The Colonel and Little Missie

by Larry McMurtry

  Pawnee Bill took a natural, if short-lived, satisfaction in finally becoming the boss of his old hero. He tolerated Cody’s weaknesses and kept things on a fairly even keel.

  When Cody died Lillie was deeply moved. “I was a friend of Buffalo Bill’s until he died,” he said. “He was just an irresponsible boy.”

  Many would have agreed with Gordon Lillie, but most would have agreed, too, that Cody’s irresponsibility wasn’t the whole story.

  18

  BEFORE Buffalo Bill and Gordon Lillie finally split, they took one more big step in unison: they made a movie together. Neither feared innovation and both saw that moving pictures were the coming thing. Cody had started lighting his arenas with Edison’s electric lights as early as 1893. He was always buying generators and dynamos, hanging more lights, acquiring the latest gadgets. Several pioneering cameramen filmed scenes from the Wild West shows. Cody was caught by the kinetoscope many times as he made his grand entry. There were movie booths in the St. Louis Exposition of 1904—the first of many movies about Cody’s idol Kit Carson appeared in that year.

  By the turn of the century cameramen were ubiquitous. Annie Oakley was screen-tested more than once; there may still exist somewhere a few faded frames of her performing at shooting contests, breaking clay pigeon after clay pigeon. We have fairly full reports of the making of many films in the first decade of the twentieth century, but precious little of this early footage survives.

  Cody had survived as a showman since 1872 by repeating, over and over in simple skits, the story of the Plains Indian wars. He saw no reason not to continue repeating it in this new and potentially thrilling medium—neither did Pawnee Bill. And where better to begin than with the story of Cody’s life. The Life of Buffalo Bill was a one-reeler filmed in 1912 by the Buffalo Bill and Pawnee Bill film company.

  In the opening sequence Cody plays himself, an old scout making a lonely camp on a lonely trail. The old scout has a dream in which an actor playing Cody relives Cody’s much-relived life. Indians dash about, chasing stagecoaches; then, as the centerpiece to a well-planned dream, there’s the duel with Yellow Hair. The story, as well as the characters, move at a furious pace.

  The partners were proud of this maiden work, but by 1912 they were by no means the only showmen around who were making Westerns. According to Joy Kasson, Biograph, by 1912, had already made seventy Westerns, some of them directed by D. W. Griffith. One of the most famous of these was the Mary Pickford version of Ramona.

  Pawnee Bill seemed to find filmmaking even messier and more chaotic than putting on arena shows; he was not wrong. The strain soon wore him down; he retired to his ranch in the far West and lived until 1942.

  Cody, however, saw a chance to do something really ambitious, something that could preserve for future generations of Americans the grand story of the settling of the West. It might also, if it worked, restore both his fortunes and his self-respect.

  What he proposed, and mostly completed, was a work called Indian War Pictures (though, at various times, this sequence of films used many more titles, Buffalo Bill’s War Pictures being one of the more ordinary). This was not to be one film but several, which would, of course, touch many of the old bases: Killing of Tall Bull, First Scalp for Custer, and so forth. Cody managed to get his old friend General Miles interested—movies were such a big attraction in those years that a man of Cody’s fame had not too much difficulty in securing financing. Before he was through he even secured some from Harry Tammen, although he surely knew by this time how unscrupulous Tammen was.

  When Cody set out to restore his name by making motion pictures, he decided that their hallmark would be authenticity, an elusive element in any art at any time. He always tried to make his arena shows as realistic as possible by using real props (the Deadwood stage) and, in many cases, real Westerners such as John Y. Nelson and, of course, the many Indians. Cody managed, throughout his long career, to think of himself as mainly a kind of pictorial historian. He tried, to the best of his abilities, to show Western life as it had been. And he also managed to sustain a forty-year career playing only one character, himself.

  Some of the old tropes from his arena shows worked fairly well as short films. The Battle of Summit Springs (Tall Bull) and the First Scalp for Custer (Yellow Hair) presented no huge problems to the filmmakers—after all, only a couple of years later D. W. Griffith would mass thousands of extras for his great film Intolerance. There were people of experience who could direct Westerns competently. Joy Kasson’s estimate is that Westerns comprised about twenty percent of American film production by then. The early Western star Bronco Billy (Anderson) had already made some 150.

  At first things went swimmingly for Indian War Pictures, but Cody had never been good at quitting while he was ahead. In this instance his miscalculation was his decision to finish the Indian Wars sequence with a reenactment of Wounded Knee, the horror that had taken place only twenty-three years earlier.

  Cody had been blocked from visiting Sitting Bull before he was killed, and had not himself witnessed the carnage on the battlefield. Black Elk had not yet made his famous statement about the broken hoop, the sacred tree, and the death of his people’s dream. What Cody failed to realize was that, for the Sioux people, Wounded Knee was a scar that had not healed and would never heal. They were not ready to go back to that place where so many warriors, women, and children had died. Though they knew the difference between real life and playacting—Cody himself had employed many of them—they may not have believed that General Miles and his six hundred soldiers were arriving just to make a show.

