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 (8 page)

 

Page 31
Annie would not be able to stand up to the recoil of Bogardus's ten-pound shotguns, he capitulated. The partners agreed that Annie and Frank would audition for the Wild West that spring in Louisville, Kentucky.
Annie remembered that she and Frank took "the first train out for Cincinnati," where she spent several weeks in April practicing on a local gun club's trap-shooting range. When they finally arrived at the Wild West groundsthe Louisville Baseball Parkon a Monday morning, the lot appeared deserted. "As we thought everyone was out in the parade, Mr. B. suggested we run through my act," Annie later wrote. ''I noticed a man standing at a corner of the grandstand and thought it was someone who had just wandered into the grounds," she added. When Annie finished practicing, the man, who sported a cutaway coat, a derby hat, and a fancy cane, ran toward her crying: "Fine! wonderful! Have you got some photographs with your gun?'' The man was none other than Nate Salsbury. He hired Annie Oakley on the spot.
Salsbury's offer must have been a tremendous relief to Annie and Frank, for they left behind them an Ohio river town where, according to Annie, "the best hotel was third-class and the theater impossible." Clearly, Oakley grasped the historic nature of the moment. "There was I facing the real Wild West, the first white woman to travel with what society might have considered an impossible outfit." As Buffalo Bill led her and Frank down the line of company officials, cowboys, Mexicans, and Indians waiting to meet them, Annie nodded and smiled at the bows, handshakes, and greetings they received. Among others Annie met that morning were "Major" or "Arizona John" Burke, the company's press agent; Jule Keen, treasurer; Buck Taylor, "King of the Cowboys"; Johnny Baker, the "Cowboy Kid"; numerous Sioux and Pawnee Indians; and every cowboy from Bronco Bill to Coyote Bill. Then a blaring cornet interrupted the touching scene, and everyone raced for the grub tent. "So began my life with the B.B.W.W.," Annie later mused.
The momentous and historic match that began that spring day in 1885 between Cody's rodeo-drama and the shooter Annie Oakley in what she called "the 'show' business" seems like a fairy tale.

 

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During most of their association, Cody and Oakley respected and esteemed each other; he called her "Missie" and she called him "Colonel." He once inscribed her autograph book to ''the loveliest and truest little woman, both in heart and aim in all the world." And she once described him as "one of the nicest men in the world."
Still, despite her assertion that "the whole time we were one great family loyal to a man," Oakley and Cody sometimes butted heads. True, their first season together spun by like a honeymoon. Buffalo Bill gave Annie, a virtual unknown, a solo spot midway through the program, after the Pony Express and his own shootout with Yellow Hand. Annie skipped into the arena, waving and blowing kisses. Dressed in leggings, knee-length skirt, loose blouse, and cowboy hat with a six-pointed star pinned to its turned-up brim, Annie presented a vision of Victorian sexuality; she was demure, feminine, and, with her hair hanging loose down her back, both girlish and erotic.
Moreover, Annie's skill stunned audience after audience. She swung a rifle or a shotgun to her shoulder while Frank, who now acted as her assistant and manager, loaded traps and released clay birds, which she downed singly at first, then finally four at a time. Then, with rifles and pistols, she smashed glass ball after glass ball. Next, she lay her gun down, threw balls into the air, retrieved her rifle, and broke the balls before they fell. She concluded her feats like the accomplished, yet unaffected, actress she was working to become; she charmed audiences with a bow, a kiss blown toward them, and a jaunty little kick that soon became one of her trademarks.
Annie remembered life on the road that first year as hard but satisfying. The company played one- and two-day stands throughout the eastern and central states, swung into Canada, and finished in Youngstown, Ohio. The troupe logged thousands of miles traveling in day coaches. When they had to travel at night, they used boards to extend their seats into beds and covered them with mattresses and blankets they carried with them.
"Five o'clock every morning we were all up," Annie wrote. When the train pulled into a camp, the roustabouts first bedded the horses in fresh rye straw and herded the buffaloes into a make-

