The Colonel and Little Missie Read online

  In Memories of Buffalo Bill Lulu Cody comes across as a spunky woman who is going to have her say, and precisely her say. She blandly leaves out all discord, admits only once or twice to loneliness, and generally paints as admiring a picture of her husband as even Major Burke could have produced. No mention of other women sullies her pages; even Little Missie is not allowed to appear. Then, with no warning, we’re at the end:

  Many a year followed that, many a year of wandering, while Will went from country to country, from nation to nation, from state to state. There were fat times and there were lean times, there were times when storms gathered, and there were times when the sun shone; but always in cloud or sunshine, there was ever a shadow just behind him [Cody], following him with a wistful love that few men can ever display, Major John M. Burke. And when the time came for that Will and I said goodbye forever, another man loosed his hold on the world. Throughout every newspaper office in the country, where John Burke had sat by the hour, never mentioning a word about himself, but telling always of the progress of his “god” there flashed the news that Major John M. Burke, the former representative of William Frederick Cody, had become dangerously ill. And six weeks later the faithful old hands were folded, the lips that had spoken hardly anything but praise of Buffalo Bill for half a century, were still. Major Burke had died when Cody died, only his body lingered on for those six weeks, at last to loose its hold on the loving, faithful old spirit it bound and allow it to follow its master over the Great Divide.

  The death of Cody himself is recorded less grandiloquently; then, a few pages on, it’s Lulu’s turn.

  Yes, my life is lived, and out here in the West, where every evening brings a more wonderful, more beautiful blending at sunset, I watch the glorious colorings and feel a sense of satisfaction that it will not be long now before I see the fading of the sunset of my own little world, until the time shall come when I am with the children I loved and the man I loved . . . on the Trail Beyond.

  Lulu had indeed outlived her children and Bill Cody. She outlived Texas Jack Omohundro by forty years, and his lovely wife, the peerless Morlacchi, by thirty-four. Texas Jack Omohundro died of pneumonia in Leadville, Colorado, in 1880, and his wife, the premiere danseuse so admired by Major Burke, succumbed to cancer in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1886. Nate Salsbury went in 1902, Cody in 1917, Lulu in 1920. But three of the best rifle shots ever, Johnny Baker, Doc Carver, and Annie Oakley, were still going strong.

  9

  ONE thing we’ve learned in the celebrity-rich last century is superstars cleave to other superstars. Rock stars hang out with other rock stars, movie stars with other movie stars, Michael Jordan with Larry Bird, and so on.

  By 1886, when Cody and Salsbury brought the Wild West to the Erastina resort on Staten Island for an extended stay, Cody had become such a huge star that he had no peer to hang out with. Fortunately he had an entourage, and Annie Oakley’s star was rising rapidly. At some time during this season Sitting Bull went home, but not before Cody presented him with a gray horse and a fine sombrero; in later years the difficult Hunkpapa was very particular about this hat. When one of his relatives decided to try it on, Sitting Bull was not pleased: “My friend Long Hair gave me this hat. I value it very highly, for the hand that placed it on my head had a friendly feeling for me.”

  Before departing Sitting Bull made his “Little Sure Shot,” Annie Oakley, a member of the Hunkpapa tribe.*

  After the sinking of the steamboat and the huge losses they incurred in their first two seasons, Cody and Salsbury had to give serious consideration to profits, which could best be achieved, it seemed to them, by settling in for an extended run in a big population center such as New York. This might produce not only famous spectators but also repeat spectators. Staten Island, where P. T. Barnum had first chased his buffalo, proved to be nearly ideal.

  Soon enough celebrities began to attend the Wild West, and they were not sparing of endorsements. General Sherman attended the first show and uttered some fairly cryptic praise. P. T. Barnum himself was more direct. “They do not need spangles to make it a real show,” he said. Libbie Custer proclaimed the Wild West “the most realistic and faithful representation of a western life that has ceased to be, with advancing civilization.”

