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Sam Sixkiller: Cherokee Frontier Lawman

Sam Sixkiller was one of the most accomplished lawmen in 1880s Oklahoma Territory. And in many ways, he was a typical law enforcement official, minding the peace and gun slinging in the still-wild West. What set Sam Sixkiller apart was his Cherokee heritage. Sixkiller’s sworn duty was to uphold the law, but he also took it upon himself to protect the traditional way of life of the Cherokee. Sixkiller’s temper, actions, and convictions earned him more than a few enemies, and in 1886 he was assassinated in an ambush.

This biography takes a sweeping, cinematic look at the short, tragic life of Sam Sixkiller and his days policing the streets of the Wild West.  Sam Sixkiller:  Cherokee Frontier Lawman was honored by the Oklahoma Historical Society as the Most Outstanding Book on Oklahoma History in 2012.

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Sam Sixkiller and his career as a fearless peace officer read

Sam Sixkiller: Cherokee Frontier Lawman

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Entertaining Women:

Actresses, Dancers, and Singers in the Old West

When movie star Carole Lombard died suddenly at the age of 33, some said it was the end of an era-not just of her hilarious brand of screwball comedies like My Man Godfrey and Twentieth Century but off-screen , too, where her raucous and profane wit made her one of the most fun people in Hollywood. She was the type of star little girls dreamed of becoming: not only was she beautiful and glamorous, she was also married to Clark Gable, creating one of the most sensational love matches in Hollywood’s golden days.

The pair were so well liked that it made perfect sense for them to be asked to headline the first war-bond drive after Pearl Harbor. The campaign would peak in Indianapolis, in Lombard’s home state, so she decided to go anyway after Gable declined and took along her mother instead. On one night, January 15, 1942, Lombard helped raised more than $2 million, four times what organizers hoped for. Afterward, Lombard was eager to get back to California, so she instructed her agent to book them on an airplane flight instead of the train. Lombard’s mother was most reluctant. She had never flown before and her numerologist had told her that January 16 was an unlucky day for flying.

Lombard flipped a coin, an after the star called tails and won, the two women and the press agent took off at 4 a.m., Friday, January 16, on a flight that included several stops and was to take seventeen hours. One stop Friday afternoon was in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where several military officers wanted to board and displace civilian passengers. Four passengers got off the plane, but Lombard, pointing out that she had just raised $2 million for the war effort, convinced the pilot to add three seats and let her and her companions continue the flight.

The plane made one last stop, in Las Vegas, to refuel, then took off at 7:07 p.m. headed for Los Angeles. About a half hour later workers at the Blue Diamond Mine south of Las Vegas reported seeing a bright flash atop a distant mountain and then heard an explosion. It seems the pilot, who had been reprimanded several times before for disobeying flight regulations, was flying off course over the mountains to try and make up for lost time from all the previous stops. The plane grazed a rocky projection than slammed into a wall of Table Rock Mountain near its peak at 8,000 feet.

It took rescue workers, led by a local 70-year-old Indian, almost a day to climb the steep cliffs and read the crash site, surrounded by snow several feet deep. There was no snow near the destroyed plan. Many of the nineteen passengers and three crew members, including Lombard, were so badly burned, they couldn’t be identified. It was several days before all the bodies could be removed from the mountains.

Gable, who had flown to the area and paced nervously until it was clear there were no survivors, soon afterward enlisted in the Army Air Force as a 41-year-old private.

To learn more about Carole Lombard’s and about the other talented performers of the Old West read

Entertaining Women: Actresses, Dancers, and Singers in the Old West.

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Entertaining Women: Actresses, Dancers, and Singers in the Old West

Winners will be announced on February 28, 2016

Long before actors were vying for an Oscar nomination and world wide fame thespians were trying to carve out a modest living entertaining prospectors and settlers of the Old West. Today the curtain goes up on a woman entertainer who captured the hearts of the western pioneers.

