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Tattoo artist Ron Dolecek says he’ll never forget the day, almost two decades ago, when one of his customers came into his shop carrying something rolled up under his arm.
“He says, ‘I think you’re going to want to see this,’” Dolecek remembers.
The man unfurled a hand-painted sideshow banner, like the kind you used to see at a carnival or fair. It showed a woman covered in tattoos from her neck down, draped in gauzy fabric against a faded yellow background.
Dolecek says he was captivated the moment the banner rolled out on the floor of his shop — and he thought he recognized the tattooed figure on the banner as Maud Stevens Wagner, a turn-of-the-century performer who became an icon of American tattooing, but he couldn’t be sure.
“I'm instantly doing the math in my head, like; Who can I call? Where can I borrow money?” Dolecek says. “Because this is not leaving my shop.”
The bold piece of folk art was painted years before, to entice carnival midway visitors to see a sensational spectacle and spend their money. For Dolecek, it was a tangible piece of history.
The customer told Dolecek that he found it in a farmhouse by Cedar Point, Kansas, in the Flint Hills. The structure was falling down and there were rumors it was boobytrapped by the last family who lived there, but he’d been out with his friends when they saw the abandoned house and decided to go in and explore.
“They went upstairs and found steamer trunks full of tattoo memorabilia,” Dolecek says. They found hand tattoo tools, there were pigments, flash and sideshow banners.
“So this fellow realizes that he's found something significant,” Dolecek says.
Not only was Dolecek right about the woman on the banner, but he found out the farmhouse once belonged to her family.
At a time when women couldn’t vote and career options were limited, Wagner forged her own path as an entertainer and artist. She was born in Emporia, Kansas, and some claim she was one of the first female tattoo artists in the country.
Wagner’s extraordinary journey took her from performing in a high-wire act in a small-time traveling circus to becoming an icon of the tattoo world. More than a century later, collectors pay high prices for rare memorabilia connected with her career, and pictures of her are among the most downloaded tattoo-related images in the Library of Congress.
“You can imagine a woman that is tattooed from her neck down at the turn of the century in middle America would be something,” Dolecek says.
That striking 1907 photo of Wagner was made in the Plaza Gallery in Los Angeles, California, and staff at the Library of Congress have titled it “Portrait of Mrs. Maud Stevens Wagner, showing images tattooed on her upper body.”
On her chest, the image shows a woman sitting on a lion under palm trees. Beneath Wagner’s elegant bun, arched brow, and five-strand choker of pearls, her arms show a riot of creatures, with Kansas sunflowers peeking out on each elbow.
“For me, that photograph, it’s a Mona Lisa pose, because it’s very enigmatic,” says Alan Govenar, an author and filmmaker who published a book on Maud Wagner last year — one of many projects about the history of tattooing in the West.
“She's so beautifully tattooed,” Govenar says. “There's something intensely evocative about this photo.”
‘All eyes on her’
Curiosity about this mysterious tattooed woman eventually followed Wagner back to her hometown.
Lisa Soller, deputy director of the Lyon County History Center and Museum, ran across her name while working on an exhibit of notable people from Emporia.
“Her life just intrigued me,” Soller remembers. “So I just kept digging deeper and deeper, and I fell down the rabbit hole.”
Soller says Maud Wagner was born on Feb. 12, 1877, as Nora Stevens, just outside of Emporia, Kansas, to homesteaders David VanBuren Stevens and his wife Sarah Stevens.
At the time, Soller says, “Emporia was just an incredible place to live.”
With two colleges and an opera house, the town was a cultural, educational and intellectual hub in the Midwest. It was also at the crossroads of two major railroads, which brought new people and plenty of popular entertainment.
“In fact, Emporia was known as the Athens of the Prairie,” Soller says.
Nora Stevens was in her early 20s when she changed her name to Maud and hit the road with her older sister, Dora, according to Soller. The pair were known as the Stevens Sisters, and they sang popular songs, acted in sideshow skits, and had a high-wire act in Indiana with a traveling circus and variety tent show called Wonderland Shows.
