I just wanted to know when Annie Oakley left Buffalo Bill’s show. Simple question, right?
Wrong!
The answer was simple enough, but finding the answer led me down a rabbit hole I was loath to emerge from. What an outstanding woman she was! This is the type of woman the feminists should idolize. Strong, capable, a patriot, a feminist without being obnoxious, feminine without exposing any skin, honest, tenacious when necessary, generous, well-spoken, kind and of course exceptionally gifted . . . and she taught other women to be the same.
Today’s sources were compiled from history.com; centerofthewest.org; and Britannica.com.
Annie Oakley was not her real name.
The fifth of seven surviving children, she was born Phoebe Ann Moses on August 13, 1860, in rural Darke County, Ohio. That’s northwest of Dayton, near the Indiana border. Growing up, her sisters called her Annie. The name “Oakley” is reported to have been chosen after a town near her hometown.
Annie was not just an entertainer with a rifle slung over her shoulder. She was the first bona fide American female superstar. Her story is an inspirational tale of a child who rose from stark and abusive poverty, who never forgot her roots or those who faced similar hurdles, who did everything in her power to better the lives of girls and women, and who was a staunch patriot in deed as well as in word.
While her sisters played with dolls, Annie tagged along with her father as he hunted and trapped in the woods. From an early age, Annie showed an extraordinary talent for marksmanship.
When she was six years old, her father died from pneumonia, and her mother was left to care for her and her five siblings. Her mother remarried, but her second husband also died suddenly, leaving the family with a newborn baby. Because the family did not earn much money, they lived in a poor house, and Annie was sent to live with the Edington family.
Oakley worked with the Edington family at the local infirmary where she learned how to sew and helped with the younger children. She later stayed with an abusive family, whom she referred to as “the wolves.
“I was eight years old when I made my first shot,” she later recalled, “and I still consider it one of the best shots I ever made.” Steadying her father’s old muzzle-loading rifle on a porch rail, she picked off a squirrel sitting on a fence in her front yard with a head shot, allowing its meat to be preserved. The young girl’s shooting not only put food on the table, it eventually allowed her mother to pay off the $200 mortgage on the family house through the money Annie earned by selling the game she hunted to a local grocery store that supplied hotels and restaurants in Cincinnati.
When she was 15, a traveling professional sharpshooter named Frank Butler came to Cincinnati, challenging local marksmen. A hotelkeeper who knew of Annie’s reputation agreed to place a $100 side bet (worth more than $2,500 today!) with Frank. Butler’s bet? That he could beat any local shooter. Butler, who reportedly chuckled when he first saw his opponent, hit 24 out of 25 targets. The teenager hit all 25.
After winning the shooting match, Annie won Butler’s heart. The two married the following summer (he was 28) and remained wedded for 50 years. They died within three weeks of each other in 1926.
January 30, 1847 – November 21, 1926
William “Buffalo Bill” Cody refused to hire Oakley for his Wild West show after their first encounter because he already had an expert marksman, world champion Captain Adam Bogardus, as part of his traveling troupe. However, in late 1884 a steamboat carrying the show’s performers sank to the bottom of the Mississippi River. The passengers made it off safely, but the sharpshooter’s prized firearms met a watery demise. Struggling with his equilibrium and his new guns for months after the accident, Bogardus quit Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show in March 1885, creating an opening that was filled by Oakley.
Her most famous trick was repeatedly splitting a playing card, with the edge facing her, and putting several more holes in it before it could touch the ground. She did it from 90 feet away, using a .22 caliber rifle.
In the late 1800s and early 1900s, ushers traditionally punched a hole or two in free tickets to the circus, theater or sporting events in order to differentiate them from those of paying customers when tabulating receipts. The pock-marked tickets resembled the playing cards that Oakley would shoot holes through during her performances, led to free admissions being referred to as “Annie Oakleys.” According to the Dickson Baseball Dictionary, the term also became a part of baseball lingo to refer to a walk because it was a “free pass” to first base.
She could also hit a tossed-up dime from 90 feet, and one day she hit 4,472 of 5,000 glass balls tossed into midair.
Shooting the ashes off a cigarette held in Frank’s mouth was also a big part of the act.
Annie earned $700 a week while on tour in Europe. But she remembered the poverty of childhood and lived frugally. She sent money home to her mother and family, and gave money to orphans, widows and young women who wanted to further their education. Records show she provided funding and professional training for at least 20 young women.
