The Life and Legacy of Annie Oakley (28 page)

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Authors: Glenda Riley

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

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Page 158
tent by the thousands, six or seven thousand for the afternoon performance and as many more during the evening. There, through the efforts of Buffalo Bill and his troupe, they were able to "conjure up scenes of prairie and frontier life such as novelists" had painted. Soon, the
Express
concluded, the "tomahawk and the hunting knife" would be extinct, and the American West would march only in Buffalo Bill's wake.
Having such a fascination for the American West, the English understandably continued to see Annie Oakley as an authentic westerner. Fans and reviewers alike referred to her as a "frontier" girl; some of those who had the opportunity to visit with her even thought she spoke with a delightful "western" accent. Thus did the Ohio farm girl become the model western woman.
In the meantime, William F. Cody had been in the gradual process of inventing the cowgirl, just as he had invented the cowboy, turning him from a rugged, often unsavory, manual laborer who worked at a low-paid, dusty, seasonal job into a cultural hero. Cody seemed to ignore the reality of the cowboy and the complaints against him. In 1881, for example, President Chester A. Arthur had asked the U.S. Congress to suppress not only Indians but also the desperadoes known as "Cow-boys" who ran rampant throughout the American West.
In a similar way, Cody created the cowgirl. If he hoped to attract women viewers, he would have to include women in the show. Moreover, rather than simply appearing as victims in the sketch about the burning of the settlers' cabin, women performers needed to be figures with whom a female audience could identify and admire. After all, the late nineteenth century was witnessing a drastic change in thinking about women and their abilities while the female work force was growing dramatically and women were breaking into virtually every professional field.
Also, because Buffalo Bill wanted to present an authentic portrayal of the West, he had to include women, for women did indeed ride and shoot in the West. Documented cases existed in Kansas, Montana, Wyoming, and Texas of women who ran ranches and drove their cattle to market or worked as partners with their husbands, performing a variety of jobs including wrangling cat-

 

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tle. In Wyoming, for example, Lucy Wells helped her unmarried brother develop a homestead into a ranch. She remembered that she "could handle the horses, milk cows, mow and rake in the fields," in short, everything there was "to be done on a ranch except plow."
Then, especially during the 1890s and early 1900s, a significant number of young women went west as "girl homesteaders." Land-office data from Colorado and Wyoming indicated that 11.9 and 18.2 percent of homestead entrants were females, more of them single than married. Data also revealed that 42.4 percent of the women "proved up" their claims, whereas only 37 percent of male claimants did so.
Consequently, even women who clung to the traditional female ethic of the Victorian era were curious about women who pushed at the bounds of that ethic. Thus, as Cody developed the cowgirl, he tried to shape the image of women performers the way he and, he hoped, potential audiences
wanted
to see western women.
One of the most popular acts in the Wild West that involved women was the Virginia reel on horseback, in which women rode as dance partners to the men. During her early years with the Wild West, Annie sometimes participated in the Virginia Reel, but it soon featured Emma Lake Hickok, daughter of Agnes Lake, a circus owner married to Wild Bill Hickok before his fatal shooting in Deadwood. Emma taught her horse to jump to music and stand on his hind legs to bow.
Of all the female performers, Annie captured first place in the public mind by personifying western women with unusual grace. She shot and rode with unusual skill. The first season with the Wild West, Annie began her act by shooting clay pigeons sprung from a trap; she then shot pigeons from two traps at a time, picked up her gun from the ground and shot after the trap was sprung, shot two pigeons in the same manner, and shot three glass balls thrown in the air in rapid succession, the first with her rifle held upside down on her head, the second and third with a shotgun. During following seasons, Oakley constantly practiced and regularly added new tricks to her repertoire.
Virtually all the women performers during the early years were Anglo women, often from rather conventional backgrounds and

 

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from areas outside the western United States. Shooter May Lillie grew up in Philadelphia and attended Smith College, whereas the "Texas Girl," Lillian Ward, had moved from Brooklyn to Texas for health reasons. Others accompanied husbands on the Wild West circuit. One of these was Minnie Thompson, who formed a partnership with her husband to run Wild West shows and circuses.
Women of other races and ethnic groups either had their own place in the Wild West shows or remained largely invisible. Native American women almost always appeared in limited roles; in the historical panoramas, they played torturers of white women or they appeared as "squaws" accompanying their men. Between shows, they provided back-lot attractions for curious visitors. African-American, Mexican, and Asian women seem to have been absent from the arena, at least during the early years.
As early as 1891, Cody's publicity used the term "cowgirls." Later, in 1898, the staff coined the term "rancheras" to describe the women riders in the show. The female riders Cody billed as ''a bevy of beautiful rancheras, genuine and famous frontier girls in feats of daring equestrianism." But as more women joined the Wild West shows, the graceful term ''rancheras" lost ground to the more descriptive "cowgirls." Even Annie Oakley's niece Fern came to think of her aunt as a cowgirl. She later wrote that as Annie rode into the arena, her long brown hair flying in the breeze, she "was typical of the Western cowgirl." Fern's words, of course, were inaccurate; her Aunt Annie, along with a few others, was only in the process of helping Cody
create
the typical western cowgirl.
Some of the cowgirls joined Wild West shows for excitement. May Lillie once said that being a cowgirl gave a woman far more enjoyment that "any pink tea or theater party or ballroom ever yielded." Many liked the opportunity to draw good pay or to work and travel with their husbands. Although some married couples attempted to bear and raise children on the circuit, childless married couples, like Annie Oakley and Frank Butler, were common.
At first, most cowgirls drew positive reactions from audiences. Cody and others billed them as prairie beauties, natural flowers of

 

