What happened on this day...

Hi everybody and welcome to August 23rd. 

Gosh where has the time gone.

Most everybody has kids going back to school already and I have to say i'm a bit jealous.  I still have 2 more weeks with my kiddos.

It's a bittersweet year for me though.  My oldest graduated high school in June and in just 3 days, i will be transplanting her into her new dorm room at college. 

I feel so old :( and I'm sad.  She and I are very close so it'll be hard for both of us i'm afraid.  Feel free to send positive thoughts that this emotional mama keeps it together :)

Anywho, when i was researching info for my blog day, i ran across an interesting fact that i didn't know.

Does everyone know who Annie Oakley is?

Well on this day, August 23rd in 1876, she married

traveling show marksman Frank E. Butler

and below are 11 interesting facts about Annie !

1.  She made her first shot at 8 years old.

Born on August 13, 1860 in a rural part of western Ohio, Phoebe Ann Moses grew up poor. Her father’s death in 1866 meant that she had to contribute to help her family survive, so she trapped small animals such as quail for food. At eight years old, she made her first shot when she killed a squirrel outside her house. “It was a wonderful shot, going right through the head from side to side. My mother was so frightened when she learned that I had taken down the loaded gun and shot it that I was forbidden to touch it again for eight months,” she later said.

2. She used her shooting skills to pay off her moms mortgage.

Despite Oakley’s top-notch shooting skills, her widowed mother struggled to make ends meet. She sent Oakley to work for another family in exchange for her daughter getting an education. As a teenager, Oakley returned home (after working as a servant for an abusive family) and continued to hunt animals. She sold the meat to an Ohio grocery store, earning enough money to pay her mom’s $200 mortgage. She later wrote: "Oh, how my heart leaped with joy as I handed the money to mother and told her that I had saved enough to pay it off!"

3. She beat her future husband in a shooting match.

At 15 years old, Oakley participated in a shooting match on Thanksgiving with Frank Butler, an Irish-American professional marksman. The match, which happened in Cincinnati, was a doozy. To Butler’s surprise, the teenage girl outshot him by one clay pigeon, and he lost the $100 bet he had placed. Rather than feel embarrassed or emasculated by his loss, Butler was impressed and interested, and the two married the following year.

4. Despite her profession, she emphasized her femininity.

At the end of the 19th century, shooting was a predominantly male activity, and Oakley certainly stood out. But rather than dress or behave like a man to fit in, she emphasized her femininity. She wore her own homemade costumes on stage, behaved modestly, and engaged in "proper" female activities such as embroidery in her spare time.

5. She was only 5 feet tall. (I feel her pain lol)

In addition to Oakley’s gender, her diminutive stature made her stand out in the world of sharpshooting. In 1884, the Sioux chieftain Sitting Bull befriended Oakley when the two performers were traveling across the country. Acknowledging both her height and her shooting skill, Sitting Bull nicknamed Oakley Watanya Cicillia (English translation: Little Sure Shot). The American Indian warrior liked Oakley so much that he gave her his special moccasins to "adopt" her as his daughter.

6. She performed for Kings and Queens in Europe.

Although the concept of the Wild West is firmly rooted in Americana, Oakley showed off her shooting skills across Europe as part of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. In 1887, she performed for Queen Victoria at the American Exposition in London, and the queen reportedly told Oakley that she was a "very clever little girl." In 1889, Oakley performed at the Paris Exposition and traveled to Italy and Spain. The press loved her, the king of Senegal wanted her to come help control the tiger population in his country, and Italy’s King Umberto I was a fan.

7. She offered to lead female shoots in World War I.

Wanting to use her shooting skills to serve her country, Oakley wrote a letter to President McKinley in 1898. She offered to provide 50 female sharpshooters (with their own arms and ammunition) to fight for the United States in the Spanish-American War, but she never got a response. Similarly, in 1917, she contacted the U.S. Secretary of War to offer her expertise to teach an army unit of women shooters to fight in World War I. She didn’t hear back, so she visited army camps, raised money for the Red Cross, and volunteered with military charities instead

8. She sued the press for publicizing her (non-existent) drug addiction.

In August 1903, two of William Randolph Hearst’s newspapers in Chicago reported that Oakley was a cocaine addict who was arrested for stealing a black man’s pants. Other newspapers ran the story, and Oakley—who was neither a drug addict nor a thief—was horrified. "The terrible piece … nearly killed me … The only thing that kept me alive was the desire to purge my character," she said.

The woman who had been arrested in Chicago was a burlesque performer whose stage name was Any Oakley. Most newspapers published retractions, but Hearst didn’t. He (unsuccessfully) hired a private investigator to uncover anything sordid about Oakley. Oakley sued 55 newspapers for libel, ultimately winning or settling 54 of them by 1910. Despite winning money from Hearst and other newspapers, costly legal expenses meant that she ultimately lost money to clear her name.

