Louis S. Warren (39 page)

In the era of the artful deception, many shooting acts were stage trickery, with candles snuffed out, matches lit, and apples split by hidden devices rather than closely aimed bullets. In this sense, all shooting acts walked a line between trickery and authentic skill, and audiences wondered at them just as at magic shows and card tricks.
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In contrast, Oakley's shooting was genuine, and remarkable. In April 1884, at Tiffin, Ohio, she wielded a .22-caliber rifle against 1,000 glass balls thrown in the air—and broke 943 of them. In February 1885, she loaded her own shotguns in a nine-hour marksmanship marathon that saw her shatter 4,772 glass balls, out of 5,000 thrown. Three years later, at Gloucester, New Jersey, she took a $5,000 bet that she could not shoot 40 of 50 pigeons released from 30 yards away. She downed 49.
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Although she took much satisfaction in her new life in public entertainment, her performance venues usually failed to please her. Shooting acts were often staged in theaters, where they served as filler, appearing between the farce and the main feature, for example. But the 1870s, the very moment when Oakley began appearing on stages, witnessed a kind of sexual insurrection with the advent of burlesque. Although later audiences would equate burlesque with strip shows, the earlier form of burlesque was distinctive for its all-female companies (indeed, the most famous burlesque companies were owned by women). Burlesque troupes normally staged parodies, and their stars played roles formerly reserved for men, often addressing the audience with witty political puns and risqué dialogue. All of these innovations shocked conventional morality.
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By 1875, burlesque performance and shooting acts alike were moving to variety and vaudeville theaters, where a series of separate routines—a boys' choir, snake charming, a juggler, a one-act comedy, a shooting demonstration, a magic show—followed one upon the other. Many of these theaters played to working-class male audiences, especially immigrants. They sold alcohol on the premises, and shows were even more risqué than the original burlesque.

Oakley had a profound aversion to burlesque, lowbrow variety theaters, and their “blue” shows. With Butler, she sought out vaudeville theaters that courted “respectable” women for their audiences with “ladies' nights” and free sewing kits, dresses, or other “domestic” prizes, and with “clean” shows—no liquor on the premises, no dirty jokes, and a reticence about bare flesh on the stage.
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Vaudeville impresario Tony Pastor was one of the first to attempt this strategy. Oakley preferred his theaters over most others, but her opportunities there were limited. In 1884, when she and Butler went to see Cody's show in New Orleans, her act was a feature of the Sells Brothers Circus, an amusement about which she was less than enthusiastic.
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In the beginning, Annie Oakley was drawn to the Wild West show for many of the same reasons that other Americans bought tickets to see it: it was wholesome entertainment. Unlike the circus, the Wild West show featured a romantic frontier hero as its star attraction, and for all its dubious male swagger, it was missing much of the liminal sexual content of circuses, burlesque, and other traveling amusements. Salsbury's reputation for “clean” shows, and the progressive narrative and open-air setting of the performances, reinforced these characteristics. By 1884, the show was already advertising itself as “America's National Entertainment,” and billing its attractions as educational and suitable for children.
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The “Attack on the Settler's Cabin,” after all, carried a clear message that Buffalo Bill stood for family preservation, making the Wild West show an outpost of family entertainment in a wilderness of decadent urban amusements.

It was in early 1885, during the awful New Orleans stint, that Salsbury watched Oakley run through her routine. Adam Bogardus—sick, soaked, and depressed—had just quit the show. In discussions with Cody, Salsbury recommended trying Oakley as a replacement for Bogardus, for three days at Nashville. Her ascent to a stardom that rivaled Cody's began when, at the end of her trial period, Salsbury and Cody hired her and then ordered $7,000 worth of poster, billboard, and herald art touting her act.
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Buffalo Bill's Wild West show rarely advertised individuals, and the heavy commitment to publicizing Oakley's presence suggests that the owners understood she was more than a novelty. For an entertainment chock-full of shooting acts, the twenty-five-year-old woman provided gallons of symbolic glue that both contained the show's violence and bonded its gunplay to family. Buffalo Bill's gun-toting centaur combined with Adam Bogardus's stalwart blasting of clay pigeons were impressive, but even with show programs touting “The Rifle as an Aid to Civilization,” men with guns were borderline figures. Shooting, after all, was destructive, not productive. Gunmen suggested war, and in a show that staged race war as amusement, the predominance of shooting stars pushed the envelope of acceptable chaos to its limit.

