Louis S. Warren (40 page)

Indeed, her embodiment of a feminine domestic ideal suggests her acting skills were every bit as remarkable as her shooting. The Moses family had been hardscrabble farmers in rural Ohio. Annie Moses was six when her father died, nine when her stepfather passed away. Her mother, unable or unwilling to care for her children, dispersed them. Brothers and sisters went to neighbors. Annie spent a year in the county home, then another two years with a cruel farm family. “The man was a brute,” she later recalled, “and his wife a virago.”
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She returned home only by running away, to discover her mother remarried to one Joseph Shaw. He was kind enough to take her in but he, too, soon died. This time, Annie kept her place at home by making enough cash to be invaluable, as the proficient market hunter she had become. Within four years, she figuratively left the house forever as Frank Butler's wife. Only then did she learn to read.

By
1902,
Annie Oakley's sixteen years with
the Wild West show had come to an end.
Her hair dyed, she was still youthful, even
virginal, an icon of middle-class femininity.
Courtesy Buffalo Bill Historical Center.

In her publicity, Oakley made much of her devotion to her mother and siblings. “I know this much,” she told a London interviewer in 1887, “if I had my mother living with me here I should be in no hurry to get back to the States.”
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But in more private ways, she could not get far enough away from her origins. It is said that she took the name Oakley because children at the county home taunted her with a singsong refrain, “Moses poses.” This could be true. But her eagerness to seize a new identity, and her thoroughness in burying the old, suggest a deep anger. Annie Moses went after her old surname like a fury. Before she became Oakley she tried out the name “Mozee.” Her experiment extended to changing family records, rechiseling “Mozee” on Moses family tombstones, and waging a consequent feud with her brother, who retained the Moses name.
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When she failed to expunge that name from history, she abandoned Mozee for still another.

Perhaps her new and most famous identity was preferable because it severed all connection to the Moses name. Whatever her reasons, there is no indication that Annie Oakley's affection for Frank Butler was anything but deep and constant. But if Annie Mozee began her path to stardom with her marriage, her refusal to take her husband's name to the stage with her— even he called her “Miss Oakley” in newspaper interviews—suggests she might have been dubious about its value.
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Indeed, marrying a divorced trick-shooting Irish immigrant from the vaudeville circuit was no sure ticket to better fortunes. Butler made his way to the stage after arriving from Ireland in 1863. When the couple went out on the stage together, they entered the same world of widespread disrepute that Cody occupied in the 1870s. On its face, the idea of her becoming a middle-class attraction by this route seemed absurd.
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But Annie Oakley was never one to take no for an answer. She insisted on star billing, and she got it. Her act featured a woman pushing—or bursting— a whole series of cultural constraints. She earned a livelihood by drawing a gun on her husband, shooting a dime from between his thumb and forefinger, the ember off a cigarette between his lips, a playing card in his hand held edgewise toward her, so that the bullet sliced the card in two. She could do all of these stunts with her rifle held backward over her shoulder as she sighted in a mirror. When Butler released two clay pigeons, Oakley would leap over a table, pick up her gun, and shatter them both before they hit the ground. In another event, he held small cards in his hand. She fired at them, then he threw them into the stands. Spectators beheld these souvenirs in awe: two-inch by five-inch cards with her picture at one end and a one-inch-wide, heart-shaped bull's-eye at the other—with a bullet hole through it.
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Oakley's spectacle entranced middle-class audiences partly because she appeared as a respectable, domestic figure. Her entrance in the arena “was always a very pretty one,” wrote Dexter Fellows, longtime press agent for the Wild West show. “She never walked. She tripped in, bowing, waving, and wafting kisses.” She was less than five feet tall, and with her delicate, youthful features, and a dress that reflected the latest middle-class fashions, her large rifle or shotgun looked oddly out of place. “Her first few shots brought forth a few screams of fright from the women, but they were soon lost in round after round of applause.” If the pretty, diminutive, respectable woman could handle the guns so masterfully, then surely the display was safe to watch. “It was she who set the audience at ease,” recalled Fellows, “and prepared it for the continuous crack of firearms which followed.”
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Annie Oakley's act made powerful use of her symbolic femininity. Where Victorians believed that men were bedeviled by surging passions that they struggled to restrain, the better class of women were “naturally good,” more able to restrain their passions unless somehow corrupted. Thus, the best way of containing the surging desires of manhood was a faithful marriage. A good wife was the sole recipient of a good husband's physical affections, and in this connection, she was vital to the restraint and direction of his passions.

At first glance, a performance in which a small, girlish—even virginal— woman raised a gun to her husband might seem to subvert these principles. Indeed, cultural anxieties about the place of women in public and private life were pronounced in the 1870s. As much as they were symbols of domestic order, as Carroll Smith-Rosenberg writes, “from the mid-nineteenth century on woman had become the quintessential symbol of social danger and disorder.”
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The power of the home as symbol depended on a connection with woman. And the possibility that women might wish to sever or reshape that bond generated a large amount of cultural anxiety. Indeed, American society was as transfixed by the problem of shoring up womanly domesticity as it was by the presumed failure of manly virility, for the Industrial Revolution both called women to work for wages and created a new bourgeoisie for whom a principal symbol of status was a stay-at-home wife. The dangers of the new cities were legion, from crime and prostitution to alcoholism and many, many threats of nervous disorder. But none was more confounding than the danger of women
choosing
to leave the dwelling place of men, either to work or in more symbolic ways, by availing themselves of birth control or abortion.
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The willingness of white women to combat established notions of home and domesticity in this way left them open to accusations of weakening the culture or, in the parlance of the time, the white race.

