The Life and Legacy of Annie Oakley (3 page)

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Authors: Glenda Riley

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

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Page xvi
embodied were declining encouraged them to see her as a model western woman.
For at least forty of her sixty-six years, Oakley reigned as a major public figure. Then, in 1926, her death marked the beginning of her deification. Much as Buffalo Bill Cody came to represent the classic western man, Annie Oakley became the quintessential western woman. Today, many people still see the West of Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley as the
true
West, a West not only of shooting, riding, and roping but also of honesty, hard work, generosity, individualism, cooperation, and success.
Granted, Cody and Oakley's West was dramatic, colorful, and exciting. Things happened: shooters hit their targets, riders stayed on bucking broncs, ropers lassoed steers, and heroes vanquished villains of all sorts. But Cody and Oakley's West was more than entertainment and Oakley more than a star. Annie's life provides a revealing study in valuesboth of her era and of ours. Because she represented a myriad of admirable qualities often associated with the American West, an analysis of her timeless appeal helps explain what the West symbolized to Americans in her age and still today.
As the twenty-first century approaches and changing views of our past force us to reassess the nation's western past, Annie Oakley retains her luster. Even as historians revise the customary saga of the American West by condemning its cruelties, documenting the wasteful exploitation of its resources, and adding such groups as African Americans and Hispanics to the picture, there is no need to revise Oakley. Although not born or raised in the American West, Annie represented a West of honesty, courage, hard work, and sensitivity toward others. Today, her life and legend make an enduring West both attractive and possible.
But, because Annie Oakley is an integral part of the American public's continuing fascination with the Old West, she often seems more mythological than authentic. In addition, the genuine Annie is elusive because she was a private person who apparently did not keep diaries or preserve her correspondence. As a result, we can track Annie's career and whereabouts through newspaper clippings preserved by her husband, Frank Butler, but assessing the inner Annie is far more difficult.

 

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Fortunately, the newspaper clippings serve as a kind of text, revealing how Annie Oakley embraced or resisted change over the years, how she chose to present herself to the public, and how she and Frank reacted to such crises external to their own lives as the Spanish-American War of 1898 and World War I. In addition, a myriad of anecdotal and incidental evidence fills in some of the gaps. Annie wrote several pamphlets and, shortly before her death, a brief and factually inaccurate autobiography. Frank left a few poems and letters; Annie's niece Fern wrote her own version of her aunt's life; and several octogenarians remember and are willing to talk about their memories of Annie. Also, several letters written by or to Annie have survived, as well as a sketch of Annie by her grandniece Bess Lindsey Walcholz. A discussion of these and other sources can be found in the "Note on Sources," which, rather than endnotes, is the standard format for volumes in the Oklahoma Western Biographies series.
Through such sources, we can reconstruct Annie's life story. We can also learn more than we might in a pure biography because the lack of personal sources forces us to place Annie Oakley in historical context. And we can read between the historical lines, hypothesizing regarding Annie's personal motivations and speculating about the underside of her personality. Yet it still remains easier to reconstruct what Oakley contributed to legends and myths than what she personally thought and felt during her lifetime. Ultimately, because her subterranean moods and feelings remain unrevealed by sources, the "real" Annie Oakley is impenetrable.

 

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Chapter 1
"We Managed to Struggle Along"
Phoebe Ann Moses (or Mosey) was a late summer baby, born on August 13 in 1860. Even at the beginning she shook her tiny fists in the air and let the world know she intended to deal with life head on. As the fifth surviving child of a poor Ohio farm family, she could hardly expect ease and plenty, but the want, loss, and abuse that challenged her resourcefulness and forced her to become a survivor would have defeated most little girls. Annie, as her four older sisters dubbed her, seldom asked for trouble; it simply came to her unbidden.
Soon, for example, Annie began to notice the continuing strain on the family's limited resources. "When I was two," she later wrote, "there was a baby brother, worshipped by his five sisters," even though he represented another mouth to feed. When yet another child came along less than two years later, Annie felt torn between her love for the little girl and her own resentment of an increasingly difficult situation. The family home already bulged and the larder barely met the family's needs, although the children helped by feeding the stock, helping repair the fences, planting a garden, working in the fields, and gathering wild berries and nuts, including hickory, butternuts, and walnuts.
Of course, other Darke County children worked to help their families, but many of them, unlike Annie, also attended school. In addition, many other children knew what leisure time and entertainment meant. Hopscotch, jump rope, and "button, button, who's got the button?" were favorite games among the younger children. Older boys and girls attended singing school, learned to dance, and enjoyed sleigh rides, circuses, and county fairs. Annie experienced none of this. Instead, Annie stood on the cabin's plank floor, working alongside and watching her mother, whose back ached as she bent over a kettle of boiling laundry, whose face grew grimy as she cooked over the greasy smoke of the fireplace, and whose eyes squinted as she worked on the never-ending pile of

