Today, most remember “California Girl” Lillian Frances Smith (1871–1930) as Annie Oakley’s chief competitor in the small world of the Wild West shows’ female shooters. But the two women were quite different: Oakley’s conservative “prairie beauty” persona clashed with Smith’s tendency to wear flashy clothes and keep company with the cowboys and American Indians she performed with. This lively first biography chronicles the Wild West showbiz life that Smith led and explores the talents that made her a star. Drawing on family records, press accounts, interviews, and numerous other sources, historian Julia Bricklin peels away the myths that enshroud Smith’s fifty-year career. Known as “The California Huntress” before she was ten years old, Smith was a professional sharpshooter by the time she reached her teens, shooting targets from the back of a galloping horse in Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West. Not only did Cody offer $10,000 to anyone who could beat her, but he gave her top billing, setting the stage for her rivalry with Annie Oakley. Being the best female sharpshooter in the United States was not enough, however, to differentiate Lillian Smith from Oakley and a growing number of ladylike cowgirls. So Smith reinvented herself as “Princess Wenona,” a Sioux with a violent and romantic past. Performing with Cody and other showmen such as Pawnee Bill and the Miller brothers, Smith led a tumultuous private life, eventually taking up the shield of a forged Indian persona. The morals of the time encouraged public criticism of Smith’s lack of Victorian femininity, and the press’s tendency to play up her rivalry with Oakley eventually overshadowed Smith’s own legacy. In the end, as author Julia Bricklin shows, Smith cared more about living her life on her own terms than about her public image. Unlike her competitors who shot to make a living, Lillian Smith lived to shoot.

America's Best Female Sharpshooter: The Rise and Fall of Lillian Frances Smith (Volume 2) (William F. Cody Series on the History and Culture of the American West)

Biographies & Memoirs

Bricklin, Julia

Community & Culture

University of Oklahoma Press

Review\nAlthough Lillian Smith surpassed Annie Oakley in shooting ability, most histories of the West have overlooked her. In America’s Best Female Sharpshooter, Julia Bricklin painstakingly reconstructs Smith's career, including her transformation for the stage into the Indian persona “Princess Wenona.” In this definitive work on Lillian Smith, Bricklin has made a significant contribution to studies of women in the American West. —James D. McLaird, author of Calamity Jane: The Woman and the Legend\n“Historian Julia Bricklin has shed light on this neglected woman's career, bringing her out of the shadows and shattering some misconceptions along the way. Bricklin has done Lillian and the history of women in the American West a great service by bringing the shootist’s life to public attention.”—Story Circle Network Reviews\nToday, most remember “California Girl” Lillian Frances Smith (1871–1930) as Annie Oakley’s chief competitor in the small world of the Wild West shows’ female shooters. But the two women were quite different: Oakley’s conservative “prairie beauty” persona clashed with Smith’s tendency to wear flashy clothes and keep company with the cowboys and American Indians she performed with. This lively first biography chronicles the Wild West showbiz life that Smith led and explores the talents that made her a star.\nDrawing on family records, press accounts, interviews, and numerous other sources, historian Julia Bricklin peels away the myths that enshroud Smith’s fifty-year career. Known as “The California Huntress” before she was ten years old, Smith was a professional sharpshooter by the time she reached her teens, shooting targets from the back of a galloping horse in Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West. Not only did Cody offer $10,000 to anyone who could beat her, but he gave her top billing, setting the stage for her rivalry with Annie Oakley.\nBeing the best female sharpshooter in the United States was not enough, however, to differentiate Lillian Smith from Oakley and a growing number of ladylike cowgirls. So Smith reinvented herself as “Princess Wenona,” a Sioux with a violent and romantic past. Performing with Cody and other showmen such as Pawnee Bill and the Miller brothers, Smith led a tumultuous private life, eventually taking up the shield of a forged Indian persona. The morals of the time encouraged public criticism of Smith’s lack of Victorian femininity, and the press’s tendency to play up her rivalry with Oakley eventually overshadowed Smith’s own legacy.\nIn the end, as author Julia Bricklin shows, Smith cared more about living her life on her own terms than about her public image. Unlike her competitors who shot to make a living, Lillian Smith lived to shoot.

Humor & Entertainment

In 1900, the young and beautiful Leonel Ross Campbell became the first female reporter to work for the Denver Post. As the journalist known as Polly Pry, she ruffled feathers when she worked to free a convicted cannibal and when she battled the powerful Telluride miners’ union. She was nearly murdered more than once. And a younger female colleague once said, “Polly Pry did not just report the news, she made it!” If only that young reporter had known how true her words were. Polly Pry got her start not just writing the news but inventing it. In spite of herself, however, Campbell would become a respected journalist and activist later in her career. She would establish herself as a champion for rights of the under served in the early twentieth century, taking up the causes of women, children, laborers, victims and soldiers of war, and prisoners. And she wrote some of the most sensational stories that westerners had ever read, all while keeping the truth behind her success a secret from her colleagues and closest friends and family.

Polly Pry: The Woman Who Wrote the West

TwoDot

Nineteen-year-old Burmah Adams, a hairdresser and former Santa Ana High School student, spent her honeymoon on a crime spree. She and her husband of less than one week, White, an ex-con, robbed at least twenty people in and around downtown L.A. at gunpoint over an eight-week period. But the worst of their crimes was the shooting of a popular elementary school teacher, Cora Withington, and a former publisher, Crombie Allen, who was teaching her how to drive his new car. A few days later, a watchful pair of patrolmen in a Westlake neighborhood called their detective colleagues at the Los Angeles Police Department; they had spotted a car that looked like one the duo had stolen days before. Two of these detectives dressed as mechanics and kept an eye on the apartment building until Burmah and Thomas appeared one afternoon. As police swarmed the building, Burmah tried to hurl herself out of a third–story window, while Thomas shot at officers and was immediately gunned down and killed. Blond Rattlesnake reveals the events that brought Adams and White together and details the crime spree they committed in the sweltering hot days and nights of Los Angeles in the height of the Great Depression. It describes the terror of citizens in their path and the outrage they directed at the female half of the duo. Politicians exploited Burmah’s incarceration and trial for their own purposes as the press battled for scoops about the “Blonde Rattlesnake” and created sensation while trying to make sense of her crimes.