“I don't think she was going to be satisfied with being a housewife or a farm wife,” Soller says. “She wanted to be the center of attention, and she wanted all eyes on her.”
Meeting a tattooed man
When Maud Stevens was 26 years old, she met Gus Wagner, a charismatic showman who billed himself as a professional globe-trotter, world champion hand tattoo artist and tattooed man.
Wagner had learned his technique, called hand poke or stick-and-poke, from tattoo masters in Japan, Java and Borneo during four years as a merchant seaman. He later told a reporter that he carried a pictorial history of his own life on his breast, a history of America on his back and the romance of the sea on each arm.
Dolecek says he heard Stevens met Wagner beneath the newly electrified lights at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, better known as the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair.
“Maud meets Gus and, according to legend, they traded a lesson in tattooing for a first date and pretty much hit it off right away,” Dolecek says — a meet-cute made for Hollywood that has been republished countless times on the internet.
But experts of tattoo history, like Derin Bray, who runs an auction house in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, says, after studying items the two left behind, they likely met at a small-time show the year before.
“It’s a great story, exchanging a tattoo for a date,” Bray says. “But it’s not true.”
Instead, Bray’s research dug up photographs of the pair that are dated at least a year before the World’s Fair. Their marriage was officially announced Oct. 3, 1904.
And while the two may not have met in St. Louis, the spectacle of one of the largest World’s Fairs in history would have been difficult for them to resist.
It’s estimated 19.5 million visitors traveled to St. Louis to take in 1,200 acres of scientific displays, and cultural exhibits from more than 60 countries and 43 of the 45 American states at the time. It showcased new technology like outdoor electric lighting and the automobile, and popularized the ice cream cone and Dr. Pepper.
On the outskirts of the World’s Fair, a reporter from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch found the Wagners busily tattooing customers at a storefront where they’d set up shop. Gus Wagner boasted that he made almost as much as a bank president during the fair.
“It’s a paying business all right, if you know how to go at it,” he told the reporter. “First, you’ve got to know the business – how to handle the needles, how to apply them without going too deep, and above all, how to use pigments that are put and will not cause irritations. Then you’ve got to deliver the goods. Do it quick and have it over with.”
The traveling life
The Wagners made their home on the road, crisscrossing the country on the carnival circuit, and they spent their winters inking customers in the off season. Dolecek says it was common at the time for tattoo shops to move around.
“Tattooers would take up in the back of a barber shop, maybe a photo studio,” Dolecek says. “And as a couple, they're credited at the turn of the century with bringing tattooing into middle America.”
Eventually, the Wagners’ road show included a rolling museum. To lure the curious and encourage them to part with their dimes, Gus Wagner collected reptiles and snakes and used his taxidermy skills to create unusual “attractions” that took the form of baby mermaids and what he advertised as “the human-headed octopus.”
By 1915, the husband and wife were tattooing customers in a pop-up shop in Kansas City, where a Star reporter described Maud Wagner as a human work of art.
“Herr (Gus) Wagner himself made the first drafts of a tattoo system that has spread even to her toes,” the reporter wrote. “She is quite out of the ordinary in tattooing galleries, like the possession of an original daVinci. She has twelve colors on her body, the limit of the tattooist’s art.”
Saving a trove of tattoo history
After decades practicing as a couple at small-town carnivals around the country, Gus Wagner was struck by lightning in 1941 and died several months later.
When Maud Wagner died in 1961, she left loads of tattoo art and historic memorabilia to their only child, Lotteva Davis, who safeguarded a scrapbook of the family’s adventures.
Though her parents were tattooed from neck to toe, Davis never had a single tattoo.
“Although we all knew how to tattoo, Papa taught her and me, Mama wouldn’t let Papa tattoo me,” she told a reporter from The Dallas Morning News in 1993.
