Killer Colt (10 page)

Early on (as this bit of newspaper doggerel indicates) Dorfeuille himself “gave the gas,” though he had evidently quit performing by the time “Dr. Coult” arrived in Cincinnati.

We know of Sam Colt’s appearance at the Western Museum from a letter sent to him many years later by none other than Hiram Powers, who began a long-lasting friendship with the six-gun inventor in Cincinnati. By the time this letter was composed in 1851, Powers was living in Florence, Italy, where he had won international renown as the creator of
The Greek Slave
. A life-sized marble statue of a chained female nude, this piece achieved a level of popular success that no other American sculpture has ever rivaled (at least partly, no doubt, because it afforded Victorian gentlemen the chance to ogle a naked, nubile woman under the pretext of contemplating fine art).

In his letter to Colt, Powers reminisced about a memorable incident at the Western Museum:

Since Powers’s letter constitutes the only record of Colt’s visit to Cincinnati, there is no way of knowing exactly what transpired on the trip, beyond the comical episode involving the intoxicated blacksmith. Still, it is safe to assume, as have various historians, that Sam spent a good portion of his time there in the company of his brother John, who was not only residing in the Queen City during this period but was himself an occasional lecturer at Dorfeuille’s.
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•   •   •

While maintaining himself through public speaking, teaching, and assorted mercantile pursuits, John continued to work on his textbook. To illustrate the basic principles of his method, he included hundreds of sample ledger entries. Many of these were drawn from his own experiences. One entry, for example, refers to “sundry notes” owed to Edmund B. Stedman, the fiancé of his late sister Margaret. Another mentions “bills payable” to Robert Trumble, a college friend from John’s days at the University of Vermont.
Other friends and relations whose names appear in the book include his cousin John Caldwell; his business associate Joseph Law; and his youngest brother, James.
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Thanks to this practice, Colt’s “treatise on book-keeping” is an unexpectedly autobiographical work, offering provocative clues to his personal life.

One item has struck scholars as particularly intriguing. In a section labeled “Inventory of my Property with which I commence business,” Colt includes the following:

Based on this notation, biographers of the Colt family have speculated that, sometime during his travels around the Southwest, John had acquired a wife with property in Texas.
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What became of her—assuming that she existed at all—is unknown. Death, divorce, or abandonment are the likeliest possibilities. Whatever the case, John appears to have been free of any marital entanglements during his residence in Cincinnati. Certainly there was nothing to prevent him from pursuing a romance with an adventurous young woman named Frances Anne Frank, stepdaughter of another of Joseph Dorfeuille’s competitors.

•   •   •

While certain scholars insist that the idea for “The Infernal Regions” originated with Mrs. Trollope, others attribute it to Frederick Frank, proprietor of an eponymous showplace located above a drugstore on the southwest corner of Main and Upper Market streets. Like Letton’s, Frank’s establishment had begun as a “gallery of fine arts” before being converted into a garish dime museum. For the price of admission—a quarter for adults; fifteen cents for children under ten—visitors were treated to the usual array of “unprecedented attractions,” from anatomical curiosities, to a “cosmoramic tableau” of “the bustling streets and markets of Cincinnati,” to live performances
by the likes of thirteen-year-old Master Kent, “the greatest Juba dancer living,” and Mr. Jenkins, “the celebrated Singer and Delineator of Yankee Eccentricities.”
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According to some historians, Frank was also the first Cincinnati showman to present a lurid exhibition of the torments of hell, featuring waxwork figures of cavorting “imps, devils, and goblins.”
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Performing daily at Frank’s Museum was his twenty-one-year-old stepdaughter, Frances Anne, an enchanting (if “uninstructed”) singer who accompanied herself on the organ. In addition to her “sweet, rich” voice, Frances was endowed with other natural charms:

Despite her youth, Frances had already been married twice and was the mother of an infant girl. At fifteen she had eloped with a riverboat gambler, then divorced him after two years of wandering “from wretchedness to splendor and from splendor back to wretchedness.” Shortly thereafter, she entered into a marriage of convenience with a “young German of considerable wealth and rank.” That union—which produced Frances’s child—ended when her husband died after squandering his fortune “in three years of reckless luxury.”

Whether John met Frances while visiting the museum as a customer or appearing there as a lecturer is unknown. In any event, he was immediately “enraptured by her beauty and manner” and “found no difficulty in engaging her in conversation.” They immediately formed a close and increasingly intimate friendship.

Seated on the museum’s balcony overlooking the “vast quay of Cincinnati,” they shared the stories of their “strange, wild” lives while gazing out at the glorious vista: “the moving city of steamers,—the strangely fashioned flat and keel boats,—the ever bustling crowd thronging the water’s edge,—the gentle Ohio and its beautiful banks,—on the opposite Kentucky shore,
the picturesque city of Covington, and in the far distance beyond, hills rising upon hills, and landscapes of varied loveliness.” Before long, the two had become lovers.
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Their relationship continued for several years. When John was away on one of his frequent business trips, they were “constant correspondents”; when he was in town, “they were constant visitors.” As the time passed, it became increasingly evident that Frances had marital designs on John and was prepared to deploy all of her “allurements” to “make him hers.”

