Agnes Lake Hickok: Queen of the Circus, Wife of a Legend
by Linda A. Fisher and Carrie Bowers, Univ. of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 2009, $29.95.
Most students of Western history know Agnes Lake as the wife of James “Wild Bill” Hickok—and that’s about all they know. A circus performer, she married Hickok only five months before he was killed in Deadwood, Dakota Territory, in 1876. Even though Lake, who died in 1907, left behind few personal accounts for historians, Carrie Bowers and the late Linda Fisher were able to piece together a lively biography of a woman almost as colorful and dynamic as the gunman she married.
Born Mary Agnes Pohlschneider on August 26, 1826, in present-day northwestern Germany, Lake left Europe with her family in 1833 for America. They settled in Cincinnati, where Lake met circus performer Bill Lake. They married in 1846 (she said it was 1842), and by 1847 Agnes Lake was performing in the circus.
That would be her career—first as a slack-wire walker and horseback rider, eventually as an animal trainer. When her husband was murdered, she took over the Hippo-Olympiad and Mammoth Circus, becoming the first woman in America to own and operate a circus.
Lake met Hickok in Abilene, Kan., in 1871, and the two were married in Cheyenne, Wyoming Territory, on March 5, 1876. “I can see him Day and night before me: the longer he is Dead the worse I feal [sic],” she wrote after Hickok’s murder. She continued to perform, touring with P.T. Barnum and William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody, and even managed the equestrian career of her daughter, Emma Lake.
Lake lied about her age (an entertainer’s prerogative) and claimed French (instead of German) ancestry. “She was an entertainment chameleon,” the authors write, “constantly changing and shifting her ‘appearance’ to blend in with the conception of a circus performer’s presumed life.” Yet she was “adventurous,” and “fiercely dedicated to her craft.” And much, much more than the wife of a Western icon.
Originally published in the August 2009 issue of Wild West. To subscribe, click here.