As we have seen, marksmanship implied industrial efficiency and technological reinvigoration, but it had wider resonances, too. Crowds were drawn to shooting acts by the almost magnetic tension between the explosive destruction of the gun and the controlling hand of the shooter. In eschewing waste—of bullets, or energy—the symbol of the marksman resonated with the rhetoric of capitalism and civilization. Corporate moguls of the late nineteenth century trumpeted new efficiencies as they consolidated and monopolized whole industries in the 1880s and '90s. The ability of American settlers to support more people on less land was a primary rationale for the conquest of the West which the show depicted. Mastery of guns suggested the precise deliverance of death; it implied flawless justice, and the ultimate harnessing of nature to human ends.

But it also had obvious, though unspoken, sexual connotations. Indeed, marksmanship was a coded display for an entire ideology of sex and race. Victorians understood men and women as fundamentally sexual beings. To many, the success of individuals and nations was contingent on the control of male sexuality. Some saw semen, the “male essence,” as the source of manly ambition and energy. Too-liberal dispersion of it led to the loss of both. Others were convinced that each organ had only so much “nerve energy,” and that overutilizing one organ drained all the others. Wholesome marital sex made men temporarily limp. Illicit, excessive sex made them perpetually languid, indolent, and passive—neurasthenic. Men who restrained their lust, on the other hand, were more likely to be physically and mentally “hardened,” primed to exploit opportunity where it opened.
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White men triumphed over dark men, and American civilization advanced at the expense of savagery, precisely because of the alleged superiority of white men at controlling their sexuality.

Of course, the perceived threat of overcivilization had led to refinements in this thinking. Some, notably the psychologist G. Stanley Hall, had suggested less emphasis on the restraint of male passion and more on the channeling of it, the better to avoid nervous exhaustion.

But whether one believed in old-fashioned restraint of male passions or the newer gospel of channeling them, the marksman was a near-perfect symbol, his ability to control the direction and delivery of his bullets a metaphor for his ability to contain and channel his desires. The death-dealing machine of the gun was symbolic of life-planting male organs, its lethal bullets an inversion of the “male essence” that planted the seeds of life. The sharpshooter stood for sexual restraint, the conscious redirection of masculine energy, individual success, and national power.

The allure of this symbolism was heightened by its relevance to the increasing racial and class violence of American cities after the Civil War. In the pervasive labor upheaval of the 1870s and '80s, working-class men and many immigrants from Ireland, Italy, Poland, and elsewhere rebelled against frequent, industry-wide wage reductions. In the subsequent violence, strikers wielded clubs, rocks, torches, and sometimes guns. In 1877, beginning with railroad workers in Maryland and West Virginia, what came to be known as the Great Strike burned along the railroad lines to Chicago, Kansas City, and other cities. A crowd of 20,000 demonstrated in Chicago. The railroad station in Pittsburgh burned to the ground. Dozens died in confrontations between strikers, police, militia, and federal troops.
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In response, terrified authorities and legislatures created new institutions to restrain “savage” labor, including urban armories and, in 1877, they reformed National Guard units. National Guardsmen were successors to the old militias, which in a few notorious cases had been composed of workingmen reluctant to fire on strikers. The new National Guard formalized command hierarchies and provided greater militarization. Above all, it promised to put guns in the hands of men who would use them against rebellious workers. Businessmen created volunteer guard units during the strike. Afterward, they helped support the National Guard with voluntary donations, and filled its ranks enthusiastically.
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Thus, proficiency with firearms came to be seen as practical, even vital for the defense of middle-class interests in the 1880s and '90s. The National Guard, its business supporters, and the nascent National Rifle Association (formed in 1871) opened dozens of shooting ranges for National Guard regiments. They also sponsored regional and national shooting competitions to encourage “the steady advance in marksmanship” of this new institution, “on whom we largely depend in the last resort for the preservation of public order.”
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While the marksman embodied an answer to deep-set anxieties about the need to strengthen masculinity and class power among white men, he also contained a message about restricting access to guns. For, without exception, the shooters in Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, as in the many other shooting acts of the Gilded Age, were white. Just as the destructiveness of the gun was restrained by the marksman who kept his bullets within a minimal “spread” on the target, his performance implied that the gun's power would not undo him, that he could contain it, and keep it from spreading into the hands of racial others.

