Blood Brothers

by Deanne Stillman

  Sitting Bull and his party arrived at the park as the day’s program was under way. Buffalo Bill was presenting his shooting skills on horseback, and that scenario was followed by an Indian attack on a stagecoach. Then came pony races, followed by another attack, this one on a settlers’ cabin. “Sitting Bull seemed much interested,” reported the Courier, “and gave vent to frequent monosyllabic utterances of approval. A number of people connected with the show pressed forward to get a good view of the famous redskin.” Among them was the “clever and adept feminine markswoman Annie Oakley.” Given her iconic status in the American story, the language may seem restrained, but she was not yet a superstar. At the time of Sitting Bull’s arrival, she herself had been part of the Wild West for just a few months. She and Sitting Bull had met the previous year in St. Paul, as previously mentioned, striking up an immediate friendship in which Sitting Bull would take note of her skills and give her a nickname that guaranteed her immortality. Now they fell right into conversation, with Annie asking Sitting Bull a number of questions about a red silk handkerchief and some coins that she had sent him after they went their respective ways. “I got them,” he said via the interpreter. “But I left them at home for safety. I am very glad to see you. I have not forgotten you and feel pleased that you want to remember me.”

  “GREEK MEETS GREEK” was the headline for the interview with Sitting Bull the following day, perhaps referring to gods or heroes. Then came the florid subtitle, “A Thrilling and Romantic Encounter Between Redskin and Pale Face Chieftains,” with the most important news of the moment in the next subtitle, one line below: “The Sioux Warrior Sitting Bull and Buffalo Bill Bury the Hatchet at the Driving Park.” Given the nature of this development, one might have expected it to be on the front page. But it was on page four. The front page was everything that Sitting Bull had already experienced about white culture. It was plastered with ads. For instance, in the left-hand personals column, there was a solicitation for “voice building” with an instructor named Franklin; there were ads for laundry services, a coffee substitute from a homeopathic pharmacy, and several refrigerators. Second from the left were more ads; there were Turkish mats for sale, shirts made to order, and chandeliers and gas fixtures “at popular prices.” Third from the left but not in the middle where news began were ads for “amusements.” “First-Class Comic Opera at the People’s Prices” was going on at the Court Street Theatre, and at Bunnell’s Museum, Miss Katherine Rogers was starring in “Leah, the Forsaken,” a popular play written in 1863 about a Jewess who violates 17th-century German law and falls in love with a Christian farmer.

  Most prominent among the ads was this announcement:

  * * *

  * * *

  BUFFALO BILL

  “He is King of them all.”—Gen. E. A. Carr

  This Afternoon Positively Last Performance.

  Afternoon only.

  Rain Shine.

  Buffalo Bill’s Wild West.

  Reconstructed, Enlarged and Improved.

  Double Attraction, First and only appearance of the WORLD RENOWNED SIOUX CHIEF SITTING BULL.

  We fulfill every promise—Cody and Salsbury.

  Music Furnished by the Famous Cowboy Band

  ADMISSION 50c CHILDREN 25c

  * * *

  * * *

  Times for the show followed, along with transportation information. “Carriages admitted free” was the ad’s last line.

  In 1946, Annie Get Your Gun opened on Broadway, starring the zaftig Ethel Merman as the petite and unassuming sharpshooter Annie Oakley. The show was about Annie’s time in the Wild West, and of course featured Buffalo Bill and Sitting Bull, and even a person playing a dancing horse. Merman had been singing and performing musical comedy in Manhattan clubs for years, and then Hollywood came calling, followed by Broadway. She had a powerful voice that has been much copied and parodied over the years, but however camp it has become, her rendition of “There’s No Business Like Show Business” from this musical is both her signature and a Hollywood anthem. The scene from the play in which she belts out this song, and the scene from the movie version of the play, starring Betty Hutton doing the same, is shown at film industry tributes everywhere, permanent features of the show biz landscape. Yet few people are thinking about Annie Oakley when footage of Ethel Merman is rolled out at Academy Award openings. That’s a shame because, although the Irving Berlin song stands on its own, the heated lyrics actually tell us much about the experience of being a performer on Buffalo Bill’s stage, a birthplace, after all, of American theater. As one of the stanzas goes:

