Mr Salsbury, Buffalo Bill and Major Burke are real smart when it comes to dealing with newspaper reporters. A whole bunch of them were looking round the camp today, peering inside the Indian wigwams, watching the buffalo grazing and admiring the great long horns on the rodeo cattle, when the dee-licious smell of roast meat drew them to a big tent. Inside there were cowboys turning huge joints of beef over a camp fire.
Buffalo Bill asked the reporters to grab a place on the wooden bench and join in the “frontier barbecue” – and they didn’t need no second invitation. Of course, not many folks on the frontier eat prime meat like this too often.
They’re lucky to get a plate of beans and coffee, but how were those city slickers to know that? They stuck sharpened sticks into juicy ribs of beef and gobbled them down using their fingers. And boy, were they in a mess by the time they’d finished!
Still, they didn’t seem to mind. And they wrote some real nice things in the newspapers about the hospitality you find on the frontier.
Good, free publicity – you can’t beat it.
2 AUGUST 1885 – BOSTON
Mr Salsbury is always coming up with something new. Here in Boston we’re performing the Wild West at night for the very first time. All around the arena, huge flares light up the night sky. Frank wasn’t too happy about these at first – he thought the artificial light might make it difficult for Annie to hit her targets. But practising in the light of the flares, Annie didn’t miss a single shot. Frank told her he guessed she could do it even in the dark.
At night the show looks real dramatic, but Mr Salsbury was worried that some folks watching might be scared of the loud bangs. So he put Annie on at the start, right after the opening gallop. And it works like a treat. Everyone is so surprised to see a little girl all alone and shooting targets that they don’t take long to get used to the sound of gunfire. Annie looks kind of gentle and friendly, even when she’s blasting away with her shotguns. She gets folks used to the sound of shooting and the rest of the show goes just fine.
2 SEPTEMBER 1885 – LONDON, CANADA
Not London, England, but a pretty jumpin’ joint all the same!
Old Sitting Bull may be quiet, like most Indians, but he ain’t dumb. Since he joined the Wild West, he’s been making a tidy sum selling folks his autograph and pictures of himself. On top of the $50 he gets paid each week, he has a queue of people waiting to pay him a dollar a time for his signature or a picture.
Across the border, here in Canada, folks welcome Sitting Bull like a kind of hero. That’s because he and his people escaped north to Canada and lay low for a while after General Custer and his men were all killed at Little Bighorn. He’s met a whole lot of Canadian Indian chiefs. All the top people in big cities like Montreal have come to welcome him too. And he’s had a whole lot more photographs taken, to turn into pictures to sell. By the time he goes home in a few weeks, he’ll have plenty of money for his people back on the reservation.
11 OCTOBER 1885 – ST LOUIS, MISSOURI
Well, that’s it for another season. Today was the last Wild West show of 1885. Tomorrow we all head for home until next year.
Sitting Bull has been looking at the sky for the last few days. He says it will be a cold winter. Will he be joining the show next year? I don’t think so. “The wigwam is a better place for the red man,” he told reporters. “He is sick of the houses, and the noises, and the multitudes of men.”
It sounds to me like he’ll be staying at home on the reservation, with his family from now on.
Annie’s going to miss him, that’s for sure. These last weeks she and the old chief have become even more friendly than they were before. Sitting Bull likes her shooting so much he’s given her the name Little Sure Shot, and they say he’s even adopted her into the Sioux nation as his daughter.
Tonight we had an early supper in the cook tent. Mr Salsbury, who’s usually as quiet as Sitting Bull, made a short speech congratulating everyone on the most successful season ever. He told us that a million people had come to see the Wild West, and that we’d made a profit of $100,000. No wonder Buffalo Bill was smiling all evening. Back in March, the show was $60,000 in debt!
29 MAY 1886 – ON THE TRAIN TO WASHINGTON D.G.
Sitting Bull was right – it was a cold winter. But that was months ago, and now everyone is looking forward to another successful season.
We all met up back in St Louis last month. The Wild West is bigger than ever, with twenty-six freshly painted railroad cars to carry the 240 performers, animal-handlers, canvasmen and loaders, plus all the animals and equipment.
