The Life and Legacy of Annie Oakley (11 page)

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Authors: Glenda Riley

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

BOOK: The Life and Legacy of Annie Oakley
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er than short stands, by producing a show in Madison Square Garden, and by taking the Wild West to Europe. Now, with the American frontier "officially" dead, the years ahead offered fertile ground to entertainers, impresarios, and media moguls who could breath life and vitality into the country's good old days. Fortunes could be made, publicity gained, reputations established, and legends generated in such a climate of opinion. A public that hungered for the Old Wild West and for the virtues, adventure, and drama associated with it would gladly pay to witness the spectacles Cody and Salsbury staged in arenas in both hemispheres.
Just as circuses replayed history in gaudy dramas ranging from Cleopatra to Columbus, so did Cody and Salsbury re-create an American past in increasingly larger and more dramatic versions of "The Attack on the Settlers' Cabin," "The Rescue of the Deadwood Stage," "The Pony Express," "The Buffalo Hunt," and ''Custer's Last Fight." In addition, shooting, riding, conflict between heroes and villains, and an Old West theme provided a sure-fire formula for pleasing audiences and making them talk about the Wild West long after a performance.
In a letter written around 1890, General William Tecumseh Sherman congratulated Cody for illustrating "the history of civilization on this continent during the past century." He wrote, "You have caught one epoch of this country's history, and have illustrated it in the very heart of the modern worldLondon." Cody appreciated Shermans' remarks; Shermans' comments reinforced Cody's own beliefs about what held an audience's attention and made them come back for more.
In addition, in the same way that circuses relied on daredevils and death-defying stunts, Cody and Salsbury recognized the value of their shooters, cowboys,
vaqueros
, Indians, and other performers. The partners worked tirelessly to develop new stunts that would take both the performer and the viewer to the edge, then pull them back before disaster occurred. Then, after James A. Bailey of Barnum and Bailey Circus fame replaced ailing Nate Salsbury as manager in 1894, he and Cody began to change the show significantly by adding circus elements, including trained animal acts and sideshows.

 

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Cody and Salsbury also took into account the women of the 1890s. For eight of Annie's sixteen seasons with the Wild West, management placed her in the number-two spot on the bill to reassure women in the audience and help them relax during the frequent bursts of gunfire. Annie began shooting with a pistol, then accelerated the noise and excitement until she shot with a full charge in her rifle and shotgun. In the words of John Burke, "Women and children see a harmless woman there, and they do not get worried." In the show itself, Cody and Salsbury presented women as something more than victims or assistants to the main performers. Certainly, in "The Attack on the Settlers' Cabin," women ran, screamed, and fell into rescuers' arms, but in other segments of the show, "cowgirls" guided horses through complicated drills, performed bareback tricks, and rode untamed broncos. Sometimes, women also shot; in fact, the star shooter, Annie Oakley, was a woman.
In addition, the Wild West exposition reflected racial and ethnic diversity, probably because Cody desired authenticity. Since diversity characterized the American West, the show had to include Native Americans, Mexican Americans, and, of course, Anglo Americans. African Americans and Asians appeared only infrequently, although Cody gradually added Arabs, Germans, Irish, Japanese, Cubans, Filipinos, and other groups, especially to the Congress of Rough Riders of the World.
Cody and Salsbury also continued to hone the Wild West into a remarkably efficient operation. When the company toured Germany in 1891, German troops studied its movements. "We never moved without at least forty officers of the Prussian guard standing all about with notebooks taking down every detail of the performance," Annie recalled. "They made minute notes on how we pitched campthe exact number of men needed, every man's position, how long it took, how we boarded the trains, and packed the horses, and broke camp; every living rope and bundle and kit was inspected and mapped." They also took great interest in the camp kitchen, which served some 750 people tasty and hot meals every day.
The 1893 season proved the wisdom of expanding the Wild West exposition; despite worsening economic conditions in the United

 

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States, the show cleared almost one million dollars in profit. Based on that circumstance, Cody continued to expand, even though profits declined. Within five years, the Wild West exposition's equipment included eight sleeping coaches, fifteen railroad cars for stock, sixteen flatcars for equipment ranging from electric-light plants to the celebrated Deadwood stage, and thirty-five baggage wagons for tents, tack, and other gear.
Evidently, Oakley and Butler understood Cody and Salsbury's strategy in attracting audiences, publicity, and profits; they appear to have supported it at nearly every turn. The time and effort they invested in Annie's performance also indicated that they realized that the right combination of shooting and personality would ensure them continued success but that real stardom required more. Annie and Frank obviously understood that everything from costumes, accessories, lighting, and music to the performer's social and technical skills during the act and his or her personal behavior in private life demanded careful orchestration.
In addition, Annie and Frank's European experience impressed on them the widespread appeal of the American Dream. They always remembered what they called the "scum" and beggars in Naples, as well as the filth and corruption that tarnished other areas of the Old World. Whether consciously or not, they understood that people who lived with such problems wanted to see, and believe in, the prosperous, clean, and uncorrupted American West. Although Annie and Frank may not have explicitly discussed the idea of wish fulfillment, they obviously comprehended its principle.
Annie and Frank also drew on their own moral beliefs in shaping and refining Annie's act and personal image. Although their show business acumen dictated the inclusion of drama, their own personalities demanded a "clean" aura based on solid family values. Consequently, Annie and Frank developed a routine and a persona for Annie that suited the times. Like the overall Wild West program, Oakley and Butler incorporated five basic elements into Annie's act and into her private life: guns, horses, heroes, villains, and the American West.
A crucial dimension of Annie's act and image was exceptional skill with that western symbol the gun. Employing guns as safe

 