Ladies and gentlemen, Charlotte Thompson,

The Emotional Actress

Among the many talented, intrepid actresses who performed in the Old West were London born Charlotte Thompson. She came to the United States with her father in 1850s. Jane Eyre was one of her major roles. She played the part in 1874, 1883-85 and toured several eastern U.S. as Jan Eyre from 1875, 1877, 1885, 1887.

Miss Charlotte Thompson. It is a pleasure to announce the coming to San Antonio next week of this charming lady. Miss Thompson is one of the best emotional actresses of the American stage, especially in the noble passion which make womanhood admirable. None can see Miss Thompson, in her impersonations, without loving and respecting woman more and more, and on the account, we consider her a great actress, and one certainly whom everyone should come out to patronize. These are our thoughts of her most recent work.

“A large audience was amply rewarded last evening for its attendance at the opera house, in the play Drifting Clouds as produced by the well known emotional actress, Charlotte Thompson, and her excellent company. The character of Phyllis Denoir, impersonated by Miss Thompson, was one of the most exacting nature, but the role suffered nothing at her hands. It was a very strong piece of emotional acting carried out with strict propriety and without any of the very ragged bits of passion so often seen in like situations. The drama itself is a powerful one, and without the few humorous moments with which it is so pleasantly interspersed, would, with Miss Thompson’s acting, be almost too tragically intense to afford pleasure. While the art of the author carries on the plot throughout with interest the happy denouncement leaves nothing to be desired at its termination.”

San Antonio Times  March 19, 1890

To learn more about

Charlotte Thompson’s illustrious career and her performances across the Old West read

Entertaining Women: Actresses, Dancers, and Singers in the

Old West.

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Entertaining Women: Actresses, Dancers, and Singers in the Old West

Winners will be announced on February 28, 2016

Long before actors were vying for an Oscar nomination and world wide fame thespians were trying to carve out a modest living entertaining prospectors and settlers of the Old West. Today the curtain goes up on a woman entertainer who captured the hearts of the western pioneers.

Ladies and gentlemen, Songstress Antoinette Adams

The first actress to appear in Virginia City was Antoinette Adams, variously described as six feet tall, long-necked, Roman-nosed, cracked-voiced, and a faded blonde. Although her audience of miners were cruelly disappointed in what they saw and heard, they listened patiently through her first rendition. At the first pause in her performance, a burly miner stood up and ordered the audience to give three cheers for “Aunty.”

The cheers resounded, and Antoinette sang again. Once more the miners applauded her, then one man rose to suggest they give her enough money to retire from her profession. A shower of silver cascaded upon the stage, the audience rowdily saluting her retirement. After that, every time Antoinette opened her mouth to sing, the miners cheered her so lustily she could not be heard; they also hurled more silver at her feet. At last the actress surrendered, ordered the curtains pulled. When she gathered the silver up, it filled two money sacks. But Antoinette could take a hint; she left town the next day.

To learn more about

Antoinette Adam’s not so illustrious career

and her performances across the Old West read

Entertaining Women: Actresses, Dancers, and Singers in the

Old West.

Enter to win a copy of

Entertaining Women: Actresses, Dancers, and Singers in the Old West

Winners will be announced on February 28, 2016

Long before actors were vying for an Oscar nomination and world wide fame thespians were trying to carve out a modest living entertaining prospectors and settlers of the Old West. Today the curtain goes up on a woman entertainer who captured the hearts of the western pioneers.

Ladies and gentlemen, Madame Adelina Patti,

The President’s Opera Star

Among the many stars that performed at Piper’s Opera House in Virginia City, Nevada in the late 1870s was a beautiful soprano by the name of Adelina Patti. Adelina was a highly acclaimed 19th-century opera singer, earning huge fees at the height of her career in the music capitals of Europe and America. She first sang in public as a child in 1851, and gave her last performance before an audience in 1914. Along with her near contemporaries Jenny Lind and Theresa Tietjens, Patti remains one of the most famous sopranos in history, owing to the purity and beauty of her lyrical voice and the unmatched quality of her bel canto technique. Bel canto is a lyrical style of operatic singing using a full rich broad tone and smooth phrasing.