  There’s no business like show business like no business I know

  You get word before the show has started that your favorite uncle died at dawn

  Top of that, your pa and ma have parted, you’re broken-hearted, but you go on

  The stars of the Wild West had lost everything, seen it all, and combinations thereof, and Annie Oakley was no exception. Nowadays, there are certain ways to escape such circumstances. Often it’s through sports; a person excels at one and becomes professional, going on to earn large sums of money and live a life of monetary comfort and public admiration. For others, it’s through the military; join and follow the path out of a town, a situation, a life. For yet others, no skill or service is required; all that’s needed is fame. In the nineteenth century, a primary escape hatch was comprised of animals, birds, and natural resources—anything that was in the air, in the ground, or on it. Annie Oakley literally shot her way out of poverty, hunting countless small animals to feed her large family of seven brothers and sisters during her childhood, and later selling them to restaurants that served game. Quite simply, she lived in a bloody era and circumstances forced her prowess with guns. But that alone would not have made her an adored icon. To paraphrase a childhood friend, she had a “fine unexplainable personality” that captivated the world.

  Like many pivotal characters in frontier history, Annie was born in Ohio. Her Quaker parents, Jacob and Susan Moses, met in the hills of western Pennsylvania. According to family lore, Jacob fell in love with fifteen-year-old Susan, asked for permission to marry her, and then took her away on a horse. They married in 1850, and had three daughters. In Holidaysburg at the end of the eastern division of the Pennsylvania Canal, they had a small inn. One night in 1855, a guest knocked over an oil lamp and the inn burned down, leaving the family homeless. Jacob packed up his family and headed to Ohio, at the time a western frontier fabled for its endless possibilities. Jacob and Susan settled on a small rented farm in Darke County, about eighteen miles north of Greenville, in a village called Woodland. Ohio was already a hot spot in the Indian wars. Greenville was a horrific location in the country’s westward march, with General “Mad” Anthony Wayne building a fort there and launching his bloody campaign against Indians in that region. In 1794, it culminated in the Battle of Fallen Timbers, the last conflict in the Northwest Indian War, during which natives siding with the Crown were destroyed. This included Tecumseh and the Shawnee who tried to fend off the Americans, on foot, in the southeastern part of the state until Tecumseh was killed in the War of 1812. He was widely regarded as a warrior and statesman of great power—and thus, in that strange way Americans have of honoring those who have been destroyed, was invoked in the middle name of General William Sherman, Civil War hero and Indian fighter.

  When the Moses family arrived, the region was relatively quiet. Woodland had no general store and the post office was half a mile away. Jacob’s plan was to eke out a living from the land, like other settlers. He cut down trees and built a cabin and constructed a little farm. In the cabin, Susan gave birth to Phoebe Ann on August 13, 1860; she was the sixth daughter, soon to be joined by a brother. One of Susan’s daughters had already died in infancy. Phoebe Ann’s sisters called her Annie, and, as Shirl Kasper wrote in Annie Oakley, “she grew into a small child, strong despite her size, with thick, dark hair and eyes that people noticed, for they were blue-gray, large, and br
ight with direct gaze.” She was not interested in playing with her sisters and their rag dolls, and instead preferred the company of her father and her brother, John, who was two years younger.

  On the farm, the family butchered their own cows and tanned the hide to make shoes. “They smoked ham, pickled beans, and tucked away apples before the winter set in,” as Kasper wrote. “Annie spent hours wandering through the woods, listening to the birds and tracking rabbits. The woods were full of hickory nuts, walnuts, and wild cherries. Roses grew unchecked, and the wild ducks and geese flew free.”

