Singer Fannie Garrettson was certainly upstaged in Deadwood the night a former lover hurled an ax and tried to climb onstage before her new husband shot him dead.
Despite—or perhaps because of—her subsequent notoriety, Fannie Garrettson’s background is obscure. For one her name appears variously in period newspapers as Fannie or Fanny, and Garrettson or Garretson. In later years the singer claimed she was born in Boston in 1848 and raised there as Martha Frances Morrell, but evidence for this is elusive. There are grounds for believing she was an immigrant from Scotland. She said she was in San Francisco in 1868, and by 1871 she was a frequent performer at that city’s famous Bella Union Theatre. The next year she received good notices as a featured soprano during a two-week engagement in Victoria, British Columbia, and had high hopes of working her way cross-country. But she was soon back appearing regularly at the Bella Union and was still there in early 1874 when she figured in a minor scandal.
At her lodgings she had introduced a man named Gorham Beales to fellow performer Lulu Torrence (stage name Lulu Daisy), and the pair was smitten. At the time Lulu, who was married but separated, was also dallying with a hack driver named George Hogan. On January 14, 1874, Lulu was seen talking to Hogan in the street when a shot rang out, and she collapsed, mortally wounded. Fannie gave evidence at the coroner’s inquest, which generated a good deal of prurient newsprint, but the verdict was that Lulu—whom her husband portrayed as a serial suicide attempter—had shot herself through the heart.
In July, Fannie got a job at McDaniel’s Theatre in Cheyenne, Wyoming Territory, and appeared there frequently over the next 12 months. One notable performance was for Chief Red Cloud and a Lakota (Sioux) delegation en route for Washington that reportedly “seemed delighted at the fine singing of Miss Fannie Garrettson.” When an Independence Day fire destroyed McDaniel’s Theatre in 1875, Fannie shifted over to Allen’s Theatre, where she was billed as the “California Nightingale.” The following month she left Cheyenne for Laramie.
At some point she had picked up a partner, Ed Shaughnessy, and they now lived together as man and wife in Laramie. Shaughnessy was described in period accounts as being in his early 30s, almost 6 feet tall, with light hair, blue eyes, and a mustache and goatee of a light or sandy color. He was reportedly a former employee of the Union Pacific who had been discharged due to persistent drinking. It was also said he had left a wife and two children in Nebraska for Fannie. With her assistance he acquired a restaurant on Front Street in Laramie and offered room and board.
The relationship was a troubled one. On one occasion Fannie reportedly left Ed for the Pacific Coast only to return and reconcile. In August 1876 she did leave Laramie for an extended gig at McDaniel’s New Theatre in Cheyenne. She was, wrote the Cheyenne Weekly Leader, “simply unapproachable and far superior to the usual class of vocalists.” The following month the Leader added: “Miss Garrettson’s pleasing manners and great vocal ability continue to make her one of the greatest favorites ever appearing on a Cheyenne stage. Her finely cultivated voice has lost none of its old-time sweetness.”
In Cheyenne, Fannie renewed acquaintance with a good-looking banjoist and vocalist named Dick Brown, who in December 1874 had shared a bill with her at McDaniel’s. Dick was born Ira Brown at Lock Haven, Pa., in 1847 or 1848, according to most records, although the 1850 census listed him as an 8-year-old. By then the Browns had crossed the country to California and settled near Coloma, site of the original gold strike at Sutter’s Mill. In the years that followed, the family moved from camp to camp in search of riches before going their separate ways. Dick learned to play the banjo and discovered he had a considerable talent for the instrument. When he left home, he played banjo and sang in saloons, participating in mining ventures when the opportunity presented itself. He soon found he could usually make more money picking the banjo than he could swinging a pick.
Brown traveled around the West for several years, polishing his act and burnishing his reputation. In November 1874 he appeared at Allen’s Theatre in Cheyenne, where the Leader pronounced him “without exception the best banjoist that America can boast of.” When he joined Fannie on the bill at McDaniel’s, The Cheyenne Daily News went further and billed him “the champion banjo player of the world.”