There are new Indians and new cowboys this season, too. Sitting Bull is staying at home, as I guessed he would. In his place we’ve been joined by American Horse and Rocky Bear. I must be real careful to get their names right. They look mighty fierce and I don’t think they’d take it too kindly if I called them Rocking Horse and American Bear by mistake.
Annie Oakley was such a success last season that Buffalo Bill’s hired two cowgirls to appear in the show and another girl shooting star, Lillian Smith. I don’t know how Annie is going to like having a competitor. She don’t mind Johnnie Baker, of course. He joined the show last year, same as Annie. Johnnie’s a great shot like Annie; he can even shoot targets upside down standing on his head, but he’s a young man. Lillian Smith’s only a fifteen-year-old girl, and it ain’t going to please Annie if she starts stealing her popularity. But she’s a trier, our Little Sure Shot. I can almost hear her saying to herself, “Anything you can do, I can do better. I can do anything better than you.”
I guess we’ll know soon enough which of them is top gun. Tomorrow we open in Washington for a week. Then we’re off to Philadelphia before going to New York for the rest of the summer.
26 JUNE 1886 – NEW YORK
New York! New York! It’s my kind of town.
We only arrived at dawn today, and I love it already. New York is like a big juicy apple waiting to be gobbled up. To think that we’re going to be here all summer! That’s got to be better than moving from place to place every day or so.
The Wild West is going to be staged at a brand new arena on Staten Island. Across New York Bay you can see Manhattan, the richest part of the biggest, richest city in America. Folks there have machines that let them talk to each other down wires. They have this new-fangled stuff called electricity which brings them light down wires, too. I wonder how they tell which wire is which?
I hear that soon work will start on a new kind of building in Manhattan, which will be so tall folks are calling it a sky-scraper. They’re naming it the Tower Building and it’s going to stand eleven floors high. Imagine that! This here Tower Building ain’t going to be a wooden building like the ones back west. It’s going to have a framework made from big steel girders. That’s how they can build it so high. If it works, I don’t see why they couldn’t use the same idea to build even higher buildings. If I came back in a hundred years’ time, I guess I wouldn’t recognize Manhattan. Why, there could be buildings twenty, perhaps thirty floors high. That really would be something to see!
4 JULY 1886 – NEW YORK
Independence Day, and what a crowd! Ferries brought thousands across the harbour to see us. The Wild West camp covers fifty acres of fields and woods, so to city folks it looks like their idea of the West itself. All day long, you meet them wandering round looking at everything. It’s like we’ve come from another world, which I guess we have in a way.
They like watching the horses and the buffalo and the longhorn cattle. But it’s the Indians living in the woods they really want to see. Their camp is just the same as any camp they have back home on the prairie. Visitors can’t stop themselves patting the Indian ponies all tied up in line, peering inside the wigwams, or looking at the Indians as they sit round their fires, draped in blankets and smoking pipes. (What they don’t know is that the Indians probably spend as much time playing white man’s card games and gambling.)
On Sunday morning, fo
lks in the Baptist church had a real surprise when some of the Indians turned up for the morning service and sat down in the front row. When the organ started to play “Nearer, My God, to Thee”, they stood up and sang the whole hymn in the Sioux language. Some frontier preacher must have taught them, but they sure made an unusual choir.
The Indians like our food, too. Mr Salsbury treated them to a feast of “Yankee pies”, which none of them had ever tried before. I don’t know what was in them, but every Indian in camp tucked in. Five hundred pies had been eaten by the time they were fit to burst!
24 JULY 1886 – NEW YORK
Nearly 28,000 people came to see the show today. There were so many we couldn’t seat them all, and now the carpenters are busy making more seats. New York has never had an entertainment this popular.
By now everyone has got used to performing twice a day, even if the evening show does use electric light. The pattern may be the same day after day, but no one minds. There’s always a feeling of excitement as the stands begin to fill. The cowboys rope and saddle their horses. The Indians put on their warpaint. Stable hands hitch the teams to the old stagecoach and the covered wagons.
