The Tragedy-haunted Major of Casa Grande

THE LADY ISA SPY

A FAMOUS ACTRESS BY CHANCE BECOMES A UNION SECRET AGENT, AND SO BEGINS THE SAGA OF MAJOR PAULINE CUSHMAN PAULINE CUSHMAN WAS AN ACTRESS BY CALLING, whose true deeds dwarfed those she portrayed on stage. Her life was her finest role, a medley of despair and triumph that in many ways mirrored the American experience in the 19th century. She was a federal spy, commissioned a major by President Lincoln for her daring Civil War service. She toured Western theaters after the war as a Union heroine, and rowdy audiences responded by firing their pistols at the ceiling instead of applauding.

Cushman was famous. Her eyes were Spanish-black, and she had raven ringlets falling almost to her waist, and a dashing manner. She also was known to pack a pistol and a hard punch, and she often used both during her time as a boardinghouse operator in frontier Arizona. But in the tradition of great tragedy, Cushman's life ended in a cheap San Francisco boarding-house. As one obituary put it, she died "childless and gray-haired," full of morphine to dull the pain of her last days.

Cushman was born in New Orleans on June 10, 1833. Following a business failure, her father, a Spaniard from Madrid, moved the family to Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he operated a trading post frequented by Chippewa Indians.

There Pauline lived her first adventures. An early biography presents her as the darling of the Chippewa tribe, soldiers, and others who came to the store to trade. Her admirers taught her to ride bareback, shoot and skin game; and it was said that she had the pluck to navigate a canoe over the fiercest rapids.

At 18 she made her way to New York and signed with a theatrical troupe called the New Orleans Varieties. She was a fast success, landing a plum costarring role in The Seven Sisters, playing opposite John McDonogh, described in early accounts as the matinee idol of his day.

In 1863 Cushman's troupe traveled to Louisville, Kentucky, a city roiled by wartime passions and dark intrigue. The venue was perfect for a woman who craved standing under the bright lights at the center of the nation's greatest crisis.

As part of her role in The Seven Sisters, Cushman was required to toast the Union. But Southern sympathizers offered her a $300 bribe to hail Confederate President Jefferson Davis instead.

She reported the offer to the federal commandant at Louisville. Together they plotted to go ahead with the suggested toast and use the uproar it would surely cause as a cover for her new job as an operative for the Secret Service.

In her obituary in its edition of December 6, 1893, the Arizona Daily Citizen reported that Cushman mounted the stage at Wood's Theater the following night, and "while the eyes of a large audience were fixed upon her in a supper scene, she proposed this toast: 'Here's to Jeff Davis and the Southern Confederacy. May the South always maintain her honor and her rights."

The theater, packed with paroled Confederate officers and patriotic Unionists, exploded with rebel yells, jeers, and a few fistfights. The outraged theater manager promptly fired Cushman from the cast.

With the ruse accomplished, Cushman pulled on her cloak and went to work, infiltrating Louisville's most active Confederate sectors. But her most dangerous assignment came in Nashville, headquarters of the North's Army of the Cumberland and its chief of Army police, William Truesdail. He and Gen. William Rosencrans needed someone to go behind rebel lines and gather information on the strength of Gen. Braxton Bragg's forces around Shelbyville.

They summoned Cushman, and she headed off under the guise of searching for her missing brother, who was, in fact, a rebel major on Bragg's staff.

Cushman's boldness nearly caused her death. In violation of Truesdail's orders, she made crude sketches of Confederate positions and managed to swipe documents from the desk of a Southern officer. With the valuable information stuffed into her shoe, she began to make her way back to Union lines.

But she was captured, escaped, and captured again. She was sent to rebel Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, who reportedly said: "Miss Cushman, I'm glad to see you. You're pretty sharp at turning a card, but I think we have you on this last shuffle."

At Shelbyville she was sentenced to the gallows, but her life was spared when General Rosencrans attacked the city, and she was left behind in the rebels' frantic retreat.

Back in Nashville, Cushman became deathly ill from her exertions, and she was attended by a warmhearted Yankee general named James Garfield. This future president so admired Cushman that he wrote to Abraham Lincoln, detailing the bravery of the woman Union troops had dubbed "The Major."

"Let her keep the title," Lincoln wrote to Garfield. "She has done more to earn the title than many a male who wore the shoulder straps of a major during the war."

When her health improved, Cushman toured the nation's theaters in her major's uniform, reciting her war adventures to enthralled audiences and drawing six-gun salutes in response.

IN 1890 SHE ATTEMPTED TO REVIVE HER POST-CIVIL WAR RECITALS. BUT THE WAR WAS LONG OVER, AND CUSHMAN HAD BECOME A HAGGARD 57-YEAR-OLD HAS-BEEN, A STAR WITHOUT A GALAXY.

But in Cushman's life, success and sadness seemed to go hand in hand. Her first husband, Charles Dickinson, died of dysentery in 1862. Her two children by that marriage both died in childhood, and her second husband, August Fichtner, died shortly after their marriage in 1872. Soon she was in love again, this time with Dr. Samuel Orr, an Army surgeon. But it was another ill-starred romance. In 1875 Orr was called for duty at Arizona's Camp Bowie, where he fell ill and died.

