Annie Oakley (August 13, 1860 â€" November 3, 1926), born Phoebe Ann Mosey, was an American sharpshooter and exhibition shooter. Oakley's "amazing talent" led to a starring role in Buffalo Bill's Wild West show. Her timely rise to fame allowed her to become one of the first American women to be a "superstar". Oakley also was variously known as "Miss Annie Oakley", "Little Sure Shot", "Watanya Cicilla", "Phoebe Anne Oakley", "Mrs. Annie Oakley", "Mrs. Annie Butler" and "Mrs. Frank Butler".
Early life
Annie Oakley was born Phoebe Ann (Annie) Mosey on August 13, 1860, in a cabin less than 2 miles northwest of Woodland, now Willowdell, in Darke County, Ohio, a rural western border county of Ohio. Her birthplace log cabin site is about five miles east of North Star. There is a stone-mounted plaque in the vicinity of the cabin site, which was placed by the Annie Oakley Committee in 1981, 121 years after her birth.
Annie's parents were Quakers of English descent from Hollidaysburg, Blair County, Pennsylvania: Susan Wise, age 18, and Jacob Mosey, born 1799, age 49, married in 1848. They moved to a rented farm (later purchased with a mortgage) in Patterson Township, Darke County, Ohio, sometime around 1855.
Born in 1860, Annie was the sixth of Jacob and Susan's nine children. Her siblings include Mary Jane (1851-1867), Lydia (1852-1882), Elizabeth (1855-1881), Sarah Ellen (1857-1939), Catherine (1859-1859), John (1861-1949), Hulda (1864-1934) and a stillborn infant brother in 1865. Annie's father, who had fought in the War of 1812, died in early 1866 at age 62, from pneumonia and overexposure in a blizzard during the end of 1865. Her mother married Daniel Brumbaugh, had one more child, Emily (1868-1937), and was widowed for a second time.
Because of poverty following the death of her father, Annie did not regularly attend school as a child, although she did attend later in childhood and in adulthood. On March 15, 1870, at age nine, Annie was admitted to the Darke County Infirmary, along with elder sister Sarah Ellen. According to her autobiography, she was put in the care of the Infirmary's superintendent, Samuel Crawford Edington and his wife Nancy, who taught her to sew and decorate. Beginning in the spring of 1870, she was "bound out" to a local family to help care for their infant son, on the false promise of fifty cents a week and an education. The couple had originally wanted someone who could pump water, cook, and who was bigger. She spent about two years in near-slavery to them where she endured mental and physical abuse. She would often have to do boys' work. One time the wife put Annie out in the freezing cold, without shoes, as a punishment because she had fallen asleep over some darning. Annie referred to them as "the wolves". Even in her autobiography, she kindly never told the couple's real name. However, the 1870 U.S. Census suggests that "the wolves" were the Abram Boose family of neighboring Preble County. According to biographer Glinda Riley, the "wolves" could also have been the Studabaker family. Around the spring of 1872, Annie ran away from "the wolves". (According to biographer Shirl Kasper, it was only at this point that Annie had met and lived with the Edingtons, returning to her mother's home around the age of 15.) Annie's mother married a third time, to Joseph Shaw, on October 25, 1874.
Annie began trapping at a young age, and shooting and hunting by age eight to support her siblings and her widowed mother. She sold the hunted game for money to locals, such as shopkeepers George and Charles Katzenberger, in Greenville, as well as restaurants and hotels in southern Ohio. Her skill eventually paid off the mortgage on her mother's farm when Annie was 15.
Debut and marriage
Annie soon became well known throughout the region. On Thanksgiving Day 1875, the Baughman & Butler shooting act was being performed in Cincinnati.
Traveling show marksman and former dog trainer Francis Frank E. Butler (1847â€"1926), an Irish immigrant, placed a $100 bet per side (worth $2,148 today) with Cincinnati hotel owner Jack Frost, that he, Butler, could beat any local fancy shooter. The hotelier arranged a shooting match between Butler and the 15-year-old Annie saying, "The last opponent Butler expected was a five-foot-tall 15-year old girl named Annie." After missing on his 25th shot, Butler lost the match and the bet. Another account mentions that Butler actually hit on his last shot, but the bird fell dead about two feet beyond the boundary line. He soon began courting Annie, and they married on August 23, 1876. They did not have children.
