Last week I introduced the four major fictional characters of A Different Kind of Fire. This week I want to talk about some minor characters that really existed back in the 1890s, though their interactions with Ruby Schmidt are purely products of my imagination.
Buffalo Bill Cody (William Frederick Cody) was an impresario who developed a Wild West show, essentially a Western-themed circus. At one time, his was the most recognized face in the world. His Wild West Show traveled throughout the United States, Britain, even Russia. Though his interaction with my heroine Ruby Schmidt is fictitious, he gives her a job making etchings of his stars (Annie Oakley, Frank Butler, Sitting Bull) to give as gifts to important people he hoped to meet on tour like Queen Victoria, Kaiser Wilhelm II, King Umberto of Italy, maybe even Pope Leo XIII.
Victoria Woodhull was the first woman to run for President of the United States back in 1872, nominated by the Equal Rights Party. A feminist, an activist for workers’ rights, and a proponent of Free Love, she also was the first woman to run a brokerage firm on Wall Street. She married for the third time and moved to England. She tried twice more for presidential nominations. My heroine, Ruby, runs into Woodhull at a Philadelphia rally in 1891.
Thomas Eakins was one of America’s finest realist painters. He was also a photographer, sculptor, and a professor at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) and the Art Students’ League in Philadelphia. He was passionate about teaching the anatomy of the human body and painting it in all its forms. He believed women should not be restricted in viewing the entirety of the body. Behavioral and sexual scandals (he was accused of being a homosexual) damaged his personal and profession reputations. He was forced to resign from PAFA after he removed a male model’s loincloth in a class where female students were present. Ruby attended some of his classes at the Art Students’ League and sketches her first full-frontal nude male there.
Thomas Anschutz began attending PAFA in 1876, the same year Eakins began teaching there. He became Eakins’s teaching assistant. Later, when Eakins was forced to resign, Anshutz was promoted to Eakins’s position at the Academy. There were rumors Anschutz helped engineer Eakins’s fall from grace. Ruby, because her work was “too masculine” for Anschutz’s taste, had to deliver one oeuvre of painting to the school while painting her own works on the side.