 

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shift corral. Next, they set up one tent for Cody, another for Salsbury, and a smaller one for Oakley and Butler. Into Annie and Frank's tent, the crew rolled "two folding chairs, a steamer chair, a good rug and a chintz curtain," all packed in a tarpaulin. Annie and Frank later added two cots with thick blankets so they could sleep in the tent rather than at a hotel. In this temporary dwelling, Frank arranged Annie's guns around the walls while Annie sat in the middle, embroidery hoop in hand, between shows.
On the road, Annie often took a morning bath in a collapsible bathtub, then consumed a substantial breakfast. "Eat?" she later wrote. "Everything in sight! Good coffee, bread, butter, preserves, fine steaks broiled over wood coals, with fruits and berries in season." With such sustenance, Annie could, she boasted, "rope and hold the strongest horse . . . [and] smile at the torrents of rain." Oakley filled her afternoons with rehearsal, then ''a rub of witch hazel and alcohol." Rolled in a blanket, she lay down in a hammock to nap. "Then a 5 o'clock dinner, an hour for writing . . . and I was ready for the night's performance.''
Oakley repaid Cody and Salsbury's faith in her by practicing daily, performing hard, and drawing her share of fans to the arena. All this proved easy; Annie and Frank liked the show. Not only did the Wild West provide steady employment, but the company was well organized. As Annie related that first year in her autobiography, her and Frank's only real sorrow occurred when their dog, George, died in Toledo. The entire camp rallied behind them in their grief. "We buried him in a private lawn," Annie explained, with "his pretty table cover under him and his beautiful satin and velvet cover with his name embroidered upon it over him." As two cowboys lowered George's coffin into the hasty grave, several of the company's Indian women wove wreaths and chanted.
As the season progressed, the Wild West began to climb out of debt. The troupe performed in more than forty cities in the United States and Canada and achieved widespread artistic and financial success. Both William Cody and the press agent John Burke thought that Annie had brought good luck to the company, which wrapped up the season in Columbus, Ohio, with a profit reportedly approaching one hundred thousand-dollars.

 

Page 34
But the last two weeks of performances played under the shadow of clouds and rain. "We were glad to hear the band play 'Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot,'" Annie said, "and part until the following spring."
Annie and Frank followed their established habit of spending part of the winter in Ohio with Susan and with Annie's sisters, who lived nearby. Annie, with Frank's help, continued to work on her reading and writing, and they both hunted. In addition, they practiced routines and devised new tricks for the coming season. In a way, Annie now engaged in remaking herself and her life, month by month, from a less than satisfactory beginning during her girlhood.
Then, during the spring of 1886, the Wild West began to prepare for a full summer's run at the new open-air arena and amphitheater built by the Staten Island Amusement Company at a resort called Erastina, where Oakley met the new members of the troupe. These included Civil War veteran Sergeant Gilbert H. Bates, riders Georgia Duffy of Wyoming and Della Farrel of Colorado, and a society woman who wanted to see the world from, according to Annie, "the back of a horse with the W.W. Co." After having difficulty locating a hot bath and having to pry herself loose from her parade mount after a long ride, the would-be star departed for home.
Much to Annie's dismay, another new addition, Lillian Frances Smith, a fifteen-year-old shooter from Coleville, California, stuck it out longer. Cody had recruited Smith the previous winter while his play
The Prairie Waif
appeared in Denver. He added Smith to the play's cast, billing her as "The Champion Rifle Shot of the World." When the show broke up, Cody brought Smith back to North Platte, where on April 20 she gave a shooting exhibition at Lloyd's Opera House. The editor of the local
Tribune
effused that Smith's shooting "bordered on the marvelous." Among other feats, she smashed twenty glass balls in twenty-four seconds with a Winchester rifle. When she reached the Wild West lot, Smith bragged that "Annie Oakley was done for" now that she had arrived.
In turn, Oakley looked askance at Smith's shoddy work, poor grammar, and what Oakley later called her "ample figure." Cody

