[175 years ago this coming weekend, Wyatt Earp was born in Illinois. Earp would go on to become one of the most iconic Wild West figures, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy stories of that complex and mythic region and history. Leading up to a weekend birthday post on engaging Earp!]
On three
figures who each and together help us see the human realities behind the mythic
sharpshooter.
1)
Frank
Butler: By the age of 15 Oakley (then known by her birth name Phoebe Ann Moses)
was already well known in her native Ohio as a sharpshooter. But it was when
she bested famous traveling trick shooter Butler in an 1875
Thanksgiving Day contest in Cincinnati (or maybe
an 1881 one—it can be tricky to discover the realities behind the myths!) that
she really became Annie Oakley, in every sense—not only due to the acclaimed
victory, but also and especially because she and the 28 year old Butler soon
married and began touring together (with Oakley now going under that stage
name). Their age gap and respective ages at the time might seem creepy; but the
date of their meeting is a bit unclear, it was the 19th century, and
in any case this was without question a lifelong
partnership—when Oakley died
in 1926 at the age of 66, Butler apparently stopped eating and died less
than three weeks later. For half a century and even after death, Oakley and
Butler were genuinely inseparable.
2)
Lillian
Smith: In 1885, after touring together for a few years, Oakley and Butler
joined one of the period’s most famous entertainments, Buffalo
Bill’s Wild West Show. It was there that Oakley met one of the few
Americans who could genuinely be said to be her match—Lillian Smith, who was a
15 year old shooting prodigy when she joined the show in 1886. It seems likely
that at this time Oakley began reporting her age
as a few years younger in order to compete more directly with Smith,
leading to another level of subsequent mythic confusion over basic details of her
story and identity. What’s definite is that Oakley left the show for a time,
returning only when Smith herself left in 1889. When she returned Oakley became
the show’s
second-highest-paid performer, after only Bill himself, so it was clearly a
smart business and career decision—but also one that reflects human
uncertainties behind the sharpshooter’s supremely and justifiably confident
performance.
3)
Sitting
Bull: If romantic partners and rivals are two kinds of distinctly human
relationships behind a mythic story, then certainly good friends are a third,
and one of Oakley’s closest friends happened to be one of the most famous
Americans of the era. The Hunkpapa Lakota warrior Sitting Bull met Oakley in
1884, famously requesting
a picture with her, and perhaps not coincidentally he likewise joined
Buffalo Bill’s show in 1885. He gave her a new nickname, “Little Sure Shot,”
that she used for the rest of her career; and the two became so close that he
symbolically adopted her as a daughter (his own had tragically died young) and
into his tribe. As Oakley would later write,
“he had asked me to take the place of the daughter he lost.” A mythic moment
behind two American legends to be sure, but also a powerfully human one—and while
Sitting Bull was himself
tragically killed in 1890, there’s no doubt that his legacy stayed with
Oakley for the rest of her life.
Last Wild
West story tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Wild West stories or histories you’d highlight?
No comments:
Post a Comment