Annie Oakley

This article is about the sharpshooter. For other uses, see Annie Oakley (disambiguation).

Annie Oakley
File:OakleyA.jpg A late 19th century photo of Annie Oakley
Born	Phoebe Ann Mosey August 13, 1860 near Willowdell (formerly Woodland ), Ohio, United States
Died	November 3, 1926(1926-11-03) (aged 66) United States

Annie Oakley (born Phoebe Ann Mosey August 13, 1860 – November 3, 1926) was an American sharpshooter and exhibition shooter. Oakley's amazing talent and timely rise to fame led to a starring role in Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, which propelled her to become the first American female superstar. Using a .22 caliber rifle at 90 feet (27 m), Oakley reputedly could split a playing card edge-on and put five or six more holes in it before it touched the ground.

Early life

According to the Annie Oakley Foundation, Annie Oakley was born in "a cabin less than two miles northwest of Woodland, now Willowdell, in Darke County", a rural western border county of Ohio. The village of North Star has a road sign stating it is near her place of birth. Her birthplace log cabin site is about five miles eastward of North Star. There is a stone-mounted plaque in the vicinity of the cabin site, placed by the Annie Oakley Committee in 1981.

Annie was the sixth of eight children. Her parents, Susan Wise and Jacob Mosey, were Quakers from Pennsylvania who married 1848. A fire burned down their tavern so they moved to a rented farm in Patterson Township in Darke County. Her father, who had fought in the War of 1812, died in 1866 from pneumonia and overexposure in freezing weather. Susan remarried to Daniel Brumbaugh, had another child, and was widowed a second time. During this time, Annie was put in the care of the superintendent of the county poor farm, where she learned to sew and decorate. She spent some time in near slavery for a local family where she endured mental and physical abuse (Annie referred to them as "the wolves"). When she reunited with her family, her mother had remarried a third time, to Joseph Shaw after 1868.

Because of poverty following the death of her father, Annie did not regularly attend school. Later she received some additional education. Apparently, she could not spell her family's name since she later rendered it ending in "ee". Her family's surname, "Mosey", appears on her father's gravestone and in his military record; it is the official spelling by the Annie Oakley Foundation maintained by her living relatives. Annie began hunting at age nine to support her siblings and her widowed mother. She sold the hunting game to locals for money, and her skill eventually paid off the mortgage on her mother's house.

Debut and marriage

Wild West show poster

Oakley circa 1899

Annie soon became known throughout the region as a shotgun sharpshooter. During the spring of 1881, the Baughman and Butler shooting act was being performed in Cincinnati. Traveling show marksman and former dog trainer Francis "Frank" E. Butler, an Irish immigrant (1850-1926), placed a $100 bet per side ($2,000 per side, adjusted for inflation) with Cincinnati hotel owner Jack Frost, that Frank, age 31, could beat any local fancy shooter. The hotelier arranged a shooting match with Annie, age 21, to be held in ten days in a small town near Greenville, Ohio. Frank later said it was "18 miles from the nearest station" (about the distance from Greenville to North Star). After missing his 25th shot, Frank lost the match and the bet — a serendipitous irony that led him to become a well-known winner in backstage life. Frank began courting Annie, and they married on June 20, 1882.

Career and touring

Oakley and Butler lived in Cincinnati for a time, and she is believed to have taken her stage name from the city's neighborhood of Oakley, where they resided. At first, Oakley was Butler's assistant in his travelling show. Later, Butler realized that Oakley was more talented, so he became her assistant and business manager. Annie and Frank's personal and business success in handling celebrity is considered a model show business relationship even after more than a century.

They joined Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show in 1885. At 5 feet (1.52 m) 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 Buffalo Bill's show engagement, Oakley experienced a tense professional rivalry with rifle sharpshooter Lillian Smith. Smith promoted herself as younger and therefore more billable than Oakley. Oakley temporarily left the Buffalo Bill's show but returned after Smith departed.

Oakley had initially responded to the show's age rivalry by removing six years from her promoted age. She could not remove any more years without making it seem that she was born out of wedlock after her father died. As it was, her promoted age led to perennial wrong calculations of her true age and the dates for some of her biographical events. For example, the 1881 spring shooting match with Butler occurred when she was a 21-year-old adult. However, that event is widely reported as occurring six years earlier in the fall, which also suggests a mythical teen romance with Butler.