According to a modern-day account in The Cincinnati Enquirer, it's possible that the shooting match may have actually taken place in 1881 and not 1875. Unfortunately, it appears the time of the event was never recorded. Biographer Shirl Kasper states the shooting match took place in the spring of 1881 near Greenville, possibly in North Star as mentioned by Butler during interviews in 1903 and 1924. Other sources seem to coincide with the North Fairmount location near Cincinnati if the event occurred in 1881. The Annie Oakley Center Foundation mentions Oakley visiting her married sister, Lydia Stein, at her home near Cincinnati in 1875. That information is incorrect as Lydia didn't marry Joseph C. Stein until March 19, 1877. Although speculation, it is most likely that Oakley and her mother visited Lydia in 1881 as she was seriously ill from tuberculosis. The Bevis House hotel was still being operated by Martin Bevis and W.H. Ridenour in 1875. It first opened around 1860 after the building was previously used as a pork packaging facility. Jack Frost didn't obtain management of the hotel until 1879. The Baughman & Butler shooting act first appeared on the pages of The Cincinnati Enquirer in 1880. They signed with Sells Brothers Circus in 1881 and made an appearance at the Coliseum Opera House later that year.
Regardless of the actual date of the shooting match, Oakley and Butler were married a year afterward. Butler claims the marriage being on June 20, 1882 in Windsor, Ontario, Canada. A certificate is currently on file with the Archives of Ontario, Registration Number 49594, supporting this date. Apparently, there is no recorded certificate in reference to the date of August 23, 1876 at Cincinnati although it is still listed in some sources. One possible reason for the two different marriage dates was that the divorce between Butler and his first wife, Henrietta Saunders, was not yet final in 1876. An 1880 U.S. Federal Census record shows her still being married. Sources mentioning Butler's first wife as Elizabeth are inaccurate. She is actually his granddaughter, her father being Edward F. Butler. Throughout Oakley's show-business career, the public was often led to believe that she was five to six years younger than her actual age. Claiming the later marriage date would have better supported her fictional age.
Career and touring
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.
â€" Annie Oakley , Annie Oakley exhibit at the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame in Fort Worth, Texas
Annie and Frank Butler lived in Cincinnati for a time. Oakley, the stage name she adopted when she and Frank began performing together, is believed to have been taken from the city's neighborhood of Oakley, where they resided. Some people believe she took on the name because that was the name of the man who had paid her train fare when she was a child.
They joined Buffalo Bill's Wild West in 1885. At 5 feet tall, Oakley was given the nickname of "Watanya Cicilla" by fellow performer Sitting Bull, rendered "Little Sure Shot" in the public advertisements.
During her first engagement with Buffalo Bill's show, Oakley experienced a tense professional rivalry with rifle sharpshooter Lillian Smith. Oakley temporarily left the Buffalo Bill's show but returned after Smith departed.
In Europe, she performed for Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom, King Umberto I of Italy, President Marie François Sadi Carnot of France and other crowned heads of state. Oakley had such good aim that, at his request, she knocked the ashes off a cigarette held by the newly crowned German Kaiser Wilhelm II.
The Annie Oakley Foundation suggests that she was not the source of a widely repeated quip related to the event: "Some uncharitable people later ventured that if Annie had shot Wilhelm and not his cigarette, she could have prevented World War I." After the outbreak of World War I, however, Oakley sent a letter to the Kaiser requesting a second shot. The Kaiser did not respond.
Oakley promoted the service of women in combat operations for the United States armed forces. She wrote a letter to President William McKinley on April 5, 1898, "offering the government the services of a company of 50 'lady sharpshooters' who would provide their own arms and ammunition should the U.S. go to war with Spain."
The Spanish-American War did occur, but Oakley's offer was not accepted. Theodore Roosevelt, did, however, name his volunteer cavalry the "Rough Riders" after the "Buffalo Bill's Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World" where Oakley was a major star.
The same year that McKinley was fatally shot by an assassin, 1901, Oakley was also badly injured in a train accident, but she recovered after temporary paralysis and five spinal operations. She left the Buffalo Bill show and in 1902 began a quieter acting career in a stage play written especially for her, The Western Girl. Oakley played the role of Nancy Berry and used a pistol, a rifle and rope to outsmart a group of outlaws.
Following her injury and change of career, it only added to her legend that her shooting expertise continued to increase into her 60s.
Throughout her career, it is believed that Oakley taught upwards of 15,000 women how to use a gun. Oakley believed strongly that it was crucial for women to learn how to use a gun, as not only a form of physical and mental exercise, but also to defend themselves. She said: "I would like to see every woman know how to handle guns as naturally as they know how to handle babies."