I help Frank load and prepare Annie’s guns. When everyone’s ready, Frank Richmond, the announcer, strides across the arena, climbs on to his raised platform in front of the mountain scenery, and opens the show in his booming voice: “Ladies and Gentlemen! Buffalo Bill and Nate Salsbury proudly present America’s national entertainment, the one and only, genuine and authentic, unique and original, Wild West!”
That’s the cue for the grand parade to gallop into the arena and for the 20,000 people all around to start cheering. Yep, it’s true what Annie says. There’s no business like show business.
24 SEPTEMBER 1886 – NEW YORK
There’s just one more week to go before the show closes in Staten Island. The Wild West has made a heap of money this summer and still folks keep coming. Some have been so many times that they even know the names of all the horses and ponies.
Thanks to Major Burke, the newspapers have had something to write about the Wild West show every week. There can’t be many people who don’t know about the twin elks born in our camp, or the wagonload of watermelons the Indians ate one afternoon, or the professor who arrived one day to prove that the Sioux people were descended from the Lost Tribes of Israel! Major Burke reckons any news is good news. That’s sure been true this summer, there’s no mistaking that.
It’s been a good summer for Annie as well. Her shooting has made her famous all round New York and New Jersey. A lot of men who fancy themselves as sharp-shooters are feeling a mite nervous about this slip of a girl who breaks records with her gun as easy as she breaks glass balls.
Annie don’t let this go to her head, mind. She never makes a big deal of her success. And if she does earn some extra money from giving shooting lessons, or winning competitions outside the show, she’s always careful how she spends it. She’s generous too. Why, only the other day she paid for fifty kids in the nearby orphanage to be her special guests at the show and afterwards at a slap-up “frontier feast” all of their own. When she was a youngster, Annie lived for a while in an orphanage, and she ain’t never forgotten how it felt.
THANKSGIVING, 1886 – NEW YORK
Here we are, still in New York. The Indians are still camping out at Staten Island, only now the Wild West has moved indoors for the winter.
The summer show ended two months ago, back at the end of September. While we’ve had a break, our new winter show has moved into Madison Square Garden – a huge indoor arena which was once a railroad depot. This new show is a kind of play called “The Drama of Civilization – a Spectacle of Western Life and History”. Most performers do pretty much what they did in the Wild West show, but we’ve got extra animals like moose, antelope and two trained bears to make it even more realistic.
Different scenes of the new show have their own huge backdrops, showing the prairies and the mountains of the west. Matt Morgan, the backdrop artist, had painted 15,000 square yards* of scenery by the time he finished. That’s a lot of canvas and a lot of paint! And to make the show even more lifelike, there’s a huge wind machine that blows leaves and brushwood across the arena in the scene showing a tornado.
We opened last night. 6,000 people were packed in to watch the new show, all dressed up like they were going to an opera. Annie’s added a stunt on horseback to her shooting. She ties a handkerchief to her pony’s pastern, just above the hoof, then unties it while she’s galloping at full speed round the arena – and she does this riding side-saddle! No one, not even the cowboys and Mexicans, who’ve been riding since before they could walk, have ever seen anyone do this riding side-saddle. Just to prove how good she is on a horse, Annie can reach down from the saddle and pick a handkerchief off the ground. She can shoot targets while the horse jumps hurdles, or lying on her back as the horse gallops along.
4 DECEMBER 1886 – NEW YORK
I’ve got to hand it to Annie – she has the knack of making folks feel at ease, no matter who they are. Seeing that she is the adopted daughter of Sitting Bull, whose Sioux warriors killed General Custer and all his men, I wouldn’t have expected the general’s widow to take too kindly to her. But I couldn’t have been more wrong. Mrs Custer thinks the world of Annie, and the two ladies are always together around Madison Square Garden.
“Custer’s Last Stand”, as it’s called, has been added to the show this year. This is a battle scene in which Buck Taylor, King of the Cowboys, takes the part of General Custer and fights alongside his men at the Battle of Little Bighorn, until the Sioux warriors surround and kill them all. It’s sad. It’s heroic. The audience go crazy over it and Mrs Custer has been to see it several times.