Blonde Rattlesnake: Burmah Adams, Tom White, and the 1933 Crime Spree that Terrorized Los Angeles

History

Americas

LYONS PRESS+

Edward Zane Carroll Judson aka Ned Buntline (1821-1886) was responsible for creating a highly romantic and often misleading image of the American West, albeit one that the masses found irresistible in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. Some scholars estimate that he wrote at least four hundred dime novels over his lifetime, and perhaps as many as six hundred. While he is best known for discovering William Frederick Cody (Buffalo Bill) and making the irrepressible scout a star, Judson--by that time--had already lived five lifetimes himself: he had fought Seminole Indians in Florida; started and bankrupted three newspapers; published dozens of successful novels; agitated for the Know-Nothing party; and fought in the Union Army during the Civil War. Along the way, the fiery redheaded, gray-eyed writer lectured extensively about temperance between drinking bouts. He married eight women, seduced at least one other, and cavorted with prostitutes, one of whom beat him physically and legally. It wasn't until 1869 that, en route home from a temperance speaking tour in California, he met Cody in Nebraska, while trying to make contact with another Western star, "Wild Bill" Hickok. Judson's time with his last three wives overlapped his time with Cody. Their subsequent fight over Judson's Civil War pension provides not only a unique glimpse into the mind of a narcissistic genius, but also a panoramic view of America's past forcibly displayed by white, Protestant manhood. The Notorious Life of Ned Buntline captures the likeness of a man whose life was a landscape littered with contradictions--a man whose readers often forgave his Jekyll-and-Hyde behavior because of his inventive portrayal of a country trying to subdue the last of its natural landscapes and make sense of its teeming cities. It will be, at last, an open-eyed look at the man who sparked an American legend but whose own scandalous life somehow escaped history's limelight.

The Notorious Life of Ned Buntline: A Tale of Murder, Betrayal, and the Creation of Buffalo Bill

Historical

In 1950, facing artistic and legal persecution by Senator Joe McCarthy because of her inclusion on Louis Budenz’s list of four hundred concealed communists, single mother Hannah Weinstein fled to Europe. There, she built a television studio and established her own production company, Sapphire Films, then surreptitiously hired scores of such blacklisted writers as Waldo Salt, Ian McLellan Hunter, Adrian Scott, and Ring Lardner Jr., and “Trojan-horsed” democratic ideals back to the United States through more than three hundred half-hours of programming, making a fortune in the process. With the exception of a French producer, no other woman on the continent was creating television content at this time, and Weinstein was the only one who was head of her own studio. Before she became one of the more powerful independent production forces in 1950s British television, Hannah Weinstein had a distinguished career as a journalist, publicist, and left-wing political activist. She worked for the New York Herald Tribune from 1927, then began a career in politics when she joined Fiorello H. La Guardia’s New York mayoral campaign in 1937. She also organized the press side of the presidential campaigns of Franklin D. Roosevelt and later (in 1948) of Henry Wallace. 
Using declassified FBI and CIA files, interviews, and the personal papers of blacklisted writers and other sources, Red Sapphire depicts how for the better part of a decade, Weinstein was a leader in the Left’s battle with the Right to shape popular culture during the Cold War . . . a battle that she eventually won.

Red Sapphire: The Woman Who Beat the Blacklist

Product Description In 1900, the young and beautiful Leonel Ross Campbell became the first female reporter to work for the Denver Post. As the journalist known as Polly Pry, she ruffled feathers when she worked to free a convicted cannibal and when she battled the powerful Telluride miners’ union. She was nearly murdered more than once. And a younger female colleague once said, “Polly Pry did not just report the news, she made it!” If only that young reporter had known how true her words were. Polly Pry got her start not just writing the news but inventing it. In spite of herself, however, Campbell would become a respected journalist and activist later in her career. She would establish herself as a champion for rights of the under served in the early twentieth century, taking up the causes of women, children, laborers, victims and soldiers of war, and prisoners. And she wrote some of the most sensational stories that westerners had ever read, all while keeping the truth behind her success a secret from her colleagues and closest friends and family. About the Author Julia Bricklin is also the author of the only biography of female sharpshooter Lillian Frances Smith (University of Oklahoma Press: April 2017) and Burmah Adams and Tom White’s 1933 LA crime spree in Blonde Rattlesnake (Lyons Press: June 2019). She has authored a dozen articles in well-respected commercial and academic journals, such as Civil War Times, Financial History, Wild West, True West and California History.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Bricklin, Julia. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Bricklin, Julia

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Bricklin, Julia. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

America's Best Female Sharpshooter: The Rise and Fall of Lillian Frances Smith (Volume 2) (William F. Cody Series on the History and Culture of the American West)

America's Best Female Sharpshooter: The Rise and Fall of Lillian Frances Smith (Volume 2) (William F. Cody Series on the History and Culture of the American West)

Polly Pry: The Woman Who Wrote the West

Blonde Rattlesnake: Burmah Adams, Tom White, and the 1933 Crime Spree that Terrorized Los Angeles

The Notorious Life of Ned Buntline: A Tale of Murder, Betrayal, and the Creation of Buffalo Bill

Red Sapphire: The Woman Who Beat the Blacklist

Polly Pry: The Woman Who Wrote the West