These painful episodes didn't eliminate Cushman's penchant for adventure or quell her fiery temper. She kept making news. She was managing a resort south of San Francisco called La Honda when she taught its owner, Bill Sears, a brutal lesson in manners. Sears' affections for Cushman were not returned, and he sought revenge by speaking lies about her to anyone who would listen.

Cushman resigned her position, and on the morning of her departure a crowd gathered to see her off. When Sears appeared to see about the commotion, Cushman approached the stage driver and took his sixhorse whip. Dressed in a red velvet gown and a plumed hat, the famous actress lashed into Sears, striking him over and over.

According to one account, dust rose from Sears' clothing after each crack of the whip. When she was done, Cushman returned the instrument to the driver and said, "Thank you, sir. It's a good whip."

The driver lifted his hat. "Thank ye, ma'am. All aboard."

But to Jeremiah Fryer, a handsome man of Cherokee blood, who was many years her junior, Cushman displayed considerably warmer sentiments. She married him on January 29, 1879, and together they bought a hotel and livery stable in Casa Grande, Arizona.

The business thrived, thanks to the couple's hard work and the arrival, in 1880, of the Southern Pacific Railroad. This pushed Casa Grande's population well above the handful it had been when the Fryers arrived.

But it also gave Cushman, now known as Major Fryer, more targets for her temper. Area newspapers carried occasional accounts of her indiscretions, such as this onesentence blurb: "Major Fryer doused Mrs. Cunningham in the water trough for slander."

In a story published in the Arizona Republican in 1925, Charles Eastman described meeting Cushman when he arrived in Casa Grande in 1884. She was "good-hearted and an excellent nurse in taking care of anyone injured by bullet wounds."

MAJOR PAULINE CUSHMAN

That almost included Eastman himself. One night he was wobbling down the street, drunk, when The Major asked if he'd seen her "long-legged husband."

Eastman replied that he did not keep track of women's husbands. Cushman drew a .45, stuck it into Eastman's belly, and demanded an answer "due a lady."

Now unexpectedly sober, Eastman replied that he had not seen Mr. Fryer. "That's the way to answer a lady," she remarked.

Eastman wrote that a mollified Cushman "to my great relief took the .45 away from my grub sack."

Eastman also witnessed a street duel in Casa Grande in which Cushman played referee. A man named Price Johnson was killed by a second combatant, identified only as Robinson.

"During the shooting," Eastman remembered, "Major Fryer stood there on thecorner, the bullets whistling within 15 or 20 feet of where she was standing. At no time did she flinch."

Cushman displayed her bravery again in 1889 in Florence, Arizona, where the couple moved after Jeremiah Fryer became sheriff of Pinal County. The sheriff was out of town when a band of vigilantes threatened to drag some prisoners from their cells and lynch them.

With a Winchester on her lap, Cushman plopped down in her husband's chair in the jailhouse and calmly turned back the hotheads.

But by this time, Cushman's life was unraveling. The freshness of her youth had diminished, and she spent more and more of her time tracking down her missing husband, whose rumored infidelities made her half-crazy.

Mike Rice, a hotel bellboy who befriended her in California in 1871, wrote that her extreme jealousy, coupled with an "inordinate infatuation" with her husband, forced her to "extraordinary methods to retain his waning affections."

Hearing of a woman from a nearby town who was about to become the mother of an unwanted baby, she conspired to acquire the infant and pass it off to Fryer as her own. She informed her husband she was pregnant and convinced him that she should give birth at a hospital in San Francisco. The pregnant woman, already in that city, gave birth to a girl who became Emma Pauline Fryer.

For a time the plan worked. The marriage stabilized with little Emma at its center. But she was afflicted from birth with an incurable nervous disorder and suffered from violent spasms. At age six she died. Shortly thereafter, Fryer learned of Cushman's desperate ruse, and the marriage was over.

In 1890 she returned to San Francisco, dusted off her major's uniform, and attempted to revive her post-Civil War recitals. She frittered away the last of her money living at the posh Baldwin Hotel, hoping that someone would notice that she was back in town.

But no one did. The war was long over, and Cushman had become a haggard 57-year-old has-been, a star without a galaxy. Her last years were spent at a boarding-house on San Francisco's Market Street, working as a scrubwoman and battling arthritis and rheumatism. A doctor gave her morphine tablets for pain, and early in December, 1893, the medicine killed her.

The official coroner's report stated that she died of a morphine overdose "taken without suicidal intent and to relieve pain."

Major Cushman's final hurrah befit a woman who flourished and suffered along with her country, through the Civil War, the coming of the railroad, and the settling of the frontier.

In the days after her death, newspapers reported that The Major, who died in abject poverty, would be buried in Potter's Field. An uproar ensued, led by the Grand Army of the Republic, an organization of war veterans. Donations poured in to remedy the injustice. Her body was laid to rest in a "handsome cloth-covered casket" draped with an American flag, and she was given a military honor guard and a rifle salute.

The Major would've beamed at the attention, and at the simple remembrance printed on her grave marker: "Pauline Cushman, Federal Spy and Scout of the Cumberland."