A contemporary described Brown as “tall, strongly and well-made, with black hair, inclined to curl, and wears a dark mustache.” Another said he was “clever and gentlemanly in appearance and a man who always dressed in the heighth of fashion.” Some called him “Handsome Dick,” others “Banjo Dick.” (Still others later claimed he was the original “Deadwood Dick.”) He was clearly something of a lady’s man and had once gotten into a gunfight with a man in Reno, Nev., over a woman. On the night of August 15, 1868, the Sacramento Daily Union reported that he received a “severe but not dangerous wound in the side. The ball is supposed to have glanced around a rib. Several shots were fired on both sides, and [Frank] Henderson received a ball through his coat, vest and shirt without touching his body.…Cause of the quarrel—a common woman living with Henderson.”
Brown returned to Cheyenne in October 1875 and drew large crowds with a program said to feature “all new songs, most of which are original with him and are of a comic nature.” Drawn irresistibly to the gold discoveries being made in the Black Hills, he soon joined a party traveling north and wound up in Custer City.
On February 5, 1876, Captain Jack Crawford, then a correspondent for the Omaha Daily Bee, noted the presence in camp of “Dick Brown, the great banjo player and favorite of the Pacific slope.…Dick has a fine ranche [sic] adjoining town and two good mining claims and is working every day with his axe [sic] and saw, building, etc. Although he left an engagement at $60 per week at Cheyenne when he came here, he says he thinks he can do better in the Hills and has bid farewell to the stage. We wish Dick success, as he is a gentleman of the first water.”
Brown accompanied Crawford to the new camp of Deadwood, where years later Brown claimed to have made a small fortune selling town lots. The July 14 Salt Lake Daily Tribune reported he had sold 8 pounds of gold in Cheyenne, which the paper reckoned was “the best solo Dick ever played.” On August 1 the Sacramento Daily Union noted, “Dick Brown, well known in Virginia City and Carson, passed through Winnemucca the other day on his way from the Black Hills to San Francisco.” The newspaper quoted Brown as saying he had done “remarkably well in the Hills.”
Brown returned to Deadwood around the last week of October to fulfill an engagement at the Bella Union Varieties Theatre. He was accompanied by Fannie, and the pair promptly had Mayor E.B. Farnum pronounce them man and wife. They had apparently hooked up in Cheyenne, where, according to one report, they were brought before the court for “too much intimacy.” Ed Shaughnessy somehow got word of Fannie and Dick’s relationship and hurried to Cheyenne. He spent three days there, more or less constantly under the influence of drink and telling anyone who would listen he would kill the newlyweds. It was the same story on the long stage journey to Deadwood. On arrival he checked into the Grand Central Hotel, then visited the Bella Union bar to resume his drinking and perhaps take in the evening performance in the adjoining theater.
Shaughnessy spent the next day drinking, gambling and making threats. He reportedly visited the theater again but caused no trouble. On November 16 he followed a similar pattern until about 9 p.m., when a bigger drama broke out. “The audience of the Bella Union Varieties was startled by the sudden exit of the performers and the sight of an axe [sic] thrown from the auditorium to the stage,” The Black Hills Pioneer report ed. “A man was seen attempting to mount the stage, and almost simultaneously with this movement Dick Brown, one of the performers, came from behind the wings and fired four shots from a revolver, saying, ‘He has followed me long enough.’ The man who had thrown the axe fell.”
A letter to The Chicago Times added some detail. It reported that Shaughnessy had positioned himself in a corner about 10 feet from the stage, near a pile of wood for the stove. As usual he was very intoxicated, and when Fannie was onstage, he suddenly picked up an ax beside the wood pile and hurled it directly at her. She was able to duck and dodged behind the scenes, and as Shaughnessy tried to clamber onto the stage, Brown appeared with his revolver and “cut loose.” His first shot hit the stage by the footlights, his second hit Shaughnessy above the right hip and ranged downward, his third caught Shaughnessy above the elbow and the fourth missed.
Shaughnessy fell with his head under the piano. He was taken to a drugstore and attended by a doctor before being
carried to his hotel room. He lingered until around 5 o’clock the following morning. Back at the Bella Union, Brown surrendered to Town Marshal Con Stapleton, and when order was restored, the show went on.
At the time the Black Hills was a part of the Great Sioux Reservation and, therefore, not subject to direct control by the territorial government in Yankton (in present-day South Dakota), but a recent election in Deadwood had established a provisional local government that gave Mayor Farnum the power to hold court. There was some sympathy for Shaughnessy, who had called Fannie his wife, and many years later some said he had thrown nothing more lethal than a packet of love letters. But too many people had heard his threats. Brown was reported to be distressed by the shooting and was said to have won many friends by his “quiet and gentlemanly deportment.” There was little doubt he would successfully plead self-defense at the hearing before Mayor Farnum, and so it proved.
