Agnes Lake Hickok

About this book

This is a biography of Agnes Lake Hickok, the first woman in America to own and operate a circus. She spent thirty years under the Big Top before becoming the wife of Wild Bill Hickok--five months before he was killed. Agnes originally found fame as a slack-wire walker and horseback rider, and later as an animal trainer. Her circus career spanned more than four decades and flourished amid the immigration influx, the Civil War, and westward expansion. Following the murder of her first husband, Bill Lake, she was the sole manager of the "Hippo-Olympiad and Mammoth Circus." While taking her show to Abilene, she met town marshal Hickok and married him five years later. After Hickok's death, Agnes traveled with P.T. Barnum and Buffalo Bill Cody, and managed her daughter Emma Lake's successful equestrian career. The book offers depictions of nineteenth-century circus life.