During an American tour in 1862, she sang John Howard Payne’s Home Sweet Home at the White House for the President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, and his wife Mary. The Lincolns were mourning their son Willie, who had died of typhoid. Moved to tears, the Lincolns requested and encore of the song. Henceforth, it would become associated with Adelina Patti, and she performed it many times as a bonus item at the end of recitals and concerts.

Patti’s career was one of success after success. She sang not only in England and the United States, but also as far afield in mainland Europe as Russia, and in South America as well, inspiring audience frenzy and critical superlatives wherever she went. Her girlish good looks gave her an appealing stage presence, which added to her celebrity status.

To learn more about

Adelina Patti’s career and her performances in America read

Entertaining Women: Actresses, Dancers, and Singers in the

Old West.

Enter to win a copy of

Entertaining Women: Actresses, Dancers, and Singers in the Old West

Winners will be announced on February 28, 2016

Long before actors were vying for an Oscar nomination and world wide fame thespians were trying to carve out a modest living entertaining prospectors and settlers of the Old West. Today the curtain goes up on a woman entertainer who captured the hearts of the western pioneers.

Ladies and gentlemen, Lillian Russell,

America’s Greatest Beauty

It was not so much the late Lillian Russell’s great dramatic ability or her clear, well-trained voice as her personality and physical beauty that made her the most famous musical comedy star of her day and acclaimed for more than a generation as “America’s Greatest Beauty.” And after she had ceased to sing and act for the public the compelling charms that had lifted her to the stage’s topmost pinnacle persisted and made her up to the very day of her death one of the most admired of women.

Other women marveled to see how Lillian Russell, as she neared sixty years of age, still retained the clear complexion, soft skin, unwrinkled face, youthful expression and all the vivacity of earlier life.

How did she achieve this modern miracles? What was the secret of her unfading beauty.

Lillian Russell made no secret of some of the measures and means she employed to retain her extraordinary good looks, but she did not tell the whole story. She did not say that in addition to the baths, cold creams, cosmetics, exercise and wholesome living she made liberal use of common sense, self-control, persistence, energy and cheerfulness-factors neglected by many women who faithfully follow her other formulas.

She employed the combination of mental qualities and drug store and beauty parlor accessories not only during her whole stage career, but long after the time when most women realize that they are growing old and believing that they have become passé and unattractive, make no effort to improve their appearance. At sixty Lillian Russell was even more careful of her appearance her face and figure, than she was at twenty or thirty.

To learn more about

Lillian Russell’s career and her beauty regiments, read

Entertaining Women: Actresses, Dancers, and Singers in the

Old West.

Enter to win a copy of

Entertaining Women: Actresses, Dancers, and Singers in the Old West

Winners will be announced on February 28, 2016

Long before actors were vying for an Oscar nomination and world wide fame thespians were trying to carve out a modest living entertaining prospectors and settlers of the Old West. Today the curtain goes up on a woman entertainer who captured the hearts of the western pioneers.

Ladies and gentlemen, Jeanne Eagels, the Forlorn Leading Lady

Triumph and tragedy, alternating strangely throughout her life converged on the night on October 3, 1929, when Jeanne Eagels, beautiful and famous actress, suddenly collapsed and died. At a time when her health seemed much improved and she was planning a comeback to the Broadway that had barred her for eighteen months, the black curtain descended noiselessly and swiftly.

It brought to an end the drama of a woman who had made a sensational rise to the heights of theatrical stardom, a woman men clamored for and loved, perhaps too well. Romance, broken hearts, success and defeat, adulation and repudiation – a pageant of experiences and emotions – had paraded through her life. And in the end Jeanne Eagels was the same woman she had been years before – a proud, tempestuous spirit seeking bewilderingly for some distant horizon of happiness.