 

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mending. Sometimes, Annie must have wondered about the pretty pencil sketches and few paintings that her mother had stashed away until there was time to work on them once again.
Annie's parents, Jacob and Susan, recognized that their log-cabin farm, situated in the tract known as "fallen timbers" near Woodland township and eighteen miles from the county seat of Greenville, lacked the amenities and social graces. But it was far better than the inn that had once provided a meager living back in Pennsylvania before it burned down and left them homeless. Only four years before Annie's birth, they had picked up and followed the trail of the numerous Dunkards and Quakers who had begun to migrate to southwestern Ohio's fledgling Darke County earlier in the century.
Jacob and Susan soon discovered that Darke County, organized in 1817, had developed slowly. Although blessed with rich soil and plentiful trees, the area also suffered from drainage problems. As a result, throughout the 1840s, farming had struggled to survive. During the early 1850s, agriculture, based on the staple crop of corn, began to revive somewhat. Only in 1851 was the first flour mill erected. Then, in 1852, the Darke County Agricultural Society organized. But throughout the 1850s, the area still fought to establish itself. People worked their fields with the help of sickles, scythes, grain cradles, and oxen, lit their homes with candles or kerosene lamps, and cooked in fireplaces or on wood-burning stoves. Drainage continued to pose a problem, and primitive plank roads inhibited the transportation of goods to market. At the same time, the dissension leading to the Civil War tore at the young society's fragile roots. Some Darke County residents, notably Pennsylvania Quakers, assisted the Underground Railway; others, especially some of the numerous Southerners in the county, opposed it mightily.
Consequently, Susan and Jacob found that they could survive only by expending a huge amount of energy and ingenuity. They gleaned every resource possible from land and animals. Susan spent hours canning, drying, and packing fruits and vegetables in straw: apples, peaches, pears, cabbage, green beans, beets, turnips, parsnips, and potatoes. Jacob gathered, shocked, and cribbed

 

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corn for the stock; he butchered some of the stock, smoking the meat with hickory chips. When Jacob butchered a beef every fall, he tanned its hide for shoes. "The measurements were taken and the shoes made from daddy down," Annie explained. "The tops were stitched with heavy white floss for the younger children."
Annie was not yet six when a major tragedy struck the struggling family. Although a high proportion of Darke County men volunteered for the Civil War, at age sixty-two Jacob was too old and had too many dependents to serve at the front. He met disaster instead during the winter of 1865 when an early blizzard swirled about him and his horses as they tried to get grain to the mill and carry winter supplies home from the general store. Susan and her daughters awaited Jacob's return until midnight. When they heard the sound of horses' hooves muffled by the mounting snow, they rushed to the door. Jacob sat atop his horse, a frozen specter who had lost the use of both his hands and his voice. Susan and the oldest daughter, Mary Jane, dragged him inside and tried to restore him while the other children unloaded the horses and got them bedded down in the barn.
During the desperate winter that followed, Jacob remained an invalid. He never again rode the mail route that brought in the family's only cash income. Early in 1866, he succumbed to pneumonia and left Susan, at age thirty-three, with seven children under the age of fifteen. A year later, the eldest child, Marv Jane, also died, a victim of overexposure and tuberculosis. Susan sacrificed the farm as well as the pet cow, "Pink," to pay medical and funeral bills. "How we cried when she [Pink] left us!" Annie remembered. Susan then moved her dwindling family to a smaller farm she cash-leased from a sympathetic neighbor. Here Susan and the children did the housework, including processing food and making clothing, as well as tended the animals and farmed the land. "But every night," Annie remembered, ''no matter how tired we all were, mother washed our hands and feet, brushed and plaited our hair into pigtails, took little John and Baby Huldie onto her lap, and sang hymns with us and prayed God to watch over us.''
Annie, who was not yet seven, studied the situation to see what more she might be able to contribute. "I donned my homespun