Shooting prowess
Biographers, such as Shirl Kasper, repeat Oakley's own story about her very first shot at the age of eight. "I saw a squirrel run down over the grass in front of the house, through the orchard and stop on a fence to get a hickory nut." Taking a rifle from the house, she fired at the squirrel, writing later that, "It was a wonderful shot, going right through the head from side to side".
The Encyclopaedia Britannica notes that:
Oakley never failed to delight her audiences, and her feats of marksmanship were truly incredible. At 30 paces she could split a playing card held edge-on, she hit dimes tossed into the air, she shot cigarettes from her husband's lips, and, a playing card being thrown into the air, she riddled it before it touched the ground.
Perhaps Oakley's most famous trick was her ability to repeatedly split a playing card, edge-on, and put several more holes in it before it could touch the ground, while using a .22 caliber rifle, at 90 feet (27Â m).
RA. Koestler-Grack reports that, on March 19, 1884, she was being watched by Chief Sitting Bull when:
Oakley playfully skipped on stage, lifted her rifle, and aimed the barrel at a burning candle. In one shot, she snuffed out the flame with a whizzing bullet. Sitting Bull watched her knock corks off of bottles and slice through a cigar Butler held in his teeth.
Libel cases
In 1904, sensational cocaine prohibition stories were selling well. The newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst published a false story that Oakley had been arrested for stealing to support a cocaine habit. The woman actually arrested was a burlesque performer who told Chicago police that her name was "Annie Oakley". The original Annie Oakley spent much of the next six years winning 54 of 55 libel lawsuits against newspapers. She collected less in judgments than were her legal expenses, but to her, a restored reputation justified the loss of time and money.
Most of the newspapers that printed the story had relied on the Hearst article, and upon learning of the libelous error, they immediately retracted the false story with apologies. Hearst, however, tried to avoid paying the anticipated court judgments of $20,000 ($503,000, adjusted for inflation in 2012 dollars) by sending an investigator to Darke County, Ohio with the intent of collecting reputation-smearing gossip from Oakley's past. The investigator found nothing.
Later years and death
In 1912, the Butlers, now temporarily retired, traveled to Cambridge, Maryland, the Dorchester County seat. They soon bought a plot of land in an area called Hambrooks, situated on the Choptank River, and proceeded to have a brick rancher built, renting rooms at local hotels during the house's construction. They moved into the house by 1913. The Annie Oakley House was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1996.
They became friends with the locals and in particular were good friends with the Andrews family (Sarah Ingalls Andrews, widow, and her six children), who migrated from South Dakota and settled in Dorchester County at about the same time as the Butlers. Sarah's husband was Cassian Andrews, a younger brother of Byron Andrews, both from Evansville, Wisconsin.
In 1917, the Butlers moved to North Carolina and returned to public life.
Oakley continued to set records into her sixties, and she also engaged in extensive, albeit quiet, philanthropy for women's rights and other causes, including the support of specific young women she knew. She embarked on a comeback and intended to star in a feature-length silent movie. In a 1922 shooting contest in Pinehurst, North Carolina, sixty-two-year-old Oakley hit 100 clay targets in a row from 16 yards (15Â m).
In late 1922, Oakley and Butler suffered a debilitating car accident that forced her to wear a steel brace on her right leg. Yet after a year and a half of recovery, she again performed and set records in 1924.
Her health declined in 1925 and she died of pernicious anemia in Greenville, Ohio, at the age of 66 on November 3, 1926. She was cremated in Cincinnati two days later and buried at Brock Cemetery near Greenville, Ohio.
Butler was so grieved by her death, according to B. Haugen, that he stopped eating and died 18 days later in Michigan. Biographer Shirl Kasper reported the death certificate said Butler died of "Senility". He was buried next to Oakley. It is rumored that Oakley's ashes, placed in one of her prized trophies, were laid next to Butler in his coffin prior to burial. Both were interred at the cemetery on Thanksgiving Day (November 25, 1926).
After her death, her incomplete autobiography was given to Fred Stone, the stage comedian, and it was discovered that her entire fortune had been spent on her family and her charities.
She was inducted into the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame in Fort Worth, Texas.
The Little Sure Shot of the Wild West
In 1894, Oakley and Butler performed in Edison's Kinetoscope film, The "Little Sure Shot of the Wild West," an exhibition of rifle shooting at glass balls, etc. Filmed November 1, 1894, in Edison's Black Maria studio by William Heise (0:21 at 30 frame/s; 39Â ft.), it was about the 11th film made after commercial showings began on April 14, 1894.