On December 5 Brown and William “Billy” Nuttall opened a new venture, grandly named the Temple of Music, with a bill headlined by Fannie Brown (née Garrettson). The Browns remained displeased with much of the press coverage of the recent shooting, and on December 16 the Cheyenne Daily Leader published “A Word From Fannie and Dick.” Fannie accepted she was a “notorious woman” who had lived with Shaughnessy for three years, but she denied having ever been legally married to him, while Dick said he had taken pains to check that Fannie had not been married before marrying her himself. Fannie also published a card in the Black Hills Pioneer on December 30, 1876, again denying she had been married to Shaughnessy. She further claimed that she had had to support herself and furnish him with money and that all she had ever received was the most brutal treatment until she had left him, as she had threatened to do many times before. She attached the names of citizens who could corroborate her statements.
Brown faced another hearing in July 1877, and the ruling this time was justifiable homicide. “During all this time,” wrote the Pioneer, “Mr. B has been in this city and has ever manifested a desire that the case might be decided strictly upon the evidence and the facts. Mr. B. is to be congratulated upon this favorable disposition of his case.”
The Browns were free to move on. In the fall of 1877 they toured several theaters in Texas, and in March 1878 they were reported to be at Hot Springs, Ark. From there the couple ventured to the bustling trail town of Dodge City, Kan.
On June 8, 1878, the Dodge City Varieties theatrical company opened in a brand new theater, with Dick Brown listed as stage manager. His boss, H.L. Seymour, fled the city at the end of July, leaving a pile of debts, but by then Dick had gone into partnership with saloonman Ben Springer to launch the Comique Theatre in the Lady Gay Hall. They opened on July 6, and by month’s end owners Springer and Brown were also providing more seemly entertainment twice a week at Hoover’s Hall. Ladies attending these matinees were assured “there will be nothing said or done that will in any way offend the most fastidious.”
For a while the Comique provided lively entertainment for trail drivers and the local citizenry. Both Fannie and Dick appeared regularly, as did several others, including singer Fannie Keenan and popular vaudeville entertainer Eddie Foy. In the early hours of July 26 a party of Texas cowboys rounded off their night’s entertainment by riding by and firing a volley into the theater. Foy later recalled how impressed he was at how quickly those inside, including Bat Masterson and Doc Holliday, dropped to the floor. Peace officers Wyatt Earp and Jim Masterson joined others in firing after the fleeing cowboys and dropped one from the saddle. Badly hit in the arm, Texas rowdy George Hoy died from the effects some three weeks later.
As the cattle season wound down, business faltered, and on September 10 the Ford County Globe noted, “Dick Brown and his banjo have gone to sunny southern Texas.” Later that week the Dodge City Times announced, “The Comique closed for the season Wednesday night.”
Fannie stayed on in Dodge, probably singing in a saloon, possibly the Alhambra, owned by Peter Beatty and Dodge City Mayor James “Dog” Kelley. No further reports of her appearing with Dick—onstage or off—have come to light, and it seems the marriage had folded.
In the early hours of October 4 Fannie narrowly escaped death in one of Dodge City’s most storied shootings. At the time she was lodging in a two-room frame house owned by Mayor Kelley. Fellow performer Dora Hand (stage name Fannie Keenan) was also staying there. Kelley had earlier incurred the enmity of a young trail driver from Texas named James “Spike” Kenedy. Harboring a grudge, the Texan had taken a train to Kansas City to buy the fastest horse he could find. While he was out of town Kelley went to Fort Dodge to be treated by the post surgeon. Not knowing this, Kenedy returned, rode up to the frame house at about 4.30 a.m., fired shots at the spot he imagined Kelley was lying and galloped away on his new horse. One shot just missed Fannie, who was occupying Kelley’s bed, holed the partition between the rooms and struck Dora in the side, killing her. (For more read “The Killing of Dora Hand,” by Susan L. Silva and Lee A. Silva, in the December 2009 Wild West or at www .historynet.com/the-killing-of-dora-hand.htm.)
A formidable posse comprising Bat Masterson, Wyatt Earp, Bill Tilghman, Charlie Bassett and William Duffey set out after Kenedy and caught up with him the following day. They shot the fugitive in the shoulder and captured him, but his father, wealthy cattleman Mifflin Kenedy, managed to spirit him back to Texas. As for Fannie, she wrote to theater friends in St. Louis about the killing, providing a firsthand account of Dora’s death. “I want to leave here now, while my life is safe,” she closed the letter. “I think I have had enough of Dodge City.”