 

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linsey dress . . . and started for the woods," she recalled. "There were plenty of quail, squirrel and rough grouse . . . I busied myself with traps made from the heaviest cornstalks, laid up like a loghouse and tied together by strings." Under these ingenious traps, Annie dug trenches and stocked them with grains of corn. Almost daily, several little birds fell victim to her cleverness.
Susan made the most of Annie's catches. She fried, broiled, and even fricasseed them. "Somehow we managed to struggle along for several years," Annie later wrote. But it wasn't enough for Annie. Sometime during this period, she climbed up above the fireplace and took down the old forty-inch cap-and-ball Kentucky rifle that had hung there since her father's death. She stuffed it with enough powder "to kill off a buffalo" and shot her first small game, perhaps a rabbit or a squirrel, through the head, just as her father had told her to so that the meat would remain unspoiled by shot.
Susan, who feared for Annie's safety and adhered to Quaker principles against firearms, forbade her daughter to use the rifle again for months. Within the year, however, Annie strode through nearby fields and woods, rifle in hand, confident of her ability to supplement the family's sparse diet with fresh meat. Still, the family's situation worsened. Susan, who earned only approximately $1.25 a week as a district health nurse, farmed out her children to helpful neighbors and friends who offered to relieve part of Susan's burden. At about age eight or nine, Annie reportedly moved in with Samuel C. and Nancy Ann Edington, superintendents of the Darke County Infirmary, or poor farm.
Coincidentally, the first inmate had arrived at the infirmary in 1856, the same year that Annie's parents had come to Darke County. By the time Annie got there, the infirmary housed an assortment of orphans, indigent Irish and African Americans, and people classified by the standards of the time as idiots. Certainly the infirmary was a sign of progress, for before its establishment, such people were "leased" to the lowest bidder, most of whom wanted to profit rather than provide quality care. Still, the three-story, brick infirmary that sat squarely on the Greenville and Eaton pikes just south of Greenville must have presented a dismal and frightening front to a young farm girl.

 

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Under Nancy Ann Edington's direction, Annie claimed that she learned to knit and use a sewing machine. She earned a little money by sewing, darning, and patching inmates' clothing. In her spare time, she improved her skill at fancy embroidery. Within a few weeks, a better offer came along in the guise of a man Annie called a "wolf in sheep's clothing" and later identified only as the "he-wolf." He wanted a girl to watch a three-week-old baby boy while his wife cared for the house and older children. There would be plenty of opportunity to go to school, he promised, and to trap and shoot.
When Annie declared her desire to take the job, Nancy Ann, who Annie referred to as "Auntie," wrote to Susan, who gave her permission. "All went well for a month," Annie later remarked, "then the work began to stack up." She rose at four o'clock in the morning to get breakfast, milk the cows, wash dishes, skim milk, feed the calves and pigs, weed the garden, pick wild berries, get dinner, and care for the baby. In between, the "wolf'' family, as she called them, expected her to trap and hunt.
"I was held a prisoner," she said. "They would not let me go." The "she-wolf" kept Annie out of school, fed her poorly, and one night, when Annie nodded over the stockings she was darning, struck her and threw her out into the snow. "I was slowly freezing to death,'' Annie remembered. "So I got down on my little knees, looked toward God's clear sky, and tried to pray. But my lips were frozen stiff and there was no sound." The return of the "he-wolf," generally believed to be a member of the Studabaker family, precipitated Annie's rescue. As he lumbered toward the house, his wife yanked Annie inside and tried to warm her by the fire. When he ducked through the door, his wife confessed her deed. They sent Annie to her loft bed in a feverish delirium and let her rest the next morning, although they brought her neither food nor drink.
In the meantime, the "wolves" regularly wrote to Susan, reporting that Annie was making progress in school and had made a good adjustment to their household. Believing she was helping her family and that her wage of fifty cents a week went to her mother in every letter, Annie hung on for almost two years. Then, "one fine spring day the family was gone." She wrote: "I was ironing a large basket of clothes. Suddenly I thought, why not run

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