, Dr. Samuel Fort, visited the house on Hambrooks Bay that year, he found Frank "genial," Dave "a member of the family," and Annie "still the same patient, cheerful, kindly little woman." Then Annie's niece Fern visited the Butlers during the summer of 1913. She thought the place wonderful and especially liked to sit on the porch and "look over the bay and dream." Fern also enjoyed the boating, fishing, and hunting, but she noticed that Annie displayed a ''restless spirit." Fern later recalled that she and Frank wondered how long Annie would enjoy life in Cambridge, despite its vast fields and hills for shooting and hunting.
Annie herself admitted that although they had "settled down" and expected to live happily, she could not do it. Years on the road had accustomed her to structured days, activity, admiration, and a rich social life. Now Annie faced a life that must have seemed to her erratic, boring, and out of her control. The domesticity that she liked to practice in a tent or hotel room now dominated her life. Instead of counting her achievements in numbers of shots made or quail downed, she found herself in charge of producing meals and clean laundry and planning social events.

 

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Predictably, just as she had years earlier in Nutley, Annie failed at running a home. "I went all to pieces under the care of a home," she explained. Frank agreed. She was a "rotten housekeeper," he said without even a stab at tact. He added that Annie's "record in this department" was "seven cooks in five days." Because her fastidious nature about her clothing and costumes extended to her house and meals, Annie frequently drove both domestic helpers and Frank to distraction. Also, her attention to detail, which served her so well in the arena and on the hunting grounds, proved difficult to maintain in a less-formal, domestic setting. And the confidence and patience she exhibited with a rifle in her hands dissipated the moment she exchanged gun for domestic utensil. Evidently, domestic life was less suited to Annie's perfectionist and achievement-oriented personality than life on the road.
Also in 1913, another visitor arrived who may have exacerbated Annie's apparent wanderlust. George Widows, the young man who had run off to South America when he learned Annie was married, arrived bearing exotic presents. Frank had corresponded with George for years, and now George repaid the friendship with gifts of unusual animal horns and tales of his hunts and other adventures.
Still, despite Annie's restiveness, the Butlers spent a peaceful and productive year hunting, fishing, and writing. Frank, who was now sixty-three years old, looked back in verse on his life as a sportsman. "A hunter now old and gray sat musing on his sports of long ago . . . and sighed because his hunting days were o'er." Other poems he dedicated to Annie. "Her presence would remind you / Of an angel in the skies."
Annie wrote as well. In between hunting and shooting at their own clay pigeon trap and or at the Du Pont shooting grounds in Cambridge, donated by the Du Pont family, she composed the pamphlet
Powders I Have Used
, published by the Du Pont Company. She also contributed articles, arguing for women as shooters and hunters, to such journals as the
Sportsman's Review
. Then, in 1914, Annie sent one of her open letters to
American Field
. She noted that Dorchester County officials had issued more than seventeen hundred game licenses and that "a great deal of game"

 

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was bagged there. But she added, "I am pleased to say there is plenty left over."
By 1915, the retired life seemed good, at least to Frank, who at sixty-five years of age appeared more ready for retirement than his fifty-five-year-old wife, who seemed to want more variety in their lives. In response to Annie's restlessness, that summer, Frank loaded her and Fern into their automobile and toured them across the country. Along the way, Frank noted the changes that had overtaken circuses and Wild West shows. Despite a healthy economy, he counted six stranded traveling shows, one standing six feet under water. And when they ran into Buffalo Bill Cody, who had sold the Wild West in 1913 to cover some of his extensive debts and who now performed in shows he did not own, hoping to raise some money to buy his own show again, Frank Butler judged William Cody "quite feeble" and near the end of his days. Frank remarked that show business was in "very bad straits"; retirement had come at just the right time for him and Annie.
Annie, however, believed she might find a place in new types of entertainment, especially films. She commented that she had retired only until movie producers were "willing to pay" the salary she wanted. In 1915, rumors of a movie deal circulated. Oakley assured a reporter that she had received the offer of "several positions" in films but had turned them all down. "They don't want to pay enough and until they do I will not be seen in the movies." About this time she ordered two new guns from the Ithaca Gun Company; it shipped the first, a 12-gauge double-barreled field gun, to Cambridge in September.
Unlike Annie, Frank had little desire to exchange retirement for erratic schedules, travel, and more public exposure. As a result, he relied heavily on his and Annie's friendship with Fred Stone and his family to keep Annie amused. Certainly, Fred Stone and his partner, Dave Montgomery, especially in their colossal hit
The Red Mill
, kept half the nation amused.
Rather than telling Annie jokes, however, Stone engaged her attention by inviting her and Frank to his farm on Long Island. There the Butlers shot on the trap range Stone had built after his friendship with them had encouraged him to become a devoted trap shooter. Stone also shot at local gun clubs wherever his