In Europe, she performed before Queen Victoria 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 Prince of Prussia, the future Kaiser Wilhelm II. The Annie Oakley Foundation suggests Annie was not the source of a widely-repeated sarcasm related to the event, "Some uncharitable people later ventured that if Annie would have shot Wilhelm and not his cigarette, she could have prevented World War I."

Oakley promoted the service of women in combat situations with the United States military. 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 war break out with Spain.". The Spanish-American War did occur, but Oakley's offer was not accepted. Theodore Roosevelt, did, however, name his volunteer calvary 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 railway crash, but she fully recovered after temporary paralysis and 5 spinal operations. She left the Buffalo Bill show and began a quieter acting career in a stage play written especially for her, The Western Girl. Following her injury and change of career, it only added to her legend that her shooting expertise continued to increase into her 60s.

Libel cases

In 1903, 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 wire services, 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 $15,000 ($300,000, adjusted for inflation) by sending an investigator to Darke County with the intent of collecting reputation-smearing gossip from Annie's past. The investigator found nothing.

Later years

Annie continued to set records into her 60s, and she also engaged in extensive, albeit quiet, philanthropy for women's rights and other causes, including the support of specific young women that she knew. She embarked on a comeback and intended to star in a movie. In a 1922 shooting contest in Pinehurst, North Carolina, sixty-two-year-old Annie hit 100 clay targets from 16 yards.

In late 1922, Oakley and Butler suffered a debilitating automobile 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. Annie Oakley died on November 3, 1926, of pernicious anemia, at age 66 and was buried in Brock Cemetery in Greenville, Ohio. Frank Butler was so crushed by her death that he stopped eating. He died just 18 days later.

After her death it was discovered that her entire fortune had been spent on her family and her charities.

Representations on stage and screen

• In 1935, Barbara Stanwyck played Annie in a highly fictionalized film called Annie Oakley.

• The 1946 Broadway musical Annie Get Your Gun is very 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, Mary Martin returned to the role for a 1957 NBC television special.

• From 1954 to 1956, Gail Davis played her in the Annie Oakley television series.

• A highly-fictionalised Annie Oakley appears in the 1966 comedy film, Carry On Cowboy. This version of Oakley had a father who was sheriff of the fictitious Stodge City, and travelled out west to kill her father's murderer, and eventually fell in love with the inept Englishman, Marshal P. Knutt (Jim Dale). Oakley was played by Angela Douglas.

• In 1976, Geraldine Chaplin played Annie in Buffalo Bill and the Indians with John Considine as Frank Butler.

• In 1982, Diane Civita played Annie, opposite Richard Donner as Bill Cody, in an episode of Voyagers!, where, during Cody's performances before Queen Victoria, Annie engaged in a marksmanship contest with a Russian duke.

• In 1985, Jamie Lee Curtis offered a fresh portrayal in the "Annie Oakley" episode of the children's video series, Shelley Duvall's Tall Tales and Legends.

• In 1999, Annie Get Your Gun was revived on Broadway with Bernadette Peters in the title role. Susan Lucci took over the role when Peters took a vacation from the show, Cheryl Ladd took over the role from Peters and was followed by Reba McEntire and Crystal Bernard.

• In 2006, an episode of PBS's American Experience documented Oakley's life.

Media

Annie Oakley shooting glass balls, 1894

Animated GIF files of Annie Oakley performing can be found here.

See also

• Calamity Jane
• Lillian Smith (entertainer)
• Belle Starr
• History of women in the military
• 1898
• Buffalo Bill

External links

• Annie Oakley - Biography by Dorchester County Public Library, Cambridge, MD, which has many additional details about Oakley's life but gives the wrong date for her marriage as provided by AOF[3]
• Annie Oakley Foundation's archived page "Tall Tales and the Truth"
• Annie Oakley Foundation's current web site "Mosey" research page
• Annie Oakley Research links — Virtual Museum of History
• Annie Oakley biography (Women in History)
• American Experience | Annie Oakley | People & Events | PBS (includes several myth errors in both the video production and the accompanying PBS web page)
• "Little Miss Sure Shot" - The Saga of Annie Oakley
• Short bio, pictures and the 1894 edison motion picture of Annie Oakley.
• Annie Oakley at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center, Cody, Wyoming
• Digitized 1898 letter from Anne Oakley to President McKinley advocating the use of women in military combat (from the National Archives and Records Administration).