Conceivably, Oakley might have been seen as a revolutionary who challenged and resisted the burdens of her sex, earning a salary by mastering the quintessential male technology of her day while her husband-manager took a subordinate role. But the combination of her targets—the cigarettes, money, and cards in his hands—created a symbolic male profligacy which she restrained with her firearm. Where Oakley's alchemy of blushing femininity with astonishing marksmanship signified the restraining power of woman over the gun, it also suggested the power of women—especially white, middle-class women—to restrain and direct the gun's inversion, male desire. Annie Oakley did not subvert middle-class ideals of marriage. She reinforced them. The woman who raised a rifle to her husband paradoxically embodied the perfect wife. Where white marksmen stood for racial strength against the surging, savage hordes of immigrant labor, Annie Oakley holding a gun was the perfect symbol of the racial strength to be had in domestic union of wifely virtue and male passion, which was, after all, the hearth of the race itself.
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Oakley balanced her arena inversion of gender roles with a strong social conservatism in day-to-day life. As a female sharpshooter
and
a symbol of domesticity, she stood in opposition to Calamity Jane—a genuine cross-dressing frontier woman who was named as a driver of the Deadwood coach in show programs. John Burke and other publicists made a great deal out of the fact that Oakley designed her own costumes and did her own needle-point on her dresses. In her tent at the showgrounds, journalists to whom she served tea praised the “quiet and ladylike manner in which she acts the part of hostess.”
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While she was an avid bicyclist, she had little time for suffragists and other “New Women” who seized on the bicycle as a vehicle of female liberation. To Oakley, cycle sports were properly feminine, but “many women abuse the glorious sport by making such a feature of century runs, riding until worn out, and wearing bloomers.”
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For whatever reason, she never had children of her own. Throughout her career with the Wild West show, she remained in the role of virgin and surrogate mother, to Indians, cowboys, or the assortment of schoolchildren and orphans in the crowd.
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Her interior life remains so remote that it is hard to say what private concessions she made to fulfill public demands, but there are hints they were considerable. In Dexter Fellows's estimation, “she was a consummate actress,” her public gaiety and womanly graciousness a self-conscious projection. Her trademark of shooting holes through playing cards made “Annie Oakley” a synonym for a free ticket, which was identified by a punched hole. “The further connotation of getting something for nothing also applied to Annie's code of living.” She never hired taxis to the showgrounds, but rode on wagons transporting show equipment instead. The show did not play on Sundays, when most performers took rooms in hotels for their stopovers. Annie and Frank always stayed in their Pullman car. On the showgrounds, she never bought her own soft drinks, but walked next door to Cody's tent and filled her pitcher from whatever he had bought.

She was the Wild West show's most powerful symbol of domesticity, her combination of marksmanship, femininity, temperance, and frugality a huge marketing asset for a show of border life. As Fellows recalled, “the sight of this frail girl among the rough plainsmen seldom failed to inspire enthusiastic plaudits.” But in the show community's everyday life, her fierce attention to some virtues excluded others, such as generosity, or genuine hospitality, once the journalists left her tent. “During the nine years that I was with the Buffalo Bill show,” wrote Fellows, “I never saw her take a drink of anything stronger than beer, which she would imbibe only when someone else paid the bill.”
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But Oakley's attractions were not lost on Cody and Salsbury. Learning from their success with her, they hired other women performers, including Lillian Smith, “the California Girl.” Although Smith's sharpshooting rivaled Oakley's, the latter's display of petite domesticity outshone Smith, who was heavy and single. The California Girl soon married one of the show's cowboys, Jim “Kid” Willoughby. But in 1889 she ran away with another man. (If that did not terminate any chance she had of replacing Oakley as the public's favorite sharpshooting lady, she later exploited her dark skin to take up a new role as an “Indian princess” named Winona, and appeared in competing Wild West shows.)
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Other white women with the show included Georgia Duffy, wife of cowboy Tom Duffy; Della and Bessie Ferrell, who were hired to represent “frontier girls,” later cowgirls; and Emma Lake Hickok, whose “Exhibition of Fancy Riding” was naturalized to western soil by her surname, which she took from her deceased stepfather, Wild Bill.
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Despite Oakley's many claims that the Wild West company was one big family, she appears to have resented the presence of Lillian Smith and other white women performers who came on board in her wake.
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For a time, tensions between Oakley and the show owners sent her packing. In November 1887, when Buffalo Bill's Wild West left London for Manchester, Annie Oakley and Frank Butler left the Wild West for their own tour of Europe. During 1888, publicist John Burke recorded the success of the Wild West show in London in a book, fondly recalling Lillian Smith's introduction to Queen Victoria—“Young California spoke up gracefully and like a little woman”—but failing even to mention Annie Oakley.
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She and Butler did not return to Buffalo Bill's Wild West until the 1889 season, after which she remained a major attraction with the show until her final departure, in 1901.
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Fitting Oakley into the show's mythological canvas ultimately opened up whole new vistas for Cody and Salsbury. Where the number and exuberance of Cody's roving, energetic, raucous, and warlike horse-men had threatened to overwhelm the homey virtues of his Wild West show, the presence of white women allowed Cody to selectively domesticate the entertainment. Even before he began to exploit the centaur imagery, Cody deployed white women performers in one of the most enduring acts—in which he often featured himself—near the center of the program: the “Virginia Reel on Horseback,” sometimes called the “Quadrille on Horseback.” Usually this scene depicted a community in transition, either on their way across the prairie by wagon train or in the midst of building a ranch or town. A celebration would be called for, the music struck up, and because no dance floor could be found, the young men and women would square off and begin a Virginia reel—on horseback.
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