I guess historians will argue and argue about what really happened at that battle on 25 June 1876, but no one can deny that the Sioux warriors had their greatest victory over the US army that day. I don’t want to be unkind to the memory of General Custer, but it strikes me that he made some bad mistakes.
It’s 2,000 miles from Madison Square Garden to the Little Bighorn, but every night the show brings that piece of American history alive right here in New York City.
12 DECEMBER 1886 – NEW YORK
Snow again today. The city looked real pretty. The Christmas decorations are all frosted white, and so are the trees and sidewalks. It must have reminded Annie of home, because she took it into her head she wanted to go on a sleigh ride, right here in the centre of New York! Once Annie has an idea, it’s no use trying to stop her – even when her plans include driving a sleigh-pulling moose down Fifth Avenue.
Annie’s got a way with animals, that’s for sure. When she went to the stables this morning and led out Jerry, the moose which appears at the beginning of the show, Jerry followed as meek as a lamb. Annie hitched him to a sleigh, settled herself into the seat beside Frank, flicked the reins and headed Jerry off into the street.
New York ain’t seen nothing like it. Folks out shopping just stood and stared as Jerry cantered by, and some looked like they’d seen Santa Claus himself getting in some practice for Christmas Eve.
Everything was going just dandy, till they rounded a corner and Jerry caught sight of a cart piled high with juicy, red apples. In two minutes that big old moose had eaten the lot, while the cart owner watched, dumbstruck. Frank managed to hand over $5 to cover the cost of the fruit before Jerry threw back his head, trumpeted and set off down the street to see what else he could find.
1 APRIL 1887 – AT SEA
It’s going to be a short entry today, on account I don’t feel so good.
Annie ain’t the only little lady in the news right now. This year is Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. She’s ruled the world’s biggest empire for fifty years, so we’re sailing across the ocean to England to join in the celebrations and add to the fun.
I ain’t never been to sea before, and even the old Deadwood stagecoach don’t rock and sway like this ship
. She’s called the State of Nebraska, and one day out from New York the state of the passengers, let alone Nebraska or anywhere else in the Wild West, ain’t too good. Indians, cowboys, Mexicans, mules, horses, stagehands, stable boys, even Colonel Cody (Major Burke got Buffalo Bill made a colonel specially for this trip to England) – we’re all as sick as dogs.
If I didn’t know better, I’d say Mr Salsbury planned for today to be our first full day at sea. Some April Fool joke, eh?
Oh, no… here I go again.
18 APRIL 1887 – LONDON, ENGLAND
Oh, boy! I never thought I be so glad to see a city again. Back in New York, the Indians were talking of a legend which says that any Indian who crosses the big water will fade away and die. After that voyage, I can understand what was spooking them. Still, we’ve made it. The New World has arrived in the Old World, and Major Burke has been busy letting London know. You can’t go nowhere in this city without seeing posters and pictures of Buffalo Bill, Annie, Johnnie Baker, the Indians and the rest of the folks and animals in the show.
Londoners are real friendly, too. Since we arrived, we’ve been taken to restaurants and museums, to the opera and the theatre. One night the Indians sat in the front row of seats watching a famous English actor called Henry Irving. He was acting in a play by a famous German playwright, about a fellow called Faust who made some kind of bad deal with the devil. Don’t ask me what they Indians made of it.
At the end, Henry Irving had Chief Red Shirt come up on stage to take a bow, along with Buffalo Bill, Annie and Frank, Mr Salsbury and Buck Taylor in all his cowboy gear. The audience clapped as loud for them as they did for the play. When Red Shirt asked what he thought of it, he answered pretty smart, saying it was “like a great dream”.
28 APRIL 1887 – LONDON
Preparations are almost complete for the grand opening! The Wild West is going to be part of the American Exhibition, showing all kinds of new machines and inventions from back home. Out in the west of London is a real grand-sounding place called Earl’s Court, and that’s where the exhibition and the Wild West are going to be all summer.
The Lost Diary of Annie Oakley's Wild West Stagehand Page 2