On her last day alive it probably did not seem to her that death was in the wings. If so, it made no difference. For that night she dressed in her most elaborate and beautiful clothes. She was planning to join a Broadway party. Broadway! The street which soon, she thought, would once more echo to her name and where incandescents would spell it out in glittering letters.

But hardly had she dressed when she suddenly fell faint. The night before she had taken an overdose of a solution of a sleep-producing drug called chloral hydrate. She was rushed from her Park Avenue home to a private sanitarium. They brought her into a room for an examination. She sat on the bed a moment, and then wearily took off her coat. It revealed her in all her glory. Jewels shone magnificently. Diamonds and pearls sparkled on her fingers, about her neck and on her wrist.

She signed. There was only a nurse to see this last act. She sank on the bed in convulsions. A little later she was lifeless. And then Broadway and the whole world learned with astonishment of her sudden passing.

To learn more about Jeanne Eagels career and the events that led to her untimely death read

Entertaining Women:

Actresses, Dancers, and Singers in the Old West.

Entertaining Women:

Actresses, Dancers, and Singers in the Old West

Long before actors were vying for an Oscar nomination and world wide fame thespians were trying to carve out a modest living entertaining prospectors and settlers of the Old West. Today the curtain goes up on a woman entertainer who captured the hearts of the western pioneers.

Ladies and gentlemen, Dora Hand, the Tragic Songbird

Dora Hand was in a deep sleep. Her bare legs were draped across the thick blankets covering her delicate form and a mass of long, auburn hair stretched over the pillow under her head and dangled off the top of a flimsy mattress. Her breathing was slow and effortless. A framed, graphite- charcoal portrait of an elderly couple hung above her bed on faded, satin-ribbon wallpaper and kept company with her slumber.

The air outside the window next to the picture was still and cold. The distant sound of voices, back-slapping laughter, profanity, and a piano’s tinny, repetitious melody wafted down Dodge City, Kansas’s main thoroughfare and snuck into the small room where Dora was laying.

Dodge was an all night town. Walkers and loungers kept the streets and saloons busy. Residents learned to sleep through the giggling, growling, and gunplay of the cowboy consumers and their paramours for hire. Dora was accustomed to the nightly frivolity and clatter. Her dreams were seldom disturbed by the commotion.

All at once the hard thud of a pair of bullets charging through the wall of the tiny room cut through the routine noises of the cattle town with an uneven, gusty violence. The first bullet was halted by the dense plaster partition leading into the bed chambers. The second struck Dora on the right side under her arm. There was no time for her to object to the injury, no moment for her to cry out or recoil in pain. The slug killed her instantly.

In the near distance a horse squealed and its galloping hooves echoed off the dusty street and faded away.

A pool of blood pored out of Dora’s fatal wound, transforming the white sheets she rested on to crimson. A clock sitting on a nightstand next to the lifeless body ticked on steadily and mercilessly. It was 4:30 in the morning on October 4, 1878, and for the moment, nothing but the persistent moonlight filtering into the scene through a closed window recognized the 34 year-old woman’s passing.

Twenty-four hours prior to Dora being gunned down in her sleep she had been on stage at the Alhambra Saloon and Gambling House. She was a stunning woman whose wholesome voice and exquisite features had charmed audiences from Abilene to Austin. She regaled love starved wranglers and rough riders at stage and railroad stops with her heartfelt rendition of the popular ballads Blessed Be the Ties That Bind and Because I Love You So.

To learn more about how Dora Hand’s career began and about the other talented performers of the Old West read

Entertaining Women: Actresses, Dancers, and Singers in the Old West.

Entertaining Women:

Actresses, Dancers, and Singers in the Old West

Long before actors were vying for an Oscar nomination and world wide fame thespians were trying to carve out a modest living entertaining prospectors and settlers of the Old West. Today the curtain goes up on a woman entertainer who captured the hearts of the western pioneers.

