Showing posts with label Buffalo Bill Cody. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Buffalo Bill Cody. Show all posts

Wednesday, September 4, 2019

Calamity Jane and Annie Oakley by Katherine Pym

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Martha Jane Cannery was born in 1852 and Phoebe Ann Moses in 1860. Both were show women, and were crack shots. Both were born in upper Midwest, and both had worked in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, but that is pretty much where the similarities end.

Annie Oakley
Annie Oakley (Phoebe Ann Moses) had a more stable life. Even as her father had died when she was still very young, she never went west. She married and remained married to the same man, Frank Butler. They met at a shooting contest. Frank Butler was a fancy shooter, but Annie won the meet. After Frank licked his wounds, they married two years later. It is said Annie took the name ‘Oakley’ from a neighborhood in Cincinnati, Ohio. If you go to google maps, it is still there, not far from the Ohio River.

Annie joined Frank’s traveling show, but before long Frank realized Annie was the best shot, and the wanted attraction. He relinquished his climb to stardom and became Annie’s business manager when they joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. One of her feats was when she shot a cigar from Kaiser Wilhelm’s mouth.

See how small Annie's waist is???

When I visited the Buffalo Bill Center of the West Museum in Cody Wyoming, there were artifacts from Annie’s time with the show, clothes and guns and things. She was a small person. Sitting Bull called her: Little Sure Shot, and I can attest her waist was tiny, amazingly so. She couldn’t have been more than 5’, but don’t quote me on that. I based this statement on how small her clothes were. 


Annie died of that B-12 deficiency in 1926. She was 66 years old. Frank died 18 days later. 
Hers was a good life.  

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Now, Calamity Jane (Martha Jane Cannary) was an entirely different animal altogether. Her parents, not the best in reliability or reputation, died when she was only 12, leaving her to care for her 5 siblings. Reportedly a big woman and strong (sort of manly), she supported her family as well as she could. Some say she even went into prostitution for a while. This is also where fact and fiction come into play. Calamity Jane’s true actions were superseded by her spun autobiography and newsprint’s tall tales. 

Calamity Jane
There is more than one explanation for the ‘Calamity’, which are vague and nonsensical, so I won’t go into it here. Her brothers and sisters fell out of history, too, with Jane moving through life and their existence never mentioned. She dressed like a man and did men’s work. She rode with the cavalry, saving one soldier on a wild horse ride, after which someone called her Calamity. But who knows.

Everyone thinks she was madly in love with Wild Bill Hickock, who was married. She may have been fond of him, but Bill didn’t like her much. There’s another story where she met him only a week or so, outside of Deadwood South Dakota, before he was murdered, holding the ‘dead man’s hand’, a pair of black aces and a pair of black eights.

Word has spread Jane was a kind soul who helped tend the sick during a smallpox epidemic, but on the whole, she sabotaged every good event in her life. She was a terrible alcoholic. She supposedly married and had a child but gave up the girl and wandered the country. She may have met Annie Oakley in the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show, but her drinking was too much. She was cast adrift after a short while. She was also reported to have ridden in other west shows that toured the Midwest.
By 1903 she was ill and destitute. She found her way near Deadwood where she died at the age of 51. Her last wish was to be buried beside Bill Hickock in Deadwood.

Hers was a sad life.


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Many thanks to:
Wikicommons, public domain
And the following websites:














Thursday, July 4, 2019

Wild Bill or Buffalo Bill by Katherine Pym






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From L-R: Wild Bill, Texas Jack, Buffalo Bill

I get these two mixed up. Even as they are different, they look sort of alike, maybe because of their long hair and similar beards. They both lived life to extreme, and they were friends.

Nine years difference in their ages, their lives paralleled in many ways. The two Bills were born in the same neck of the woods; James Butler Hickok (Wild Bill) in Illinois in 1837, and William Frederick Cody (Buffalo Bill) in Iowa in 1846.

Both came from religious families, Wild Bill-Baptist; Buffalo Bill-Quaker. Both families disagreed with slavery. Wild Bill’s parents worked in the Underground Railroad, helping slaves escape from the South. Buffalo Bill’s father was stabbed to death during an anti-slavery rally.

Both Bills rode for the Pony Express (at different times), and fought on the same side during the Civil War, where Wild Bill and Custer became fast friends. During the Indian Wars, Buffalo Bill guided a wagon train with Custer.

Both worked for the same stagecoach company in Fort Leavenworth, KS. During one trip, the stagecoach broke down, and Wild Bill, waiting for the repair crew, slept in the bushes while the passengers remained in the coach. During the night, Wild Bill was attacked by a bear. The passengers found him the next morning critically wounded, the bear dead with a stab wound.  

Our daring Bills performed in the same stage play where they showed their prowess shooting at targets, thrilling the audience. 

After the Civil War his life and Wild Bill's found separate paths, although they were lifelong friends.

Wild Bill Hickok

Captain Jack Crawford summed up Wild Bill as one fraught with faults but carried a gentleness about him until riled by insults. He was a good friend and generous to a flaw, but he had no qualms killing a man who did him an injustice. Toward the end of his life, Wild Bill spent most of his time wandering saloons, & playing cards.

He usually sat in a far corner with his back to the wall, but on one particular day, someone sat in his usual seat. Wild Bill reluctantly found a chair at the corner table, and sat with his back to the door.  That’s where Jack McCall found him, and shot him point blank in the back of the head.

Buried in Deadwood SD, everyone who knew Wild Bill mourned his death. He was only 39 years of age.





Buffalo Bill Cody

Charismatic Buffalo Bill’s moniker came when he worked for the Kansas Pacific Railroad, hired to provide buffalo meat for the workers. Over a period of 18 months, he killed more than 4000 buffalo.

From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_Bill):

"Cody and another hunter, Bill Comstock, competed in an eight-hour buffalo-shooting match over the exclusive right to use the name [Buffalo Bill], which Cody won by killing 68 animals to Comstock's 48."

Buffalo Bill was a restless man and entrepreneur. He went on to tour with his Wild West Show in Europe and America, where most of the audience knew the names of his headliners, both American Indians and gunslingers. They showed the world how crazy was the wild west. It ran successfully until its final show in 1906. 

Buffalo Bill died in 1917 while visiting his sister in Denver, CO. He requested to be buried on a mountain overlooking the Great Plains, but rumor has it his body was spirited away and now rests in the hills above Cody, WY. He was 70 years old.



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Many thanks to:
Wikipedia, & Wiki Commons, Public Domain


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