“I never understood why,” she said, calling it a “family feud.”
When Davis died that year in Plainview, Texas, her estate included a vast collection that writer Alan Govenar felt was important to keep together.
“A lot of people were offering to buy it, but they wanted to cherry pick the collection,” he says. “My interest wasn't as an antique dealer or a dealer in historic artifacts and artworks. I wanted to see this collection preserved.”
So, Govenar purchased it and donated the bulk of the collection to the South Street Seaport Museum, in New York City, which preserves the history of maritime travel.
A striking, hand-colored cabinet card from the collection, made in 1903, shows Maud Wagner, skirts pulled up, sitting patiently as her husband tattoos a tiger on her thigh.
Art and antique dealer Derin Bray says, because Western tattoo material from the 19th and early 20th centuries is so rare, Govenar’s collection is one of the great achievements of tattoo history.
“It is the largest body of early tattoo material to survive and stay intact,” Bray says, “and it's really important to understanding, not just their story, but the larger story of tattooing in America.”
Bray says the past decade has brought a growing appreciation for the artform and early tattoo artists. And in 2023, just one of the Wagners’ business cards sold at auction for more than $1,000.
The mysteries that remain
Given the scarcity of artifacts dealing with tattoo history, many of the assertions made about Maud Wagner’s legacy can be hard to verify.
Even Govenar questions the claim that she was the first female tattoo artist in America.
“I don't know how one documents that and, quite frankly, I've never found much evidence,” Govenar says.
For some artists, a collection of “flash” designs might give historians a trail to follow — the pre-drawn tattoo designs displayed in books or on the walls of a shop help advertise an artist’s skill.
But, Govenar says, “in the collection that we have, there's only one flash sheet that was made by Maud, that’s signed with her name.”
Still, Bray says, that doesn’t mean she didn’t practice the artform.
For one thing, most of the flash attributed to Gus Wagner is also unsigned. For another, tattoo artists commonly ink designs that were created by others.
“The fact that she didn't paint any tattoos, as far as we know.” Bray says “Why would she? Gus already had books and books of it.”
Not only did their business cards and promotional fliers tout Maud Wagner’s skills; her husband also called attention to her talents repeatedly, and addressed the issue directly in the press.
“My wife’s a tattoo artist too,” he told a St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter in 1904. “She’s an actress and a contortionist, and I’ve got her back and arms covered with the prettiest tattoo work you ever looked at.”
Though we may never fully understand Maud Wagner’s artistic contribution, Bray says she was more than just a prop in their business.
“From what I have seen, she had a big hand in creating the backdrops in the shows that they performed, the costumes, and she had a painting studio,” he says. “I don't know where that work is, but it's out there. It has to be.”
Finding the Wagners in the Flint Hills
Ron Dolecek now plies his trade at Old Glory Tattoo, in Derby, Kansas, and he still marvels at that sideshow banner that survived all those years in an abandoned farmhouse.
“Given critters and tornadoes, fires, water damage, you know, pretty remarkable that it was found and salvaged and is out in the light of day today,” he says.
Dolecek was so transfixed by the Wagners’ story, in fact, that he found out where they were buried — side by side in Homestead Cemetery in rural Chase County — so he could pay his respects.
But when he visited in 2008, Dolecek found out their gravestones were modest concrete blocks. One said “M.W.” and the other was left blank.
Dolecek was determined to make things right.
“I had the headstones made, and we went and placed the headstones adjacent to the existing markers so that they were recognized like everybody else in the cemetery,” he says.
Now, the two stones read “The Original Gus Wagner, Globetrotting tattooer,” and “Maud Stevens Wagner, America’s first lady tattooer.”
This episode of A People's History of Kansas City was reported by Julie Denesha, and produced by Mackenzie Martin and Seth Jahraus. Mix by Mackenzie Martin, with editing by Luke X. Martin and Suzanne Hogan.