  It was in the Ohio woods that Annie learned to shoot. She had learned to make cornstalk traps from her father, and by the time she was seven, she was trapping quail and rabbit for dinner. Her father had brought an old Kentucky rifle from Pennsylvania, and according to legend there came the day that eight-year-old Annie took it down from its spot above the fireplace and fired her first shot. “I still consider it one of the best shots I ever made,” she said. “I saw a squirrel run down over the grass in front of the house, through the orchard and stop on a fence to get a hickory nut.” She ran inside, climbed on a chair, and took the rifle down, carrying it outside and resting the barrel on the porch railing. Then she aimed. “It was a wonderful shot,” she said, “going right through the head from side to side.”

  Annie’s brother was upset that she used the rifle, reported Frazer Wilson in the History of Darke County, Ohio, and he put a double load in it and handed it to her, hoping the kick would scare her away from shooting again. Throwing up his hat as a target, he was surprised when Annie shot right through it. And she never stopped. “My mother was perfectly horrified when I began shooting,” Annie once said. “She tried to keep me in school. But I would run away and go quail shooting in the woods or trim my dress with wreaths of wild flowers.”

  In 1866, Annie’s father died in the brutal manner of so many who were vulnerable to the elements. On a winter’s day, he had set out on buckboard to take his corn and wheat to the local mill, about fourteen miles away. It was snowing and within hours a blizzard set in. At midnight, the family heard wagon wheels creaking toward the cabin. “Mother threw the door wide open into the face of the howling wind,” Annie recalled. There was her father, upright in his seat, with the reins around his neck and wrists. His hands were frozen and he could not talk. A doctor was called, but it was too late. Annie’s father died of pneumonia several weeks later—just like Buffalo Bill’s.

  This was the beginning of a harrowing phase. Susan Moses moved her family to another farm. Annie’s oldest sister, Mary Jane, died of tuberculosis. Her mother sold Pink, the family cow, to pay for doctor and funeral expenses. Then she took on nursing jobs for $1.25 a week, devoting her practice to pregnant women.

  But it was not enough to sustain her family, and she sent her youngest child, Hulda, who had been born in 1864, to live with another family and work for them—a common practice of the era. In 1870, when Annie was ten, her mother sent her to the county poor farm, a kind of dumping ground for the elderly, the orphaned, and the insane, which often included women who just could not abide the expectations of the day. The repository was also known as the Infirmary, and it was in Greenville, by then a town of rapidly expanding commerce, with three rail lines, four roads, and two newspapers. There was even a public square around the old fort, and lots of stores along the borders. The plan for Annie was that she could live at the Infirmary in exchange for helping the children. “Many persons incapable of attending to their own wants were housed at the Infirmary,” a local historian wrote, “and a shortage of rooms compelled the children to associate with these unfortunates, whose habits of life and language were not intended to exert that influence for good that should always surround the child.”

  One day, a local farmer dropped in at the Infirmary, looking for a companion for his wife and baby. Poor children were often farmed out during those days and she moved in with this man and his wife and baby. She would never identify them and when it was all over, referred to them as “The Wolves.” Basically, she was a slave. “I got up at 4 in the morning,” she said, “got breakfast, milked the cows, washed dishes, skimmed milk, fed the chickens, rocked the baby to sleep, weeded the garden, picked wild blackberries and got dinner. Mother wrote for me to come home. But they would not let me go. I was held a prisoner.” She was also physically abused, which she briefly notes in personal writings, mentioning scars and welts on her back. One night, she recalled, the farmer’s wife threw her into the snow, barefoot, because she fell asleep while darning. She would have died if the farmer had not come home and let her into the house. On a spring day around 1872, she fled “the Wolves” and ran away—back to the poor farm.

  The new superintendent and his wife realized that Annie deserved more than a life among the general population of the Infirmary, and they let her stay in their quarters. “Mother couldn’t stand to see her placed with the other children,” the superintendent’s son said years later. She went to school with the official’s children, and it was an amicable arrangement. The kids even gave her a nickname, “Topsy,” after the happy character in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

  The superintendent’s wife taught Annie to sew, and she made dresses and quilts for the inmates. She also learned embroidery, and deployed fancy stitching on the cuffs and collars of the dark dresses that the orphans wore. During her time with the Wild West, her affinity for children was quite apparent, and many have suggested that it began in this time. It was something she shared with Sitting Bull. Her years at the Infirmary would also become manifest in other ways. While touring with Buffalo Bill, she made her own costumes. She didn’t have to, but was proud to do so.