 

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current hit played and once commented, "[I] got more pleasure out of breaking 100 straight in a 100-target match at the Chicago Gun Club than I did out of all our Chicago
Red Mill
notices."
Still, Annie remained unsettled. With Susan dead, family members busy with concerns of their own, and former neighbors dead or dispersed, Annie's desire to make frequent visits to Ohio dwindled. Also, some of Annie's nieces and grandnieces seemed to vie with each other for her favor, so that jealousy may have marred her visits home. At the very least, Annie's community of women back in Ohio had largely dissipated.
Yet the leisure that she and Frank had saved and planned for was not enough for Annie; she longed for more action and perhaps more contact with people. Thus, besides hunting near Cambridge, the Butlers began to spend the quail season in Leesburg, Florida, where they had first hunted in 1911. Photographs show a happy Annie and Frank in front of the Lakeview Hotel, a large two-story building fronted by a wide porch, and at Kamp Kumfort on Treasure Island, a private retreat owned by the mayor of Leesburg.
Frank loved Leesburg, which for him was, like Cambridge, a "sportsman's paradise." The Lakeview Hotel, he said, knew how to "cater to sportsmen." The hunting proved good; Annie and Frank bagged so much game that they distributed it to the other guests or ordered it served for dinner. Good company proved abundant as well. One Leesburg resident remembers that Annie called his father, John Jacob Stoer of Philadelphia, the "best quail shot" she had ever hunted with.
But Leesburg was not total heaven. Annie also bagged huge rattlesnakes, and Dave battled fleas and ticks. In addition, Annie seemed to need more structure and activity in her days. As a result, the Butlers turned to the resort town of Pinehurst, with its dozen stores, three schools, a library, a post office, four hotels, a clubhouse, two golf courses, a skeet and target range, plentiful kennels and stables, and one weekly newspaper, the
Pinehurst Outlook
, published every Saturday.
As early as 1908 and 1909, the
Outlook
had revealed that Annie and Frank had gained local favor. In January 1909, the newspaper

 

Page 181
described the hundreds of people who witnessed Oakley's exhibition, the opening event of the Midwinter Handicap, and concluded, "No one went away disappointed." Among other feats, Annie clipped a potato off a stick piece by piece; shot through the ace of hearts; sliced with bullets four cards held edgewise; smashed pieces of coal, brass discs about the size of a quarter, and marbles; and finally aimed at .22 cartridges tossed in the air, driving each out of sight. The
Outlook
also described Frank Butler as "one of the most popular shooters in the country."
Then the
Outlook
announced on December 11, 1915, that the Butlers were "spending the winter at The Carolina." Frank took charge of the traps and hunting, and Annie offered to teach some of the other women guests how to shoot. Because Annie had agreed to help female guests at the Carolina learn the proper handling of rifles and shotguns, there was "an unusual interest" in the sport. The
Outlook
noted, "Many of the girls are acquiring a skill in potting the bric-a-brac pigeons which may tax the ability of the old hands to excel."
Annie and Frank had picked the finest hotel in Pinehurst. The Carolina stood four stories high and provided its guests with electricity, central heating, and telephones in every room. The Carolina attracted wealthy northerners, who began to pour into its grounds during the early fall months to enjoy golfing, shooting, hunting, horseback riding, and other sports. Among the celebrities that Annie and Frank visited with there were Alexander Graham Bell, Edgar Guest, Senator Warren G. Harding, John D. Rockefeller, Will Rogers, Theodore Roosevelt, John Philip Sousa, Walter Hines Page, and Booth Tarkington.
Of course, Oakley and Butler themselves added to the sparkle of the guest list. When Harding first met Annie, he told her, "I feel highly honored at meeting Ohio's most distinguished daughter." She responded, "I am equally pleased to meet our next President." When he blushed and replied, "I'm not so sure," she shot back, "I am."
Annie seemed contented at last. She often joined early morning fox hunts, raced at the Pinehurst jockey club, hunted quail, entered at least one dog show, and went on weekly hunts that kept her, in her words, "vital." She also enjoyed the company of women
BOOK: The Life and Legacy of Annie Oakley
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