Oakley's early movie star opportunity followed from Buffalo Bill's friendship with Thomas Edison, which developed after Edison personally built, for the Wild West Show, what in the 1890s was the world's largest electrical power plant. Buffalo Bill and fifteen of his show Indians appeared in two Kinetoscopes filmed September 24, 1894.
Surname
There are a number of variations given for Oakley's family name, Mosey. Many biographers and other references give the name as "Moses".
Although the 1860 U.S. Census shows the family name as "Mauzy", this is considered an error introduced by the census taker. Oakley's name appears as "Ann Mosey" in the 1870 U.S. Census and "Mosey" is engraved on her father's headstone and appears in his military record; "Mosey" is the official spelling by the Annie Oakley Foundation, maintained by her living relatives. The spelling "Mosie" has also appeared.
According to biographer Shirl Kasper, Oakley herself insisted that her family surname be spelled "Mozee", leading to arguments with her brother, John. Kasper speculates that Oakley may have considered "Mozee" to be a more phonetic spelling. There is also popular speculation that young Oakley had been teased about her name by other children.
Prior to their double wedding in March 1884, both Oakley's brother, John, and one of her sisters, Hulda, changed their surnames to "Moses".
Eponym
During her lifetime, the theatre business began referring to complimentary tickets as "Annie Oakleys". Such tickets traditionally have holes punched into them (to prevent them from being resold), reminiscent of the playing cards Oakley shot through during her sharpshooting act.
Representations on stage, literature and screen
- In 1935, Barbara Stanwyck played Oakley in a fictionalized film called Annie Oakley.
- The 1946 Broadway musical Annie Get Your Gun is loosely based on her life. The original stage production starred Ethel Merman, who also starred in the 1966 revival. A 1950 film version starred Betty Hutton. Some years after headlining the 1948 national tour, Broadway legend Mary Martin returned to the role for a 1957 NBC television special that also featured John Raitt as Frank Butler.
- From 1954 to 1956, Gail Davis played Oakley in the Annie Oakley television series.
- A fictionalized Oakley appeared in the 1966 comedy film Carry On Cowboy. Oakley was played by Angela Douglas.
- In 1976, Geraldine Chaplin played Oakley in Buffalo Bill and the Indians with John Considine as Frank Butler.
- In 1982, Diane Civita played Oakley, opposite Richard Donner as Bill Cody, in an episode of Voyagers!, where, during Cody's performances for Queen Victoria, Oakley engaged in a marksmanship contest with a Russian duke.
- In 1982, the British rock band Squeeze released a song called "Annie Get Your Gun".
- In 1983, New American Library published The Secret Annie Oakley, by Marcy Heidish, which established that her husband Frank Butler was not an envious competitor, as portrayed in the Broadway musical, but was her greatest support from the day they met.±<http://www.csmonitor.com/1983/0803/080303.html>
- In 1985, Jamie Lee Curtis portrayed her in the "Annie Oakley" episode of the children's video series Shelley Duvall's Tall Tales and Legends.
- In 1996, Reba McEntire portrayed Oakley in Buffalo Girls alongside Anjelica Huston, Melanie Griffith and Tom Wopat.
- In 1998, A Shooting Star: A Novel About Annie Oakley by Sheila Solomon Klass was republished.
- In 1999, Annie Get Your Gun was revived on Broadway with Bernadette Peters in the title role. Susan Lucci assumed the role when Peters took a vacation from the show, Cheryl Ladd assumed the role from Peters and was followed by Reba McEntire and Crystal Bernard. That same year, Marilu Henner portrayed Oakley in an off-Broadway production.
- In 2004, Elizabeth Berridge played Oakley in the Touchstone Pictures film Hidalgo.
- In 2006, an episode of PBS's American Experience documented Oakley's life.
- In 2009, the band Watchout! There's Ghosts released a song called "Don't Shoot Me, Annie Oakley".
- In 2009, an episode of the Canadian television series "Murdoch Mysteries" entitled "Mild, Mild West" featured the character of Oakley, portrayed by Sarah Strange.
- In 2010, The Geraghtys released a song titled "Annie Oakley", that references the famous sharpshooter.
- In 2010, in an episode of the crime comedy-drama Castle, Richard Castle refers to detective Kevin Ryan as "Annie Oakley" after he shot at him but missed.
- In 2013, a fictionalized version of Oakley appeared in the post-apocalyptic novel "The Cartographer's Handbook" by Alex Shaw.
- In 2014, the folk music group Love.Stop.Repeat released a song titled "Annie Oakley", with lyrics about her life and exploits.