  Perhaps the guns were loaded with blanks, but not every Sioux was convinced of that. The Sioux women in particular were very disturbed; some, it is reported, began to sing their death songs.

  Cody had not reckoned with the swelling up of pain and anger that this particular reenactment produced, not all of it on the Indians’ side. There was a rift between Cody and Miles, because the latter insisted that the eleven thousand soldiers that had assembled at Pine Ridge to accept the Sioux surrender on January 16, 1890, be faithfully represented.

  Cody was for authenticity, but not authenticity on quite such an expensive scale. So the six hundred soldiers had to be marched around and around in front of the cameras. Though General Miles didn’t know it, most of the cameras contained no film.

  The shoot at Wounded Knee took thirty-four days in the fall of 1913 and produced some thirty thousand feet of film. It was released in various formats (five, six, and eight reels), all of which failed. It appeared under a variety of titles, but changing the title didn’t help. Both Tammen and the ever-loyal John Burke tried to promote it but nothing worked. Cody even rode his famous horse Isham onstage in Denver. He got a cheer, of course, but that did nothing for the show in Chicago. Cody’s reputation didn’t suffer from this failure, but his fortune was not recouped.

  The negative for this film is lost, and the copy in the Cody museum has deteriorated beyond repair. Nothing now remains of Cody’s ambitious effort except a few faded fragments and a set of remarkable still photos, which show Cody, gaunt and old now, scalping Yellow Hair yet one more time. A version called The Adventures of Buffalo Bill, released in 1917 to take advantage of Cody’s death, also failed.

  In trying to redo the massacre of Wounded Knee, Cody had taken matters too far, and pleased no one. The military hated the picture because it made them look like the killers they had been. The public avoided it because it slammed home the uncomfortable fact that the destruction of the Indians and their tribal lifeways had been a brutal tragedy.

  What Cody felt is hard to know. He knew that he had spent much of his life recycling his own early experience—he was now an old man. The way of life he had loved best, the scout’s free life in the good air of the West, was as gone now as the buffalo that had helped make his fame. The West was settled, the frontier was closed. Most of the friends of his youth—Texas Jack Omohundro, Wild Bill Hickok—were dead. His most ambitiou
s effort to show what it had been like in the old West—the Indian War Pictures—had failed in part because of its authenticity. He had spent much of his life peddling illusions about the West and the illusions succeeded where the reality failed. He had been right at the beginning, correctly perceiving that it was illusion that the people wanted. The reality, whether they had lived it or not, just wasn’t as appealing.

  Reality might not sell, but the man himself, Buffalo Bill, was still wanted, still a great draw. Even as late as 1914 a variety show in London offered him $2,500 a week just to appear; Cody turned them down—he thought he was worth twice as much.

  One of the things he fancied might save him was the dude ranch. Had he not just spent forty years watching young Eastern women go nuts over cowboys? Wouldn’t well-heeled Easterners pay to spend a month or two on a “ranch” in the West, riding horses, punching cattle in a light way, and singing corny songs around campfires under the great Western sky?

  Again, Cody was right. They would pay. It could be argued that the survival of ranching in Montana and Wyoming is the result of the fact that so many Eastern girls came west and married cowboys, bringing their money and their taste with them. Sheridan, Wyoming, where the queen of England comes occasionally to buy racehorses, probably has the best small-town public library in America. Visitors to Sheridan may even be entertained in one of Cody’s houses. In that part of the West his influence is still very much felt.

  19

  ANNIE OAKLEY never lost her great appeal to crowds. Once in a while she performed at big fairs, and the magic was still there. In the main her retirement was pleasant. She and Frank were particularly fond of a resort hotel called the Carolina, in Pinehurst, North Carolina. They stayed there often, enjoying plantation quail shooting, and now and then a duck hunt.

  Both Butlers still occasionally competed in shooting matches, but Annie more and more preferred to sponsor shooting clinics, mostly for women. She claimed to have taught some fifteen thousand women how to shoot. When World War I broke out the clinics found it difficult, for a time, to get either revolvers or ammunition. Several times Annie remembered how much she had disliked the Kaiser—after all, millions might not have lost their lives if she had just shot the Kaiser rather than his cigarette.

  However comfortable Annie may have been with Frank Butler as a husband—it is doubtful that her eye ever roved—common domesticity was something that had never really suited her. Frank himself, though he doted on Annie, was bold enough to point this out:

  Her shooting record is much better than her housekeeping mark . . . Riding, shooting and dancing come naturally to her but she is a rotten housekeeper . . . her record in this department is seven cooks in five days.

  Indeed, Annie admitted to being extremely picky. Details mattered to her. All too often closets were positioned wrong, or sinks would be too high, lights were too bright or else not bright enough. Without the spur of competition to drain off her energies her pickiness was sure to intensify. She did like dancing, though, and once won a prize at the Carolina Hotel at a dance in which she came dressed as an Indian woman, with feathers in her hair.

