Journal Notes

Senorita Rosalie was the Mexican star of the Wild West Show. She was a stunning, black-haired woman who had achieved fame as a trick rider. She would jump over walls and ride holding the reins in her mouth while standing on the back of her horse. With her feet firmly placed on the ground, she would spur her horse on and jump on its back. While the animal was in full gallop, she would fling her body in and out of the saddle and dangle precariously off the sides of the horse. She could even lie down in the saddle and retrieve items left on the arena floor. Senorita Rosalie’s expertise on a horse made her a highly sought after riding instructor. Many Wild West performers benefited from her horseback-riding advice.

Ethyle and Juanita Parry

The famous cowgirl twins were a major attraction to Bill Cody’s program in the early 1900s. The twins were called Cossack Girls because they performed all the reckless and daring feats of horsemanship attributed to the Russian Cossack cavalry men. The twins were adept at riding wild broncos and were exceptional ropers. Newspaper reviews hailing the ladies’ performance at a show in Minnesota noted that not only could the Parrys ride well but “they were pretty and attractive, and nice to look at on or off a horse.”

Fannie Sperry came into this world on March 27, 1887. She was born and raised on a horse ranch in the Beartooth Mountains of Montana. She parlayed her natural easy way with horses into a lucrative career riding in rodeos and performing in various Wild West shows including Buffalo Bill Cody’s.  Fannie’s parents helped mold her into a fine equestrian. They taught her how to transform horses into first-rate cowponies. She used her skill for breaking horses in her act with Cody’s Wild West Show. When Fannie joined the program in 1916, she had a number of roping and riding titles to her credit. The Women’s Bucking Horse Championship of Montana and the Lady Bucking Horse Champion of the World were two of the most prestigious. She died of natural causes on February 11, 1983 at the age of ninety-five.

Annie Oakley was born Annie Moses on August 13, 1860, in Drake County, Ohio. Her father’s untimely death when she was still a child forced Annie to find work to help support her seven brothers and sisters and their mother.  Annie first learned to hunt with a rifle when she was eight. She used her natural markswoman ability to provide food for the evening meals. She became such a good shot that she was hired on by a merchant to supply his store with fresh game.  A shooting match between Annie and Western showman Frank Butler in 1875 changed her life forever. The challenge was for each marksman to shoot twenty-five clay pigeons. Frank hit twenty-four of the twenty-five targets. Annie hit all of them.  Buffalo Bill Cody hired Annie to join his Wild West cast in 1885. Annie packed the house nightly with her trick riding and trick shooting. Cody called Annie “the single greatest asset the Wild West ever had.”  Annie and her husband Frank enjoyed seventeen seasons with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. She retired from the program in 1902 and died of pernicious anemia in 1926 at the age of sixty-six years old.

Lillian Smith was born on February 3, 1871, in Coleville, California. Her first performance with the Wild West Show was in St. Louis in the later part of 1886. Her proficiency with the rifle left such a lasting impression on the audiences that within six months she had earned a spot on the regular show lineup. Lillian’s remarkable target-shooting act kept audiences on the edge of their seats. Each performance ended with her firing at a glass ball that was tossed into the air. She would purposely miss it three out of four times. The bullet from the last shot would shatter the ball into pieces. It was that display of skill that prompted U.S. and European newspapers to proclaim her to act to be “spellbinding and captivating.”  Lillian Smith, who was billed as the California Girl, left Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show in 1889 and formed her own short-lived western program. Lillian retired from performing in the mid-1920s and lived out the rest of her days in a cabin along the banks of the Salt Fork River in Oklahoma.

Tombstone, in the Arizona Territory was notorious as the meanest mining town in the western frontiers, and Tombstone’s Oriental Saloon was similarly renowned.  As many as 200 men may have been shot to death there in pointless even idiotic arguments that originated in the Oriental.  On one occasion, John Ringo invited Louis Hancock to have a drink with him.  When Hancock agreed and asked for a beer, Ringo said, “No man drinks beer with me.  I don’t like beer.”  Ringo finally shot Hancock who allegedly was buried with a bottle of beer.  The original Oriental was started by Jim Vizina in a canvas tent with two wagon loads of whisky.  It later moved to an actual building that was lavishly decorated by the new owner, Mike Joyce.  Joyce later sold out to Lou Rickabaugh, who gave a quarter interest to Wyatt Earp for protection purposes.  Gunmen Bat Masterson and Luke Short ran the gambling tables, with Earp and his friend Doc Holliday often present.  Earp and Doc Holliday left town following the gunfight at the O.K. Corral.  Tombstone’s silver mine died out, and the Oriental folded with it.

Standing in the shadows of a ghost town.

Dutch Henry aka Henry Bourne, was an outlaw who died in 1930.  Henry Borne, a German immigrant called Dutch Henry, became known for horse thievery.  After arriving in the U.S. he joined the Seventh Cavalry, but quit in the late 1860s.  Shortly afterward, Borne was arrested at Fort Smith, Arkansas, for absconding with twenty government mules.  He was sentenced to prison, but escaped just three months later and became a full-time horse thief, an avocation he pursued until the automobile replaced the horse.  Dutch Henry sometimes had over 300 men on his payroll who were prepared to steal any herd, no matter how large.  It was said that the crafty Dutchman once sold a sheriff his own recently stolen horse, and “Dutch Henry” came to mean a stolen horse.  In 1878, Bat Masterson arrested Henry, but he escaped punishment.  The state of Arkansas finally succeeded in putting Dutch Henry away after they connected him with the Fort Smith robbery years earlier.  He spent the next twenty years behind bars, and emerged from prison to discover that there was no longer a market for horse thieves.  Hollywood borrowed his legendary name for many scripts featuring western badmen.