Ladies and gentlemen, Lillie Langtry, the Professional Beauty

Twenty-three-year-old Lillie Lantry’s striking looks inspired poets to write sonnets about her grace and pin-and-ink artists to sketch her elegant profile. She was known as a “Professional Beauty,” one of a handful of women in England with such arresting features they were invited to the finest soirees just so guests could admire them. Langtry was a tall, curvaceous lady with titian red hair, and portraits of her sold in shops for a penny.

Emile Charlotte LeBreton was born to William Corbet and Emile Martin LeBreton in October 1853 on the Isle of Jersey, a few miles off the coast of Saint-Malo, France. She was the only daughter in a family of six children. Her mother called her “Lillie,” which fit the beautiful child with lily-white skin.

Her education included studies in history, the classics, and early theatre. By the time she turned age twenty, she had developed a love for theatre and a strong desire to leave her birthplace and see the world she had read so much about.

She married Edward Langtry on March 9, 1874, not long after watching his yacht sail into the Jersey harbor. He took her away from her home to England, where they met and mingled with the country’s most renowned aristocrats. But their marriage would not survive the attention Lillie received from male admirers and friends who persuaded her to pursue a career on stage. The two separated after the birth of their daughter in April 1881.

Theatre owners looking to capitalize on the well-known siren’s popularity invited her to join their acting troupes. Knowing that only her beauty attracted them, Lillie refused all offers, deciding instead to take acting lessons. For months she trained with the critically acclaimed actress Henrietta Hodson Labouchere, and on December 15, 1881, she made her acting debut at the Theatre Royal in Westminster.

To learn more about how Lillie Langtry’s career began and about the other talented performers of the Old West read

Entertaining Women: Actresses, Dancers, and Singers in the Old West.

Entertaining Women:

Actresses, Dancers, and Singers in the Old West

Long before actors were vying for an Oscar nomination and world wide fame thespians were trying to carve out a modest living entertaining prospectors and settlers of the Old West. Today the curtain goes up on a woman entertainer who captured the hearts of the western pioneers.

Ladies and gentlemen, Lola Montez, the Countess of Landsfeld

Lola stood quietly in the middle of the stage at the Bella Union Saloon in San Francisco and let the audience gaze up at her. She was a captivating beauty with dark, curly hair. Men from the various mining camps around traveled to town nightly to see the “fair-skinned woman with the pretty face.” She always began her act the same way:

“Good evening, gentlemen. I am Lola Montez. I was born in the year 1830, in Seville, the capital of Andalucía, the land of the serenades and balconies, of troubadours and romance – the fatherland of Miguel Cervantes, of Las Casas of the Roman Emperors Trajan and Theodosius.”

After the short introduction the music would start and the audience would cheer wildly. Lola would dance out on stage wearing flesh colored tights and a crinoline skirt. The excited crowd didn’t know that most of what she had just told them about herself was a lie. Lola had spent so many years creating her fictitious background that she had probably forgotten what the truth was anyway. And as long as the house was packed with men who paid to see her, she didn’t care.

Lola was actually born in 1818 in Ireland and her name was really Marie Dolores Eliza Rosanna Gilbert. By the time she had reached the Gold Country in 1851, she had already built a reputation for herself as a woman who possessed extravagant charm and thrived on adventure.

Like many other entertainers, Lola had come to California to enjoy the rewards of the Gold Rush. Stories of gold being tossed at the feet of performers lured many singing and dancing acts west. Lonesome and bored miners had an insatiable appetite for entertainment and they were willing to pay handsomely to see shows and variety acts. Lola Montez became one of the most popular performers of her time.

Lola was well known for a number she called the “Spider Dance.” She wore a risqué costume and fluttered around the stage pretending to be trapped inside a spider’s web. The music and dance became more and more frantic as giant tarantulas made of cork were dropped down on her from high above the stage. The curious miners were thrilled and shocked at the display. Lola’s dancing brought her high praise, but some found the scene a little too provocative for their taste.

To learn more about how Lola Montez’s career began and about the other talented performers of the Old West read

Entertaining Women: Actresses, Dancers, and Singers in the Old West.