  Mark Twain was even more fulsome, claiming that the Wild West

  brought back to me the breezy, wild life of the Rocky Mountains and stirred me like a war song. Down to its smallest detail the show is genuine—cowboys, vaqueros, Indians, stagecoach, costumes and all; it is wholly free from sham and insincerity and the effect produced on me by its spectacles were identical with those wrought upon me a long time ago by the same spectacles on the frontier . . . it is often said on the other side of the water that none of the exhibitions which we send to England are purely and distinctively American. If you will take the Wild West show over there you can remove that reproach.

  Twain’s enthusiasm for the Wild West never waned; he even went so far as to write a short story from the point of view of Cody’s horse.

  Long before the troupe did depart for England, in 1887, Cody had collected a bale of highly complimentary letters from virtually every prominent American military leader: Sherman, Sheridan, Crook, Merritt, and Bankhead, just to name the generals who wrote glowingly about Cody’s splendid behavior. At least a score of colonels also weighed in.

  The odd thing about these testimonials is that they all praise the show’s realism, opinions contradicted—to my mind at least—by the many thousands of photographs of these same performances. What was realistic about Annie Oakley shooting glass balls? The only thing Western about her act was her costumes—she wore boots, which few Western women did at the time. The events that were most realistic, such as King of the Cowboys Buck Taylor’s bronc riding, were closer to rodeo than to Indian fights and buffalo chases. The same could be said of the roping act of the champion vaquero Antonio Esquivel.

  Somehow Cody succeeded in taking a very few elements of Western life—Indians, buffalo, stagecoach, and his own superbly mounted self—and creating an illusion that successfully stood for a reality that had been almost wholly different. Even hardened journalists such as Brick Pomeroy took fairly crude stagecraft for realism:

  It is not a show. It is a resurrection, or rather an importation of the honest features of wild Western life and pioneer incidents to the East, that men, women, and children may see, realize, understand, and forever remember what the Western pioneers met, encountered, and overcame. It is in secular life what Christ and the apostles proposed to be in religious life, except that in this case there are no counterfeits but actual, living, powerful, very much alive and in earnest delegates from the West, all of whom have most effectively participated in what they here reproduce as a most absorbing educational realism.

  The Montreal Gazette was no less convinced of the show’s fidelity to the life that had been:

  The whole thing is real. There is not a bit of claptrap about it. It is the picture of frontier life painted in intense realism, each scene standing forth in bold relief—painted, did I say? No, not painted, but acted as it is being acted along the entire frontier line that stretches from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Slave Lake. It is a place and a scene to visit, therefore, not for mere amusement, but for the sake of studying in a school where all lessons are objective and in which have been gathered materials for observation and instruction which, in the nature of things, are perishable and soon destined to vanish.

  Both these reports to a large degree affirm to the success of Cody’s instinctive decision not to call the show a show. It was, in his mind, and in the minds of most of the spectators, history, not fiction—easy to understand fiction that allowed the audience to participate vicariously in the great and glorious adventure that had been the settling of the West, an enterprise not yet wholly concluded even in 1886.

  According to the now famous Professor Frederick Jackson Turner, the American frontier finally closed in 1893, seven years after Cod
y and Salsbury brought their troupe to Staten Island. A fair number of performers in the Wild West had been frontiersmen, many of them old friends of Cody; all of the Indians were, of course, Indians. And yet the claim that the skits were wonderfully realistic still startles—though, by the low standards of the day, perhaps they were: Cody, after all, had begun his career as an actor in Western melodramas so crudely staged that red flannel was used for scalps.

  On the prop level, at least, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West did considerably better than that, despite which wholly unrealistic elements frequently crept in. In the real West, contra Mark Twain, few marksmen felt confident enough to shoot behind themselves, with the help of a mirror, as Annie Oakley did. The Deadwood stage, which Cody won in a coin flip, was real enough, but Cody’s obsession with warbonnets wasn’t. The Indians in the show were much more gloriously feathered than they could have afforded to be back at the Red Cloud agency, or even in pre-Custer times. There is a famous photograph in Carolyn Thomas Foreman’s book about Indians abroad in which a relaxed crowd is watching two Indians playing Ping-Pong, all the while trailing full-length warbonnets and wearing white buckskins.