  At the Infirmary, it wasn’t long before she was placed in charge of the dairy, where she milked the cows and made butter for the kitchen. She got a raise and saved her money. One day, she received another offer, asked to be a mother’s helper in a private home near Greenville. She tried it for a while, but she was lonely and scared, and not able to communicate with her own mother. So she went home.

  En route, she made a stop that turned out to be a critical one on her journey out of Ohio and around the world. She was probably fifteen years old. On the corner of Main Street and Greenville’s public square, she headed into the grocery store owned by G. Anthony and Charles Katzenberger. She knew that the brothers traded with hunters and trappers for wild turkeys and rabbits, giving them flour, wheat, and ammunition in exchange. And they had bought game from her in the past. Now she had a new plan. Once again, she would be hunting and trapping in the north county woods. Would the Katzenbergers like to purchase game that she shipped to their store? They said yes, and Annie got her gun.

  “I donned my linsey [dress] and hied me back to the deep, quiet woods,” she wrote. “Oh, how grand God’s beautiful earth seemed to me.” Yet, she was in for a surprise. Back at home, she discovered that she had a new stepfather, Joseph Shaw, and he had built a new cabin for her mother, brother, and sisters. It was a modest dwelling, but for once the family situation was a loving one. Annie’s mother seemed happy. There was an orchard, garden, and cellar, and she was planting, harvesting, and storing food for the winter. The three oldest daughters were married and gone, and now Annie was the eldest daughter at home, joining a sister and new arrival, a half-sister, and her younger brother, John, who had tried to trick her with her father’s rifle. Annie’s shooting abilities made her a major source of support for her family.

  When it came to guns, she was a natural. “I guess the love of a gun must have been born in me,” she later said. And she took great delight in refining her gift, heading to her beloved woods whenever she could. She would wear an outfit that became her trademark: a short, sturdy dress with knickerbockers, as Kasper described it, and heavy mittens with a trigger finger stitched in. Her boots were copper-toed and she sported long yarn stockings. She tramped through the forest, hunting and setting traps. She watched the animals and learned how they lived and moved. Quail were fast and she w
as too. But she was fair. She did not shoot sitting game, once telling a reporter that “I always preferred taking my shot when the game was on the move. It gave them a fair chance, and made me quick of eye and hand.” There is nothing more simple, she told another reporter. But she added that “you must have your mind, your nerve and everything in harmony. Don’t look at your gun, simply follow the object with the end of it, as if the tip of the barrel was the point of your finger.”

  Annie’s stepfather, a mail carrier, began making two trips per week to Greenville, taking her game and exchanging it with the Katzenbergers for food and supplies. The game was sent to fine restaurants in Cincinnati, where there was an ongoing demand. According to legend, hotelkeepers loved the quail and rabbits that Annie killed because they had been shot clean, through the head, and guests never complained about finding buckshot in their meal. True or not, Annie’s shooting expertise is so much a part of American myth that it was celebrated in a song called “Anything You Can Do” in Annie Get Your Gun. There’s a duet between Annie and Frank Butler, the handsome trick shooter from Ireland who became her partner in theater, and her manager and husband. “I can shoot a partridge with a single cartridge,” Frank croons. “I can get a sparrow with a bow and arrow,” Annie sings back.

  By the time Annie and Frank had the shooting match that led to their marriage—and that song—Annie had done so well with her hunting that she was able to pay off the $200 mortgage on her parents’ house. The Katzenbergers liked her so much that they gave her a serious gun, a Parker Brothers 16-gauge breech-loading hammer, along with one hundred brass shells. This kind of gun was an advance in the manufacture of firearms; the shooter would not have to carry a powder horn or a ramrod, or be concerned with rain, which could dampen gunpowder and render it useless. Also, the new gun permitted the shooter to load shells at home and insert them into the barrel while on the hunt. Now, “Annie shot more game than ever,” Kasper wrote. “She wrapped them in bunches of six and twelve.” She had become a full-on “market hunter.”