Annie Oakley

Annie Oakley: The Girl Who Shot Her Way Out

At fifteen she was put up against a touring professional marksman named Frank Butler in a shooting match, and she beat him. He married her. Then he gave up the top billing and spent the rest of his working life holding still while she shot cigarettes from between his lips. It is the most efficient career summary in American show business.

The Wolves

She was born Phoebe Ann Mosey on 13 August 1860 in a log cabin near Woodland — now Willowdell — in Darke County, Ohio, the daughter of Jacob and Susan Wise Mosey, Quakers of English descent who had come from Pennsylvania. She was one of nine children, six of whom reached adulthood. Her father caught hypothermia and died of pneumonia in 1866, when she was about six, and the family collapsed into destitution.

On 15 March 1870, aged nine, she was admitted with her sister Sarah Ellen to the Darke County Infirmary. Around the same year she was bound out to a local family and endured roughly two years of severe abuse before running away. For the rest of her life she called them only "the wolves," and she never named them — not in interviews, not even in her own autobiography. It is the most revealing fact about her: a woman who spent forty years being looked at by crowds kept the worst of herself entirely to herself.

A Rifle Instead of a Childhood

She was trapping before she was seven and shooting by eight, hunting to feed her widowed mother and siblings and then to sell. Game she shot went to shopkeepers in Greenville and to restaurants and hotels across northern Ohio. By the age of fifteen the proceeds had paid off the mortgage on her mother's farm. This was not sport. It was a child running a small commercial hunting operation because there was no other income, and the precision she became famous for was first a matter of not wasting ammunition she could barely afford.

The date of the Butler match is disputed — Thanksgiving Day in 1875 or the spring of 1881, depending on the source — as is the marriage, with a certificate in the Archives of Ontario recording 20 June 1882 at Windsor while many accounts insist on 23 August 1876 in Cincinnati. The stage name is thought to come from the Oakley neighbourhood of Cincinnati where the couple lived. They had no children.

Little Sure Shot

In 1885 Oakley and Butler joined Buffalo Bill's Wild West. Sitting Bull, who travelled with the show, gave her the name Watanya Cicilla, rendered in English as "Little Sure Shot" — she stood five feet tall. The act was built from small, verifiable, repeatable miracles: splitting a playing card held edge-on at thirty paces, riddling cards flung into the air before they touched ground, hitting dimes tossed up in front of her, and shooting a cigarette from her husband's lips.

She performed for Queen Victoria, King Umberto I of Italy and President Sadi Carnot of France. The three-year European tour built around the 1889 Paris Exposition made her, in effect, America's first female star. She was paid more than anyone in the company except Buffalo Bill himself. Her one real professional threat was the rifle shooter Lillian Smith, who joined the outfit in 1886 at fifteen, and whose youth prompted Oakley to start quietly subtracting six years from her own age.

On 1 November 1894 she stepped into Thomas Edison's Black Maria studio and was filmed by William Heise for a Kinetoscope short titled Annie Oakley — thirty-nine feet of film running twenty-one seconds, and only the eleventh film made after commercial exhibition began that April. Almost nobody alive in 1894 had been recorded moving. She was.

Fifty Lady Sharpshooters

On 5 April 1898 she wrote to President William McKinley offering the services of a company of fifty "lady sharpshooters" who would bring their own arms and ammunition should the United States go to war with Spain. The offer was declined, though Theodore Roosevelt borrowed the Wild West's own subtitle for his Rough Riders. Over her career she is believed to have taught more than fifteen thousand women to shoot, and she was explicit about why: "I would like to see every woman know how to handle guns as naturally as they know how to handle babies."

Her other campaign was legal. In 1904 William Randolph Hearst's papers printed a fabricated story that Oakley had been arrested for theft to fund a cocaine habit; the woman arrested was a burlesque performer using her name. Hearst sent an investigator to Darke County to dig up something damaging and the man came back with nothing. Oakley sued, and over six years she won fifty-four of fifty-five libel actions.

Iron and Steel Braces

A railway accident in 1901 left her temporarily paralysed and required five spinal operations. She left the Wild West and in 1902 turned to the less punishing work of acting, starring as Nancy Berry in the stage play The Western Girl. In 1913 she built a brick bungalow at Cambridge, Maryland, and in 1917 moved with Butler to North Carolina and back into public life. In 1922, aged sixty-two, she broke a hundred clay targets in a row from sixteen yards at Pinehurst; a car crash the same year put her in a steel leg brace, and she went on setting records during her recovery in 1924. She died at Greenville, Ohio, on 3 November 1926 of pernicious anaemia, aged sixty-six. Butler died eighteen days later.

Why Annie Is Called a Genius

Her claim rests on physical skill, not intellect, and it would be dishonest to dress it otherwise: no theory, no invention, no body of ideas. What the skill consisted of is worth stating precisely, because it was rarer than the word "shooting" suggests. She could resolve a playing card presented edge-on at thirty paces, then repeat the shot in front of a crowd, in variable light, on a schedule, for decades — meaning she had not only extraordinary visual acuity and motor control but the ability to hold both steady under performance pressure that destroys most competitors. Trapshooting supplies the objective proof that showmanship can fake: a hundred consecutive clays at sixty-two, after a broken spine and five operations.

The honest counter-case is that some of the act was staged for effect, that her most famous feats come to us through publicity rather than scorecards, and that her fame owed a great deal to Buffalo Bill's promotional machine and to the novelty of a small woman outshooting men. But that novelty was also the argument. Every performance was evidence, delivered to heads of state, that the assumption of female incapacity was simply wrong, and she pressed the point deliberately — offering fifty armed women to a president, teaching fifteen thousand others. The genius, if the word applies, is less in the eye than in what she understood the eye could prove.

Legacy

Her autobiography, left incomplete and handed to the comedian Fred Stone, revealed that she had spent her entire fortune on her family and on charity. She sits in the Trapshooting Hall of Fame, the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame, the National Women's Hall of Fame, the Ohio Women's Hall of Fame and the New Jersey Hall of Fame. Annie Get Your Gun turned her into a musical; theatre people still call punched complimentary tickets "Annie Oakleys," after the cards she shot full of holes. Asked once about praise from the King of England, she answered: "I haven't given that much thought, but I am proud of America."