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symbols of entertainment and sport, she performed a wide range of tricks, including shooting an apple off a dog's head, shooting the ash off a cigarette Frank held in his teeth and a dime out of his fingers, shooting holes in playing cards, and bounding over a table and then shooting two glass balls already in the air when she began to jump. She also pointed her rifle backward over her shoulder, sighted in a mirror, and hit targets behind her back.
In response, reviewers used such terms as "marvelous," "superb," "phenomenal," "extraordinary," ''remarkably clever," ''astonishing," and "intrepid." In 1896, a
New York Evening Telegram
reporter observed, "[Oakley] ruined more glass balls within a given time than I would like to pay for in a week." According to him, she "slammed" a rifle through the air in every conceivable direction, snapped the trigger, and yet another glass ball fell toward the ground.
Annie's skill with horses also assumed legendary proportions. She became a female cowboy who, being brave, strong, and clever, could easily handle the mainstay of western life, the horse. In 1887, for example, Annie trained a horse named Gipsy to follow her everywhere, including up flights of stairs and into a freight elevator. In 1898, one week after Annie bought a dark bay named Prince, she charmed female visitors to Stirrat's stables in New York City by giving Prince the word to kneel and bow to the ladies, shake hands, and perform other tricks. Another of the favorable reports that followed her every appearance said that Oakley, a "superb equestrienne," simply tightened the reins to persuade the fractious horse to draw up his left forefoot and drop to one knee in a salute.
The third elementheroesis more complicated. In numerous ways, Annie herself played the hero on and off the stage. For instance, like a good westerner, she always acted in a clean-cut, outdoor, athletic way. Annie not only rode well but also performed cartwheels and sprinted near the end of her performance. Newspaper critics indicated that they and the public approved. In July 1891, the
Manchester Spy
noted that "athletes of the first water would hesitate to compete with her," for seldom could "a young lady, however muscular and fond of sports, sustain such a fast and smart sprint as Miss Oakley." And in 1893, the
Brooklyn Citizen

 

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described Annie as "the wonderful woman" who could "leap like a gazelle, run like a deer."
Annie likewise proved reliable and tough. She frequently pushed herself to work under adverse conditions, including her own poor health, inclement weather, or accidents. When a portion of a grandstand collapsed in 1891 during a performance in Nottingham, England, five hundred people plunged to the ground during Annie's performance. Yet she continued her shooting and, according to one witness, "finished her work without a single miss, under the circumstances and excitement displaying remarkable nerve for a lady." Another witness declared that her coolness averted panic and that, as a result, only a few people suffered slight injuries.
Annie also maintained scrupulous honesty. Unlike other performers who relied on an accomplice to shatter targets by means of wires or other devices, Oakley never used tricks or illusion. Although temptations to employ artifice or cut corners must have existed, Annie and Frank strove to keep her act honest. On one occasion, a circus performer who fired a rifle while swinging from a trapeze and hit the bull's-eye every time attracted Annie's interest until she discovered that the woman fired blanks while a property man rang the bell behind the target. Another trick that interested Annie involved a rifle expert playing a piano by shooting discs that caused hammers to strike the piano wires. But during one performance, his gun jammed and the piano kept playing; a confederate backstage activated the mechanism. Shooters of the 1890s used other tricks as well. In one, an eight-inch-wide metal funnel painted to match the target surrounded the usual one-inch bull's-eyes; this device caught any bullet within reasonable range and funneled it to the bull's-eye. In the cigar-ash trick, a shooter need not come anywhere near the target; the smoker simply pulled a wire in the cigar's center and the ash dropped off at the appropriate moment. But Annie declined to use such artifice.
A related issue concerned whether Oakley broke glass balls with bullets or scatter shot because it seemed to the uninformed more difficult to hit a ball with a bullet. Frank Butler and others explained time and again that Cody, Baker, and Oakley had all

 

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used rifles that shot bullets into the air in the early days, but because the falling shells endangered members of the audience, tent roofs, and nearby buildings, especially greenhouses whose owners lost no time in submitting bills for damages, they had switched to shotguns that fired shotted shells, which typically held two hundred tiny pellets. Pellets did not go very far and fell harmlessly into the arena or a drop curtain. In 1894, Ralph Greenwood, who wrote for
Shooting and Fishing
, pointed out that neither Oakley nor any of the other shooters in the Wild West claimed to shoot bullets at glass balls but only fired bullets at stationary targets with backstops. Also, Johnny Baker frequently maintained that the difficulty remained the same whether using a rifle ball or shotted shell because, at the customary range of twenty feet, the pellets made a pattern only about the same size as the glass ball.
In addition to her heroic qualities, Annie also remained feminine yet sexual, both on stage and in private. Annie excelled in combining a proper Victorian image with a simple, innocent sexuality. For example, Annie never donned pants, always wore her hair long, and raised the ordinary act of riding sidesaddle to an art. When the bicycle craze for women erupted in the mid-1890s and such well-known figures as temperance reformer Frances Willard took it up, Annie learned to ride while wearing a modest skirted outfit. Without exposing her legs, she soon shot down live birds and glass balls while wheeling in a circle with her hands never touching the handlebars.
As a result, Annie became a symbol for women viewers, especially those who wanted to try their hands at some aspect of sports. One reviewer asserted that Oakley supplied "another living illustration of the fact that a woman, independent of her physique, can accomplish whatever she persistently and earnestly sets her mind to overtake." An even stronger recommendation came from a fan who wrote to Annie in April 1900, "For several years I have been trying to get my wife interested in guns and shooting, but until she witnessed your work with Buffalo Bill last season I had poor luck with it." He added that after seeing Annie, his wife became an enthusiastic shooter.
Furthermore, Oakley provided a way for women to identify

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