  Realistic or not, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West drew enormous crowds during its long Staten Island run. On a single sunny week in July nearly two hundred thousand spectators took the ferry and saw the show. For the portion of the crowd that had never been west of the Hudson, the skits and playlets probably did seem like the real thing—after all, it was pretty close to what they had been told the West was like in all those dime novels Ned Buntline and Prentiss Ingraham had been providing them with.

  Mark Twain’s credulity seems a bit harder to fathom. He was more or less in the publishing business by then—perhaps he thought a little adroit flattery might encourage the wildly popular Cody to become one of his authors. Or he could have been drunk. We must hope he was drunk when he penned “A Horse’s Tale,” the short story written from the point of view of Cody’s show horse.

  The turnout for the Staten Island run was extremely cheering to Cody and Salsbury: a show that had fumbled through two seasons, losing both money and personnel, found its footing in 1885 and solidified it with the long Staten Island run. It finally looked like a viable proposition, one that could make the two principals a lot of money. Perhaps it was Twain’s remark about the low quality of our theatrical exports that got the two men to thinking about England.

  But before we shepherd our ever-expanding troupe aboard the good ship State of Nebraska it is time to consider in more depth the blossoming career of Little Missie, the small but formidable woman whom few ever managed to outshoot.

  * Sitting Bull had first seen Annie shoot in a theater in St. Paul in 1884. He sent $65 to her room in hopes of getting a photograph. She sent the money back but went to see him the next day. Adoption into the tribe, she later noted, would have secured her “five ponies, a wigwam, and no end of cattle.”

  Annie

  1

  BUFFALO BILL CODY wore his heart on his sleeve—all his life he was a soft touch, a partygoer and party giver who was never reluctant to pick up the tab. His kindness to the old buffalo hunter William Mathewson, perhaps the first hunter to be called Buffalo Bill, has already been noted. If he came across a homeless or impoverished youth he would sometimes keep him with the troupe as an errand boy, as he himself had once been. Both Dan Muller, the artist, and Johnny Baker, the sharpshooter, attracted Cody’s sympathies—both were allowed to earn their pay. Cody at least provided a roof over their heads, and a little schooling.

  Annie Oakley was as tightfisted as Cody was openhanded. Among the troupers she was thought to be as tight as Hetty Green, the so-called Witch of Wall Street. Some thought that Annie subsisted entirely on the free lemonade that Cody and Salsbury made available to everyone in the troupe. Most of her fellow performers forgave her this and loved her anyway. It was mainly her rivals who used her frugality as a point of attack. At the height of her fame she softened a bit, sometimes serving tea and cookies to whatever youngsters wandered up. But tea and cookies were about the limit of her largesse.

  Annie was not Cody—she never wore her heart on her sleeve. She was interviewed often but she rarely exposed much of herself. What she felt as she became one of the most famous women on earth we don’t really know. She did have a heart, as well as a more or less normal allotment of performer’s ego. She made no secret of her disdain for female rivals such as Lillian Smith. The women of the troupe were not a sisterhood; had there been an effort to form one, it is unlikely that Annie Oakley would have been much help.

  She was married to Frank Butler for about four decades; he was one of the few people Annie seemed genuinely comfortable with, and yet it is possible to wonder if she allowed even her husband to know her real feelings. She always dressed modestly—she never performed in pants. She was only five feet tall and, for most of her life, weighed only a little more than one hundred pounds, and yet she had made a profound impact on crowds. She was attractive, but not a raving beauty. As a performer she was animated, skipping into the arena and launching rapidly into her various shooting acts. Once she had become famous her appearances rarely lasted more than ten minutes, a fact she reflected on when she was introduced to the old Austrian emperor Franz Josef in 1890:

  I really felt sorry when I looked into the face of the Emperor of Austria . . . his face looked both tired and troubled. I then and there decided that being just plain Annie Oakley, with ten minutes work once or twice a day, was good enough for me, for I had, or at least I thought I had, my freedom.