  Despite the comforts of the Carolina Hotel, or of the various nice houses the Butlers occupied for varying lengths of time, the Butlers were more or less rolling stones. Annie readily agreed with her husband that she was not meant for homemaking—she was still in some ways the bohemian wood sprite who liked to go out amid the trees and the critters with her gun.

  “You can’t cage a Gypsy,” she admitted once. “I went all to pieces under the care of a house.”

  The Butlers kept on the move, but they were leisurely moves—they always took their guns and their dogs, and sometimes their boat. Annie was asked to do many charity shoots and usually accepted. She had been a poor child and her memory was long. She often contributed to poor farms and orphanages. When she toured with Young Buffalo she followed the example set by Cody and Salsbury in Chicago—free tickets went to orphans, particularly the poor orphans of Darke County, Ohio, where she had grown up.

  Annie Oakley had traveled the world, shooting and winning. She was a high achiever, as Type A as anyone could be. She felt, and said, that—except for heavy lifting—she was the equal of any man at anything. But she resisted feminism per se and was ambivalent about giving women the vote. Cody was all for suffrage and argued with her about it. Working outside the home and earning a salary seemed better to him than staying home with the cat.

  Annie wasn’t so sure. She thought she might be for suffrage if only the good women would vote. But she was never particularly indulgent about her sex and worried about what might happen if too many bad women voted.

  Part of her objection to feminism seemed to be an aesthetic objection to bloomers. She hated them and, so far as is known, never wore them. In her day all real ladies wore skirts, and that was that. She was, after all, a mainly Victorian lady, although she certainly expanded the bounds of that role when she took up show business.

  On the other hand she was adamant in her belief that women deserved to be, and should be, armed. Modesty and fear of abuse played a part in this belief. Whatever happened to her in the two years she was with the “wolves” was not discussed, but she openly considered rape a threat most women should take seriously. She several times made it clear that she would have no qualms about shooting any man who threatened her honor. “If accosted I could easily fire,” she insisted. She thought that every school ought to have a rifle range and that both boys and girls should receive adequate instruction about how to use a firearm.

  When World War I broke out Annie even toyed with the idea of organizing and leading a women’s regiment, even though it might mean relaxing her role on pants for women. She once broached this idea to Theodore Roosevelt, who immediately told her to forget it.

  Unable to load up and attack the Hun directly, Annie did the next best thing, which was to visit army camps and inspire the soldiers with her shooting. She later said that her shooting exhibitions in the camps were more inspiring to her than even her best successes with the Wild West shows.

  Annie and Frank were at Pinehurst the day the Great War ended—there was a big victory parade and she capped the festivities by giving an impromptu shooting exhibition.

  From then until the end of her life she did more and more charity work. Two of her sisters had died of tuberculosis, so she always contributed to efforts to defeat that disease. At one point she melted down her medals and contributed the money to a sanatorium.

  In 1922 she did a much-reported shoot on Long Island for wounded soldiers. This seems to have been the last time she attempted her full act, skipping if she hit and pouting if she missed, as it had been in days of yore, with her patented crowd-pleasing little back kick at the end, the same kick that won her so much applause with the Wild West. And as in days of yore, the crowd absolutely loved her. A film clip survives of this high-profile shoot, with a few frames of Annie coming through a door. It may be that her old friend Fred Stone, a prolific moviemaker, was there with his camera, trying to persuade her to go before the cameras in The Western Girl or some other suitable melodrama.

  Annie was certainly aware by this time that she was indeed a Gypsy—she was never going to settle down. She had told herself, and the world, many times that she was through with show business. These announcements were her version of Buffalo Bill’s countless farewell tours. She probably thought she would be done with show business, but in practice being done with it wasn’t that easy. She kept trying to quit, perhaps thinking each time that she would quit, but in reality she never did quit—not until her health finally failed her. Once a performer, always a performer; and for a performer who had been a very big star, the business was just not that easy to give up. The attention and the need for competition kept bringing Annie Oakley back.

  To a reporter who interviewed her just after a shoot at a big fair in Brockton, Massachusetts, she admitted that the rush of celebrity and the hurly-burly of showbiz still had its s
eductiveness for her. She also frankly pointed out that she had made $700 for twenty minutes’ work. She and Frank Butler never lost sight of the financial picture—how else, other than by shooting, could a sixty-two-year-old woman make $700 in less than half an hour?

  Very shortly after the lucrative shoot in Brockton, a car wreck—that increasingly common American disaster—interrupted any plans Annie and Frank might have been nursing in regard to a return to the tour. In early November 1922, the Butlers were in Florida vacationing when their car flipped over, pinning Annie underneath it. Frank was uninjured, but Annie suffered both a broken hip and a broken ankle.

  Her injuries were not life-threatening, but they of course had an effect on Annie’s morale. Though she didn’t know it immediately, she would need to wear a brace on one leg for the rest of her life. She was two months in the hospital, receiving thousands of sympathy cards during her stay.