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the American West, and Wild West show programs regularly denied that cowgirls belonged to the class of "new women." Cowgirls, promoters maintained, simply represented lively, athletic, young women who wanted the opportunity to develop their skills.
Such assertions sounded plausible; during the late 1890s most cowgirls still wore dresses or skirts and bodices, gloves, and hats with turned-up brims. Only a few rode their horses astride, and show programs explained that those cowgirls who adopted the "cross-seat" did so for safety and for freedom of movement. Even after the turn of the century, cowgirls who continued to work as "distaff" riders, appearing in historical sagas or horseback dances, or who sang songs around a campfire were generally well accepted.
By the mid-1890s, however, many cowgirls began to change their behavior and thus elicit negative comments. The image of cowgirls as tough women, unnaturally muscled and hardened in sentiment, began to emerge. Critics even viewed many cowgirls as potential corrupters of "good" women. This shift of opinion occurred partly because many cowgirls adopted masculine styles of clothing. At first, they wore divided skirts, which soon evolved into bloomer or trouser outfits bedecked with fur, feathers, beads, fringes, quillwork, and painted designs and set off by knee-high boots and Stetson hats. By the mid-1890s, a significant number of women in Wild West shows rode broncs, diving horses, and steers, as well as performed fancy roping and bulldogging. These cowgirls rode astride, which most Americans still thought immodest as well as potentially harmful to women's reproductive systems. A special saddle with a padded seat, a heavy roll of padding across the front of the seat, and thick, stiff leather between the saddle and the stirrup appeared, but most photographs and posters from the era show cowgirls continuing to use men's lighter roping saddles.
The majority of the criticism came from the public rather than from showpeople themselves. In August 1903, J. D. Tippett, an eighteen-year veteran with tent shows, wrote to Annie saying that he had always felt "touchy about what the world" called "show women," for he knew from his travels that they were "just as moral

 

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and respectable as any class of women on earth." Tippett's remarks about the public's attitude toward female performers, comments sent to Annie in reaction to the scurrilous article about her supposed use of drugs, places her own subsequent actions in a larger context. Her willingness to sue the newspapers reflected, at least in part, her determination to keep her reputation unsullied and to hold herself above the more disreputable cowgirls.
During the years Oakley pursued her libel suits, from 1904 to 1910, publicity became increasingly risqué. Posters picturing cow-girls engaged in unladylike activities alarmed many Americans even further. In 1910, a poster advertising a motion picture,
The Life of Buffalo Bill
, produced by the Buffalo Bill/Pawnee Bill Film Company, featured a cowgirl wearing trousers, a man's shirt and bandanna, a Stetson hat, and six-guns. Riding astride, she twirled a lariat above the horns of a massive, steam-snorting bull.
The following year, when Annie joined the Young Buffalo Show, the
Baltimore Evening Sun
described one cowgirl as wearing a "comic-opera costume" and displaying a pretty face turned as "hard as nails." With the Young Buffalo Show between 1911 and 1913, Oakley refused to model herself after such women. Annie, who continued to wear her usual conservative clothing, appealed to two types of viewers: those who admired her skill whatever her attire and demeanor, and those who appreciated her ladylike stance. She continued to draw audiences and garner favorable reviews, despite, or perhaps because of, the more modern dress and actions of her competitors.
Given Oakley's attitudes toward proper female behavior, she must have reacted with both amazement and displeasure to the changes she witnessed during the years between 1885 and 1913. At least seventy-two Wild West shows, and probably more than that, existed during this period. The shows literally saturated the nation with increasingly intrusive publicity. Their advance agents plastered publicity on board fences, billboards, and the walls of buildings from barns to outhouses, so that even if people did not attend a Wild West show, they still absorbed its images.
It was literally impossible to avoid such advertising. Agents had begun their publicity blitzes with a one-sheet bill, which measured twenty-eight by forty-two inches, but they rapidly

 

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progressed to two-, three-, four-, six-, eight-, twelve-, and sixteen-sheet posters. Among the grandest was the twenty-four sheet, which came in six separate sections and, when assembled, measured twenty-four times the size of the one-sheet. Agents gave young boys free tickets to distribute handbills house to house while they placed the smaller-sized bills in store windows, sometimes completely covering them. The twenty-four-size posters covered billboards at the cost of a small fee and farmers' barns for the price of a couple of free tickets.
It would have been difficult for anyone living in the United States to ignore the masculine images of women in such advertising. During the early 1900s, Pawnee Bill billed his cowgirls as "Beautiful Daring Western Girls and Mexican Senoritas in a Contest of Equine Skill." Tiger Bill's Wild West went further; its posters pictured women shooters in the attack on the settlers' cabin. These women not only wielded guns alongside men but wore above-the-knee skirts, knee-high boots, and men's Stetson hats.
Other shows followed the trend. Owners, managers, and publicity agents, who realized that Wild West shows were losing ground to other mediums such as Owen Wister's novel
The Virginian
, published in 1902 and widely regarded as the "first" western adventure novel, or such as Edwin S. Porter's 1903 movie
The Great Train Robbery
, had to use every attention-getter they could devise. As a result, Tompkins Real Wild West and Frontier Exhibition issued posters that showed a woman riding astride, attired in a split skirt, her whip raised in the air, while another woman hung from a cross-saddle to retrieve something from the ground. Both rode amid men.
The Buffalo Ranch Real Wild West's advertising also portrayed women riding with men and participating in equestrian football and camel races. In other publicity, it claimed that cowboys, cowgirls, Indians, and Mexicans constituted the four elements of the Old West. It outreached Buffalo Bill Cody and his Congress of Rough Riders by presenting a Congress of American Cowgirls.
During these years, numerous Wild West shows expanded on the original western themes by adding "Far East" attractions. The Miller Brothers 101 Ranch Wild West, which included such spec-

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