It is unknown how long Fannie stayed in Dodge, but by January 1879 she was performing in Leadville, Colo. She was still there in April, when Dick was reported to be at Virginia City, Nev., having made his way there via Texas and Tucson, Arizona Territory. Dick next went to San Francisco, and on June 9 departed to tour Australia and the Far East.
In Leadville, Fannie linked up with a 31-year-old sign painter named James Arment. On January 25, 1880, she married him using the name Mattie Morrell, but she was not yet ready to settle down into a quiet domestic life with James. In April The National Police Gazette reported: “She was a member of the Grand Central company and, while under the influence of liquor, made an attack on Manager [Tom] Kemp, striking at him with a bottle. He evaded it and temporarily postponed any further scene; but it appears that the lady went for a revolver with the intention of shooting him, and, meeting him again, a fracas took place, which resulted in the fair Fannie’s falling, or being thrown, against a woodpile, with a fractured rib and a lawsuit as natural results.” (The suit was dismissed in February 1883.) Fannie had apparently recovered by October 1880, when she appeared onstage again in Leadville. The following month the Leadville Daily Herald noted, “She has never been in better voice and spirits.”
No record of the Browns’ divorce has surfaced, but not to be outdone, Dick—having returned to the States—courted and married 17-year-old Annie Mary Mason in New Orleans on November 25, 1880. On September 3, 1881, a notice in the New York Clipper, an entertainment and sporting weekly, reported his retirement from show business:
DICK BROWN, the Original California Banjoist and Vocalist, has embarked in the GROCERY BUSINESS, corner Thirteenth and Chestnut streets, St. Louis. Acquaintances visiting the city are invited to call.
Fannie continued to appear in Colorado theaters, and James Arment took up theatrical management in Pueblo. In 1883 he partnered with James LeClair in leasing Mottley’s Opera House in Santa Fe, New Mexico Territory, for a season. They assembled a full company of performers, including Fannie, but the venture folded after a few weeks. This seemed to mark the Arments’ retirement from the theater. Later that year the pair surfaced again in, of all places, Dodge City.
Arment resumed his career as a house and sign painter and went on to become an active and respected member of the community. He served as a councilman, Ford County’s registrar of deeds and was Dodge’s postmaster for 16 years. Despite her colorful past, Fannie was apparently accepted socially, frequently singing at meetings of the Ancient Order of United Workmen and the Grand Army of the Republic.
Meanwhile Brown, who had reclaimed the first name Ira, quit the grocery business and became a traveling salesman for the Chicago firm of E.W. Gillette & Co., makers of Magic Yeast. Based initially at Decatur, Ill., and then Portland, Ore., Ira and his wife were also socially active, often contributing to the entertainment with banjo and songs. But his frequent absences from home must have taken a toll, as the Browns divorced in 1893.
Basing himself in Chicago, Brown traveled the world on behalf of Gillette. He spent two years in Australia, and a 1900 profile claimed he had twice circumnavigated the globe. Brown maintained an apartment in Philadelphia, and it was there he collapsed and died of heart failure on October 23, 1907, while entertaining neighbors. The Philadelphia Inquirer described him as a wealthy bachelor who had made a fortune in mining, but a friend later told the paper he was a widower, not the bachelor all believed.
Fannie Arment died on June 2, 1920, at Iola, Kan., where she was hospitalized following a breakdown. The Dodge City Daily Globe described her as “a woman of great kindliness and other admirable qualities” while The Dodge City Journal reported that “during her young womanhood Mrs. Arment was a noted singer, and in her stage career she visited all of the important cities of the United States and traveled in foreign countries. Even within the last few months of her life it was a pleasure to listen to her description of the scenes of her travels.” The report left out whether Fannie had breathed a word of Cheyenne and Deadwood.
Frequent Wild West contributor Chris Penn writes about the American frontier from England. He plans to publish a full account of Ira “Dick” Brown’s life. For further reading Penn recommends: Deadwood: The Golden Years, by Watson Parker, and The Delectable Burg: An Irreverent History of Dodge City, 1872–1886, by Fredric R. Young.
Originally published in the December 2014 issue of Wild West. To subscribe, click here.