One evening, for example, they were out for a ride at dusk along the banks of the Ohio. Stopping “at a brook where they were accustomed to let their horses drink,” Frances suddenly announced, “No man can outswim me!” When John took up the challenge, she alighted from her steed, stripped off her clothing, and plunged into the water. John—after watching her for a moment as if in a “reverie”—followed suit. Meeting “his fair antagonist midway across the stream,” he raced her to the opposite shore; whereupon “Frances sprang to the bank and stood there, another Venus from the ocean foam,” allowing John to contemplate her naked form in the moonlight.

Despite all the favors she bestowed on him, however—which included a constant stream of “little presents wrought by her own hand”—it became increasingly clear that John had no intention of becoming Frances’s third husband. Their relationship grew increasingly strained, particularly after Frances informed him that she was thinking of becoming a professional thespian. In keeping with the view of the theatrical profession prevalent in Victorian America—when actresses were seen as little better than harlots—John sent her a tongue-clucking letter, warning her that if she pursued such a path, she would not only “be set down as a bad woman” but “be ranked among the most worthless.”
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Mortified by John’s priggish tone, Frances “felt as though she had been baffled and repelled.” She sent no reply to his “offensive letter.” When John—“piqued by her silence”—sent a reproachful follow-up, she ignored that one as well. Finally, after one more failed attempt to get in touch with her, John, acting very much “like a chagrined lover,” “gathered the elegant little presents she had wrought” and sent them back to her, while demanding the return of his own letters.

Although they managed to patch up this quarrel when he returned to
Cincinnati, the incident effectively marked the end of their love affair. Soon afterward, John made an extended trip to New York City. When Frances wrote “for permission to join him” there, he promptly sent a curt letter of refusal.

Just hours after she received this note, Frances showed up at the home of her sister and brother-in-law, Susan and Joseph Adams. As Mr. Adams would later testify, Frances appeared to be in a state of extreme agitation, plying them with such “strange and confused questions” that he and his wife grew alarmed and urged the young woman to lie down. Flinging herself onto the bed, she lay there in a stupor for several hours before rousing herself and begging her sister to stay by her side.

While Susan attempted to comfort her, Joseph hurried off to find a physician. In the meantime, Frances’s closest friend, a woman named Lawton, was summoned to her bedside. Throughout the evening, as Frances grew increasingly “frenzied,” her attendants applied mustard poultices to her ankles and stomach and tried to administer calomel and other medications, which Frances refused to swallow. Finally, crying out that her vision was failing, she urged Mrs. Lawton to get a pencil and paper and take down the following letter:

To Mrs. Lawton and the others gathered at the scene, this message seemed so “unaccountable” that “they set it down to mere fever-dream incoherence.”

As midnight approached, Frances “seemed entirely to lose all perception of what was passing. She called in a hurried, frenzied manner for her brother-in-law and sister but could not distinguish any one.” She lingered
until early the following afternoon, when she “died with a few short struggles.” That the vital young woman had been carried off with such shocking swiftness struck her survivors as an inexplicable calamity until a note found among her possessions revealed the truth: “that this extraordinary girl had taken one hundred and fifty grams of opium upon receiving the last letter” from John C. Colt.
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I
n early 1834, Sam began an extended run at the Baltimore Museum and Gallery of Paintings. Touted in contemporary guidebooks as a “grand repository of sublime works” both natural and manmade, this establishment offered the usual hodgepodge of curiosities, diversions, and wonders. Its most popular attraction, created by a “profound Italian physician and artist” named Joseph Chiappi, was an “obstetric and anatomical cabinet” featuring wax representations of the female reproduction system—an ostensibly edifying display that (like the sleazy “miracle of birth” exploitation films of a century later) served up sexual titillation in a scientific guise.
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It was during this engagement that Sam—dissatisfied with the model weapons he had been receiving from Anson Chase—secured the services of a new and more sophisticated technician, a Baltimore gunsmith named John Pearson. Their relationship, though productive, proved to be thorny. While Pearson labored ten hours a day in a cramped and underheated workshop, Sam—out on the road with his act—bombarded him via mail with a steady stream of demands and directions.

The older Pearson bristled not only at his young employer’s high-handed tone but also at Sam’s habitual failure to meet his financial obligations, including Pearson’s salary. In letters that grew increasingly bitter over the course of their two-year business arrangement, Pearson complained that his day-and-night labors had gotten him nothing but “vexation and trouble” and that Sam’s treatment of him was an “insult.”