In this way, as in many others, the Wild West show rewrote western history to correspond with the mythic needs of its middle-class, white audience. Outside the show arena, throughout American history, hands of all colors had gripped the shooting iron. Although bullets and firearms were expensive on the Plains, Cheyenne and Sioux snipers targeted American officers to terrible effect. In 1868, the first moments of the battle of Beecher's Island in Nebraska saw the surgeon mortally shot, the commanding general severely wounded, and his subordinate officer, Lieutenant Beecher, killed (and his name given to the battle).
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Of course, there were Mexican and African American marksmen, too, but significantly, no Indian, Mexican, or other nonwhite sharpshooters emerged in the genre of performance shooting after the Civil War. Hostility to minority displays of gun prowess complemented a gathering political movement to keep guns from minority hands. At the dawn of the twentieth century, African Americans saw their gun-toting privileges curtailed in the South, and gun-ownership rights of noncitizen immigrants vanished altogether in Pennsylvania and New York. In the West, once the Indian wars ceased, state legislators increasingly demanded that Indians be banned from hunting or carrying firearms off the reservation.
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In contrast to its reflection of gun rights as a white privilege, or talent, the show's horse and footraces soon became multiracial. In 1884, the first act of the show, after the “Grand Entree,” was a “Grand Quarter Mile Race, among four Mexicans, four Cowboys, and four Indians.”
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Interracial races kicked off the show's action in most years thereafter, introducing the show's drama as a display of American history told in social Darwinist terms, or a “race of races.” This contest was not fixed. Any racer—of any race—might triumph. White victory could be construed as proof of white superiority. An Indian or Mexican winner suggested that racial competition was ongoing and potentially tragic for a white race that allowed itself to flag. Against the possibility that white failure in the opening races might signify a larger racial degeneration, the show retained its comic ending partly by rendering the power of the gun a uniquely white province.
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After Salsbury came on board, he and Cody adapted the all-white shooting display to make it still more acceptable. Having banished Doc Carver's “Evil Spirit,” they enhanced the family context for the show's most famous shooter, Adam Bogardus, by placing him in performance with his four sons.
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Featuring white families in shooting acts was a standard way of making destructive gunplay appeal to family audiences, embedding it in a regenerative context of kin. Show publicists referred to the Bogardus “shooting quintette,” suggesting a performance similar to the popular family singing acts of the period.
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But it also communicated the essence of controlled, directed masculine desire common to all shooting acts: the faithful marksman who was a faithful and potent husband, producing four strapping marksman sons. With the Bogardus family, shooting became a demonstration of filial piety and inherited—therefore racial—virtue.

But Bogardus had just quit the show, and now Oakley's image as a virtuous white girl, or a girl-bride, provided a regenerative female context for the show's exhibition of lethal weapons, her femininity a stunningly ironic paradox for a display of gun proficiency. The symbolic meanings of the act reinforced the larger ideology of middle-class domesticity and restraint. Superficially, her performance was simple, spectacular marksmanship. But it was her inspired imposture as a middle-class farm girl and housewife that made her shooting skill so entrancing.