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for Buck and her mother, whom she later said was “insane on spiritualism.” Mary (nicknamed Polly) Sparr, an older sister who picked fights often with Victoria and Tennie, would say that the relationship between their mother and Tennie was “something I cannot explain; something mysterious, unnatural. There is a different feeling between Tennie and my mother than between any child and her mother I ever knew.” All her life, Tennieseemed unable to break the bond, even when her mother’s outrageous acts threatened to ruin the sisters’ lives. She would cry out at her mother’s crazy meddling, but say, “I love her dearly anyway.”
    This strange bonding occurred when Tennie was sold by her mother and father to the public as Buck’s “Wonder Child.” “Since I was eleven years old I used to tell fortunes with her,” Tennie said of her mother. Tennie hated her life, and felt trapped and alone without Victoria. By 1860, when Tennie was fourteen, Buck decided that she should be a solo act in his snake oil “shows.” The family rode into midwestern frontier hamlets in a painted wagon, baubles dancing on the bright canopy as the wagon lurched through mud and dirt. Tennie was prominently displayed, sitting up front by her father’s side, so villagers could see the smiling blue-eyed girl with golden brown curls and rosy cheeks. Ads were placed in local papers inviting the public to meet A WONDERFUL CHILD! MISS TENNESSEE CLAFLIN .
    Born with “supernatural gifts,” as the ad read, Tennie could ascertain a person’s “former, present and future partners,” and “when required will go into an unconscious state.” Only a snake oil salesman could have invented the list of ills Tennie could cure: from cold sores to cancer and any disorder that had “baffled the best physicians for years. She may be consulted at her room from the hours of eight a.m. to nine o’clock p.m. Price of consultation, $1.00.” Tennie sat there for thirteen long hours a day, learning the art of listening to people, picking up clues, and spinning fortunes that would please. Buck collected the money and sold “Miss Tennessee’s Magnetio Life Elixir,” a worthless concoction with a picture of Tennie on the label, at two dollars a bottle.
    When the Claflin caravan entered Ottawa, Illinois, in 1863, Buck set up an infirmary where he would callously lead Tennie down a terrible path as a “magic healer.”
    In presenting his daughters as clairvoyants with supernatural powers, Buck was cashing in on the amazing mania of Spiritualism that transfixed the country from the 1850s through the 1870s. Spiritualists became national celebrities and claimed two million members in a country with apopulation (in 1855) of only twenty-seven million. Their number would grow, by some estimates, to four million.
    When Buck saw the incredible fame being lavished on the two young sisters who had started the Spiritualist craze, he could not help but think of his own two treasures, just waiting to be pushed into the movement. In 1848, when Victoria was ten and Tennie three, Margaret and Kate Fox, sisters in the small upstate town of Hydesville, New York, would become so famous that P. T. Barnum would hire them and countless thousands come to see them. Prominent observers such as Horace Greeley, James Fenimore Cooper, and William Cullen Bryant swore the Fox sisters were authentic. Margaret, in her early teens, and her younger sister, Kate, lived with their parents in an old cottage that groaned with strange noises at night, terrifying their mother. An old peddler had been murdered there and his body was never found, so the story went. One night the mother bolted out of bed when she heard loud rapping noises filling the house. The sisters told their petrified mother that the murdered peddler was speaking to them. If the sisters asked a question, his spirit would rap out the answer. Their older married sister, Leah Fox Fish, brought them to her home in Rochester and