9. Thanks to Thomas Edison, she became a film actress.

In 1888, Oakley acted in Deadwood Dick, a financially unsuccessful play. At the Paris Exposition the next year, though, she met Buffalo Bill Cody’s friend Thomas Edison. In 1894, Oakley visited Edison in New Jersey and showed off her shooting skills for the inventor’s Kinetoscope. The resulting film, called The Little Sure Shot of the Wild West, featured Oakley shooting a rifle to break glass balls. Although she didn’t continue acting in film, she did act in The Western Girl, a play in which she portrayed a sharpshooter, in 1902 and 1903.

10. Two serious accidents halted her career.

In 1901, Oakley was injured in a train accident while traveling between North Carolina and Virginia for a performance. Although reports differ about the severity of her injuries, we do know that she took a year off from performing after the accident. Two decades later, Oakley was injured in a car accident in Florida. Her hip and ankle were fractured, and she wore a leg brace until 1926, when she passed away from pernicious anemia in Ohio at age 66. Frank Butler, her husband of 50 years, died 18 days later.

11. Her name became an idiomatic expression.

You know you’ve made it when your name becomes an idiom. Because of her shooting skills, the phrase "Annie Oakley" acquired a meaning of a free ticket to an event. Performing with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, Oakley shot holes in tiny objects, making targets out of everything from playing cards to a dime to a cigar dangling out of her husband’s mouth. Because free admission tickets for theatrical shows had holes punched in them (so they wouldn’t be sold to someone else), these tickets came to be called "Annie Oakleys."

Thanks for visiting and have a great day !!

***

Krista Ames was born and raised in Indiana. She now resides in 

Northern Michigan with the love of her life and their 4 children. 

She is a full time stay-at-home mom and pursues her writing career 

when she's not chasing kids, cooking or doing laundry.

Krista would love to hear from you any time via krista@kristaames.com

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The Butcher, The Baker, The Undertaker by Paty Jager

Silver City, ID cemetery

As usual with my writing, I wrote a scene and then went, what did they do back then? Which led me to researching about undertakers and burials in the old west.

That means this post isn't about the butcher or the baker, it's all about the undertaker. This was usually a man who spent most of his time as the local carpenter or builder. The tools of his trade were lumber, hammer, saw, and nails. Most of the smaller towns had townsfolk who had multiple jobs. The undertake was one of these. Unless there was an epidemic or a raid by Indians or outlaws the undertaker didn't make coffins all day long every day.

Most small communities or towns usually had a group of women who would "lay out the dead". This meant they would clean them up and dress them in either the deceased's Sunday best or a nightdress. Then they were placed in a family parlor or place where the community could come by and pay their respect.

Sweet smelling flowers were in abundance in the parlor to overpower any smell that might be coming from the decaying body. Before the discovery of embalming, most bodies were not left out of the ground more than 3 or 4 days due to the smell.

Before the discovery of formaldehyde bodies were soaked in arsenic or alcohol to preserve them long enough for family to gather for a proper burial. There was a note of a woman who preserved her husband in a tin container full of whiskey and kept him under her bed.

Formaldehyde was discovered by a Russian chemist in 1859. Aleksandr Butlerov. He made the fluid by disolving a gas in water and adding an alcohol base. So the earlier methods of preserving a body with alcohol weren't too far off.  Formaldehyde stabilizes the bacteria in a body that causes decay.

The downside to formaldehyde is the fact it is dangerous to the Undertaker. It can cause lung cancer, bronchitis, and death.

Embalming became a way to preserve the bodies of wealthy men and officers during the Civil War. These men would be sent back to their families and given proper burials.

The methods discovered to preserve bodies, postponed the decay of a body and families could hold off on burying their loved ones until all the family could arrive. This started the move toward elaborate funerals and the undertaker now had more of a business than making coffins.

The information I dug up about funerals in the old west was interesting. they would gather before the burial to eat and tell stories about the deceased. The coffin would be on sawhorses and people would gather around it. then the preacher would give a service and the pallbearers would carry the coffin out to a waiting wagon and the procession would walk to the church and cemetery for the burial.

I found a couple of  "funeral etiquette" statements.

It was considered improper to remove a body through the door the living crossed to enter the parlor or room where the deceased was "laid out". For this reason some homes would be built with an extra parlor door that didn't have steps or a porch. This was the door used to carry the coffin and deceased out of the house.

And the body should always be carried out of a building head first. I didn't find a reason for this one.

As always happens with my research, all I needed to know was an undertaker's exact job description in the old west and I ended up finding other interesting tidbits that worked well for this post.

Paty Jager is an award-winning author of 32+ novels, novellas, and anthologies of murder mystery, western romance, and action adventure. All her work has Western or Native American elements in them along with hints of humor and engaging characters.

This is what readers have to say about the Letters of Fate series- “...filled with romance, adventure and twists and turns.” “What a refreshing and well written love story of fate and hope!”

Sources: 

http://wildwesthistory.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-undertaker-death-and-dying-in-old.html

http://thefuneralsource.org/hi0301.html

Photos: Paty Jager