Myra Belle Shirley, better known as Belle Starr was born in Carthage, Missouri, the notorious Belle Starr moved with her family at the age of sixteen to Scyene, Texas, just outside of Dallas.  In the 1860s, Starr became involved with bank robber Cole Younger, Jesse James’ partner.  The couple spent several months together in a small cabin on the Oklahoma Strip with Younger was hiding out from the law after robbing several banks.  After Younger rejoined the James Gang, Starr gave birth to a daughter, Pearl, who was though to be Younger’s child.  Starr’s next romance was with another bank robber, Jim Reed.  Along with Reed and two other criminals in 1869, Starr robbed a California prospector suspected of having hit a rich vein.  The four tortured the prospector until he told them where his gold was hidden, and they got away with $30,000.  After Reed was shot in a gun fight in 1874, Starr and an Indian outlaw named Blue Duck organized a horse-and-cattle-rustling ring.  Starr then married a Cherokee Indian named Sam Starr were arrested in 1883 and sentenced to six months in jail.  After their release, they returned to rustling and were arrested again in 1886.  Although they appeared before ‘hanging’ Judge Isaac Parker at Fort Smith, they were released for lack of evidence.  Sam Starr was shot and killed in a barroom brawl in December 1886.  Starr’s last lover was a Creek Indian named Jim July.  On February 3, 1889, after riding part of the way to Fort Smith with July, Starr turned back to her home in Younger’s Bend.  A gunman apparently lying in wait shot her off her horse.  She was found by a passing traveler who took her home to her daughter.  When she died.  Pearl had her tombstone engraved with the following inscription:  “Shed not for her the bitter tear, Nor give the heart to vain regret, ’Tis but the casket that lies here, The gem that fills it sparkles yet.” 

J.H. Holliday, Dentist, very respectfully offers his professional services to the citizens of Dodge City and surrounding country during the summer.  Office at room No. 24, Dodge House.  Where satisfaction is not given money will be refunded.

Denizens of Dodge whose ‘miscreant molars’ gave trouble were able to be ‘drilled’ by Doc without suffering from lead poison.  One wonders if there were any dissatisfied customers with nerve enough to complain.

As he lay hiding in the pine thicket along the Potomac River, seven days after assassinating President Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth began to think his act had been in vain.  “I am here in despair,” he wrote.  “And why?  For doing what Brutus was honored for-what made Tell a hero.  My action was purer than theirs…I have too great a soul to die like a criminal.  O, may He spare me that, and let me die bravely.!”  Booth, a strikingly handsome, successful actor and strong supporter of the Confederacy, had planned for months to abduct Lincoln to force the release of Southern prisoners.  But after Lee surrendered on April 9, 1865, Booth’s plots were rendered useless.  He spent the next few days glumly drinking muck brandy at John Deery’s billiard hall in Washington, D.C..  When he shot the President on April 14 the act apparently was unplanned until that day, when Booth happened to hear that Lincoln was to see Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theatre that night.  It was during the second scene of the third act, after 10 p.m., that the 26-year-old Booth entered Lincoln’s box and shot him in the back of the head.  He stabbed an officer who tried to grab him, then leaped to the stage 12 feet below, yelling, “Sic semper tyrannis!  The South is avenged!”  As he jumped his boot spur got caught in the folds of an American flag draped along the President’s box, causing him to fall and break his left leg as he hit the stage, where he stabbed the orchestra conductor, who tried to stop him, then struggled down the rear stairs to an awaiting horse that was being held by a stagehand.  As Booth fled the city-his fractured leg tearing deeper and deeper into his flesh-he was joined by 19-year-old David Herold, who as one of eight in Booth’s gang had shot and wounded Secretary of State William Seward.  Two men who were to kill Vice President Andrew Johnson backed out.  Booth and Herold rode through the night southward in to Maryland.  They turned eight miles out of their way to arrive at the home of Dr. Samuel Mudd, who set Booth’s leg at 4:30 a.m..  From there the two men rode on to the Potomac, where they hid along the banks for a week, surrounded by Army troops but supplied food and newspapers by a Confederate sympathizer.  The troops finally caught up with the two men in the early morning hours of April 26, after they crossed the river and reached the home of Richard Garrett in Virginia.  After the soldiers surrounded the barn where Booth and Herold were sleeping, one of Garrett’s sons was ordered to go in and convince them to surrender.  Booth told the boy, “Damn you.  You have betrayed me.  Get out of here or I will shoot you.”  Herold surrendered, but Booth stayed inside the barn, intent on a hero’s final blaze of glory.  He yelled, “Captain, this is a hard case, I swear.  Give a lame man a chance.  Draw up your men 20 yards from the door, and I will fight your whole command.”  When the troops refused Booth called out, “Well, my brave boys, you can prepare a stretcher for me.”  Soldiers set the barn afire.  Booth was seen briefly against he light of the blaze, leaning on a crutch, before a shot was heard.  Booth was pulled from the barn with a bullet in the side of his neck that had broken his spinal column.  A soldier, saying “Providence directed me,” claimed he shot Booth through a crack in the barn even though orders were to take the assassin alive.  But some historians believe Booth had shot himself.  The actor spent his final hours lying on the porch of Garrett’s house.  Before he died at 7 a.m. he mumbled, “Tell mother, tell mother, I died for my country.”  And then:  “Useless, useless.”  Although Booth’s body was identified by several people before he was buried outside Washington, near the U.S. Arsenal, legend has it that the Army had gotten the wrong man and Booth remained alive.  He was spotted, it was said, in Europe and India, and many believed the self-acclaimed hero wandered around Texas and Mexico for the rest of the 19^th century before committing suicide in Enid, Oklahoma, in 1903.