  Franz Josef was to plug on for twenty-five more years, doing his lonely and vexatious job; Annie was wise to note that his was not a role to be envied. She was often dead on the mark when assessing European royalty.

  Cody always called Annie “Missie” and she was usually described in promotional materials as a “little girl” from the West who just happened to be an unparalleled rifle and wing shot. Her purity was always part of the sell, but so was her attractiveness, her seductiveness, even. The one visible sign of sex was her long lustrous hair. Occasionally she allowed herself to be photographed with it hanging loose, which certainly made a womanly appeal.

  Where the real Annie was in all of this is impossible to tell and was always impossible to tell. Her husband, Frank Butler, the man who knew her best, published a few sporting articles about guns or fishing but, except for one or two husbandly jibes about her hatred of housekeeping, Frank Butler kept mum.

  The Butlers were childless, which doesn’t mean that the marriage was sexless. Annie wanted no male hand to touch her once she was dead, but what she may have wanted in the way of touching while she was alive cannot now be determined. She did, however, dote on her dogs, and she also exhibited maternal concern for young Johnny Baker, once he joined the show; she also took an interest in his children when they came along.

  There is much about Annie Oakley that we will never know—in her own lifetime very few would claim to know her well.

  So far as her life as a performer went, the mystery was surely part of the potency.

  2

  THE roots of Oakley’s frugality are not hard to account for: in her girlhood she had known great poverty. She was born in Darke County, Ohio, in 1860, though she unabashedly changed her birth date to 1866 when the fifteen-year-old sharpshooter Lillian Smith joined Cody’s show.* To the end of her life she casually lied about her age, though her lopping off of the six years did not go entirely unnoticed in the papers. The change is one more indication of her steely will. What she didn’t accept, she altered, and then ignored the alteration, pretending that it had always been thus.

  In any case, Charles Dickens had nothing on Annie Oakley when it came to a bad childhood. Annie’s parents, Susan and Jacob Moses (or Mozee), were very poor; the situation then became desperate when Jacob Moses froze to death while attempting to bring supplies home through a blizzard. Susan Moses was destitute. One of Annie’s sisters was given away to a family who offered
to raise her. Though Annie killed her first bird at six and her first squirrel at eight, she was as yet too small to support her family by hunting.

  At ten Annie was sent to the county poor farm, a place called the Infirmary. She was soon more or less leased out to a farmer who needed help with his milking. Annie never identified this farmer, or his wife—she referred to them merely as the “wolves,” and it was with the “wolves” that she spent the darkest hours of her childhood. She was overworked, starved, and beaten; once the wife put her out in a storm to freeze, but the husband, who had no intention of losing his slave, arrived in time to save her. She continued to be overworked and physically abused until she turned twelve, at which point she ran away and walked back to the poor farm, a distance of some forty miles. By this time, fortunately, the Infirmary was run by a nice couple named the Edingtons, who soon put Annie in charge of their sizable dairy. They even paid her a wage, most of which Annie saved, as she was to do throughout her life. Nancy Edington taught her to embroider—needlework soon became a passion, one she was to pursue throughout all her touring years. It was what she did in her tent, when she wasn’t practicing her act.

  The Edingtons also put Annie in school, where she proved a quick learner. At about age fifteen she went back to her mother, who had remarried. Very soon Annie worked out a deal with the grocers Samson and Katzenberger, who had a flourishing grocery in Greenville, Ohio. They had known Annie from before and liked her. They soon agreed to buy whatever small game she cleaned and shipped to town. One thing the grocers noticed right away was that the quail, rabbit, or grouse Annie sent was not shot or torn up. She either caught the game in snares or shot them through the head, so the meat would be prime. The grocers liked her so much that they presented her with a new shotgun. She was then only in her mid-teens, but from that time on, one way or another, Annie Oakley made her living with her gun.