Eight years after the Battle of the Little Bighorn, the Lakota Sioux leader who orchestrated the defeat of General George Custer’s troops attended one of Oakley’s performances in St. Paul, Minnesota, in March 1884. Mesmerized by her marksmanship, the Native American chief sent $65 to her hotel in order to get an autographed photograph. “I sent him back his money and a photograph, with my love, and a message to say I would call the following morning,” Oakley recalled. “The old man was so pleased with me, he insisted upon adopting me, and I was then and there christened ‘Watanya Cicilla,’ or ‘Little Sure Shot.’” In addition to a nickname that followed Oakley the rest of her life, Sitting Bull also reportedly gave her a pair of moccasins that he had worn at Little Bighorn. The two became even closer friends the following year when Sitting Bull joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show for a four-month stint. “He is a dear, faithful, old friend, and I’ve great respect and affection for him,” Oakley wrote of Sitting Bull.
In April 1898, three weeks before the Spanish-American War broke out, President William McKinley received the following letter on her customized letterhead:
“I feel confident that your good judgment will carry America safely through without war. But in case of such an event I am ready to place a company of fifty lady sharpshooters at your disposal. Every one of them will be an American, and as they will furnish their own Arms and Ammunition will be little if any expense to the government. “
–Annie Oakley
McKinley never responded to the 37-year old Annie’s offer to help. Nor did Woodrow Wilson or his Secretary of War Newton Baker nineteen years later (1917) when Oakley wrote “I can guarantee a regiment of women for home protection, every one of whom can and will shoot if necessary.” But she still gave soldiers of World War I shooting lessons, and she helped raise money for Red Cross and other organizations.
In 1901, Buffalo Bill’s show was traveling by train following a performance in Charlotte, North Carolina on their way to Virginia when, due to a horrible misunderstanding, the engineer of a train headed south on the same track didn’t realize that Bill’s entourage was actually in two separate trains. He was told to move off the single track to allow Cody’s trains to pass. Once Bill’s private train passed him, the tragically misguided engineer returned to the track and soon collided with the second train. The accident killed 110 of the troupe’s 112 horses and injured many people. One of the most severely injured was Annie, who suffered extensive injuries that required five back surgeries. In fact, at the time, it was believed that her paralysis was permeant and she’d never walk again. She spent months convalescing at a New York hospital.
Although she made a remarkable recovery, she never returned to Buffalo Bill’s show. She’d been with him for 16 years.
On August 11, 1903, the scandal-mongering William Randolph Hearst published in two of his Chicago newspapers that a destitute Oakley had been arrested for stealing a pair of men’s pants to pay for her cocaine addiction. In spite of the fact that Oakley hadn’t been in Chicago since the previous winter, newspapers across the country reprinted the story. The truth was that the woman who was arrested was a burlesque dancer who used Annie’s name when she was arrested. For Hearst, that was evidence enough of the “truth”. Although most newspapers printed retractions, Oakley vowed that “someone will pay for this dreadful mistake.” She spent the next six years filing suit against 55 newspapers in the largest libel action the country had ever seen. She won or settled 54 of those suits, including the judgment against Hearst in which he was forced to pay her $27,000, but the judgments she collected didn’t even pay her legal bills.
Oakley was always kind and well-spoken in the courtroom, but most of all she was persuasive. As a result, Hearst hired a detective to go to Oakley’s hometown of Darke County, Ohio to try and dig up a little dirt on her. To the detective’s disappointment he came up empty handed, and the locals even prevented him from staying in town that evening.
She was not an advocate for women’s suffrage.
Throughout Oakley’s life, she campaigned for equal pay for equal work. Although vocal in battling discrimination in the economic arena and advocating the participation of women in the military, she did not speak out for the right of women to vote. She hedged that the concept was acceptable “if only the good women voted.”
In 1917, Buffalo Bill passed away, and although Butler and Oakley did not attend the funeral, Oakley wrote a eulogy and referred to Buffalo Bill as “the kindest, simplest, most loyal man I ever knew…the personification of those sturdy and lovable qualities that really made the west.”
She often said, “Aim at the high mark and you will hit it. No, not the first time, not the second time and maybe not the third. But keep on aiming and keep on shooting for only practice will make you perfect. Finally you’ll hit the bull’s-eye of success.”
During her career, Oakley taught more than 15,000 women how to use a gun, both for the inherent discipline of marksmanship and for self-defense. She even taught ladies how to conceal their guns in umbrellas. She said, “I would like to see every woman know how to handle firearms as naturally as they know how to handle babies.”
Following Annie’s change of career and despite her injury, her shooting prowess continued to improve until she was well into her sixties. In a 1922 contest, Annie hit 100 clay targets in a row from 16 yards away. She was 62 at the time.
Later that year, she and Frank were in a car accident that forced her to wear a steel brace on her right leg. But she recovered and set more records in 1924.
Annie’s health declined in 1925. She succumbed to pernicious anemia in Greenville, Ohio and died at age 66 in November 1926. Frank Butler was so disconsolate at her passing that he stopped eating and died just 18 days later.
After Annie’s death, her incomplete autobiography was given to a friend, the stage comedian Fred Stone. Soon it was discovered that her entire fortune had been spent on her family and on her charities.