b'Samuel continued from page 19buy cocaine. (This was) the woman for whose spectacular marksmanship King Edward himself once led the applause in the courtyard of Buckingham Palace. When arrested Saturday on the complaint of Charles Curtis, a Negro she was living with at 140 Sherman Street. She gave the name of Elizabeth Cody, but it occurred to no one to connect her with Colonel Cody\'s famous daughter-in-law. Yesterday, however, when brought before Judge Caverly she admitted her guilt. "I plead guilty, your honor, but I hope you will have pity on me," she begged. "An uncontrollable appetite for drugs has brought me here. I began the use of it years ago to steady me under the strain of the life I was living, and now it has lost me everything. Please give me a chance to pull myself together." The striking beauty of the woman whom the crowds at the World\'s Fair admired is now entirely gone. Although she is but twenty-eight years old she looks almost forty. Hers is in fact one of the extreme cases which have come up in the Harrison Street police court. Today she will be taken to the Bridewell to serve out a sentence of $45 (sic) and costs. "A good long stay at the Bridewell will do you good," said the court. The prisoner\'s husband, Sam Cody, died in England. Their son, Vivian, is now with Colonel Cody at the latter\'s ranch on the North Platte. The mother left "Buffalo Bill" two years ago and since has been drifting about the country with stray shows" (Kuntz, pp. 120-121).Wow. In today\'s world and with hindsight there would be a fact-checker who would be able to drive a truck through all of the inaccuracies and insinuations, plus the defamation of character of Annie Oakley, Charles Curtis, and yes, Maud Lee. Pratt even got the details of the charges, the ages of both Maud Lee and the real Annie Oakley, and what drugs were supposedly involved wrong. But no matter, the story was run as it was - and when the REAL Annie Oakley and Frank Butler (both still recovering from injuries suffered in that terrible Wild West show train wreck two years earlier) caught wind of the story, the proverbial fit hit the shan, so to speak. The Butlers first demand a retraction, but when they realized how huge the scope of the outlandish story was, they chose to sue over 50 Hearst newspapers across the United States. Reeling from the blows - the newspapers smeared the character of Maud Lee, calling her "an old soiled, obviously coked up cowgirl" (Kuntz, p. 145). In one very bizarre deposition made by Maud Lee in her Norristown hometown, the Butlers faced her in the courtroom! Not only would it have been interesting to be a fly on the wall in the courtroom, but one wonders what was going through the minds of an obviously troubled Maud Lee - and the famous woman she not only had admired and tried to emulate but had actually worked for 15 years earlier when she was still married to a man named Cody!The Butlers were able to fight back and win all but 55 of the libel cases they presented against the Hearst papers, and regain their good name - though the legal costs outweighed any financial restitution they received. Justice - or any kind of restitution was denied both Maud Lee and Charles Curtis, both so viciously and brutally defamed.Maud Lee, whose photographic or print image never saw the light of day despite all of the performances she appeared in - stayed in the care of her aged parents until they could no longer care for her. She would be sent, several years later, to the aforementioned Norristown State House for the Insane where she would live out her life, friendless and alone - especially after her father and step-mother passed on. It can be truly said that Maud Lee\'s Wild West story ended in a Norristown courtroom when a once-pretty young girl turned into a woman old beyond her years, a woman suffering from mental disease and drug addiction confronted a ghost from her past - the ghost though being the oh-so-REAL woman she wished she could have been. Or perhaps it ended when an anxious, intense young American man who resembled the younger version of a more famous American hurriedly bundled his troubled wife aboard a steamer in a British harbor and sent her home and alone.In the meantime, "Captain Cody" and his new family, Lela, her sons Leon and Vivian, toured the music halls of Britain and Continental Europe - discarding the American past in favor of a British present. They did the music hall circuit for the next decade, produced Cody\'s "Klondike Nugget" play to approving British audiences, with Cody occasionally engaging in and winning "Horse versus Bicycle" races which were quite the thing in the Europe of the 1890s. His interests, though, were increasingly changing to the design and the mechanical side of things, namely aeronautical design and mechanics. Thus, the American Cowboy would, by the beginning of the new 20th Century, become a pioneer of British aviationall due to the kite fascination of a young Cowboy.Next month, Part 320 September 2021'