 

Page 35
had obviously failed to think through his handling of the introduction of the stout and vocal Lillian Smith to the rest of the company, especially to her direct competitor, Annie Oakley. Perhaps the possibility of conflict between the two women never occurred to Cody, since Oakley had splendid relations with the Wild West's other star shooter, Johnny Baker. Annie tutored Johnny, cheered him, and avoided duplicating elements of his act. But Johnny was also younger, male, and far less aggressive than Lillian Smith. Soon a volatile situation began to brew between Oakley and Smith, a situation that would place Cody squarely in the middle.
Perhaps partly because of her rivalry with Smith and a resulting desire to impress her own name and presence on the public mind, Oakley defied a raging infection and soaring temperature caused by a bug flying into her right ear. For the opening parade in New York City, Annie donned a new outfit, clearly marked with the name "Oakley" on both sides, followed the seventeen-mile parade route, then had to be lifted off her horse. Back in camp at Erastina, Annie bled for five hours. The next morning a doctor lanced her ear and diagnosed blood poisoning. Annie lost four days of work. She later noted that it was the only time she missed a performance "in over forty years." When she returned to the arena, Annie leaned against a table while shooting.
After the grand opening, New Yorkers swarmed to the Wild West; they boarded special ferries that docked at St. George, then climbed aboard a train that ran directly to the Wild West portals. They viewed either the 12:30 or the 7:00 performance, the latter assisted by artificial lights. Within four weeks, the Wild West drew approximately 14,000 visitors a day, a total of 360,000 people. When the entrance booth ran out of tickets and turned potential customers away, the show's carpenters began building additional grandstands.
Undoubtedly, Lillian Smith attracted her share of admirers. Appearing in seventh position, only one act away from Annie Oakley, who shot in fifth position, Smith broke twenty-five glass balls per minute, shot glass balls revolving on a string around a pole, hit a plate thirty times in fifteen seconds, and fired three times toward a flying glass ball before hitting it with her fourth

 

Page 36
shot. But Lillian also boasted of her skills, dressed in a less-than-modest fashion, and fraternized with the men in the Wild West troupe.
Whether Oakley ever complained to Cody about Smith's behavior is unknown, but relations between Cody and Oakley began to deteriorate. Biographers have assumed that Cody harbored jealous feelings when he heard the applause for Annie and read her reviews, but the applause and reviews themselves fail to support this theory. Buffalo Bill regularly received more applause than any other performer; he also dominated the headlines and opening paragraphs of most reviews, whereas Annie received mention farther down.
In addition, Cody's performing style differed from Annie's. The Wild West program explained that rather than a fancy-shot, Buffalo Bill was "what may be termed a 'practical marksman,' . . . a marvelous all-round shot." And, unlike Oakley, who reportedly refused to shoot from horseback to avoid competing with Buffalo Bill, Cody performed his most spectacular shooting tricks on horseback.
The ill feelings between Cody and Oakley simmered through the winter as a revamped Wild West, now a four-act review called the "Dawn of Civilization," played to capacity audiences in Madison Square Garden. The management of the Garden, which had opened in 1879 and covered three blocks north of Fifth Avenue and Broadway, must have been delighted, given their usual erratic and short-term bookings, to showcase the Wild West for six months. Indeed, the management literally raised the Garden's roof twenty-five feet to accommodate the performers, especially the shooters. Freshly painted backgrounds went into place, and a mammoth blower sat ready to power a cyclone.
Oakley performed many shooting and riding stunts in the Garden. She also introduced a new trick; she untied a handkerchief from the area just above her horse's hoof as she herself rode on, and dangled precariously from, a sidesaddle. In a similar manner, she picked her hat up from the ground. In appreciation of her efforts, the New York Ladies Riding Club rewarded Annie with a gold medal, the fourth in her growing collection.
Buffalo Bill's response to Annie's honor remains unclear. Nor

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