Annie Oakley (birth name Phoebe Ann Mosey, August 13, 1860 – November 3, 1926) was a U.S. American sharpshooter, so amazingly talented and lucky that she became the first American female superstar. Using a .22 caliber rifle at 90 feet, Oakley could split a playing card edge on, and put five or six more holes in it before it touched the ground.
Biography
She was the daughter of Quakers, Susan and Jacob Mosey, who were from Pennsylvania. A fire burned down their tavern so they moved to a rented farm in Patterson Township, Darke County, Ohio. Her father fought in the War of 1812 and died in 1866 from pneumonia and overexposure in freezing weather.
Born near North Star, Ohio, Annie was the fifth of seven children. Her mother remarried, 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 embroider and sew. She spent some time in near servitude for a local family where she was met with mental and physical abuse (Annie only referred to them as “the wolves”). When she reunited with her family, her mother had married a third time.
Annie did not go to school. Apparently she could not spell her family’s name, because she later rendered it ending in “zee”. Her family’s surname “Mosey” appears on her father’s gravestone, in his military record, and is the official spelling by the Annie Oakley Foundation, maintained by her living relatives.
Annie began hunting at the age of 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.
Annie soon became known throughout the region as a sharpshooter. During the spring of 1881 the Baughman and Butler shooting act was performing in Cincinnati. Marksman Francis “Frank” E. Butler (1850-1926), bet a hotel owner $100 that he could beat any local fancy shooter. The hotelier arranged a shooting match with Annie, age 21, to be held in ten days time 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 ($1900 in 2005 dollars). He began courting Annie and won her heart. Annie and Frank began a happy marriage of 44 years on June 20, 1882.
They lived in Cincinnati for a time, and she took her stage name from her paternal grandfather. At first, Oakley was Butler’s assistant in his travelling show. Later, Butler realized that Oakley was more talented, and 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 the Buffalo Bill Wild West show in 1885. Standing only five feet tall (5’0″), Oakley was given the nickname of “Watanya Cicilla” by fellow performer Sitting Bull, which translated to “Little Sure Shot” that the show advertised. Oakley had such good aim that, at his request, she knocked the ashes off a cigarette held by the Crown Prince of Germany, the future Kaiser Wilhelm II. Oakley later joked that, had her aim been a little worse, she might have averted World War I. She also performed before Queen Victoria and other crowned heads of Europe.
During her first Buffalo Bill show engagement Oakley experienced a tense professional rivalry with sharpshooter Lillian Smith. Smith promoted herself as younger and therefore more billable than Oakley. Oakley temporarily left the Buffalo Bill show, but returned after Smith departed.
Oakley had initially responded to the show’s age rivalry by removing six years from her promoted age. This led to perennial wrong calculations of her age and the dates for some biographical events. For example, the 1881 spring shooting match with Frank occurred when she was a 21-year-old adult, but that event is widely repeated as occurring six years earlier in the fall, which provokes the myth of a teen romance with Frank.
In 1901, she was badly injured in a railway crash, but she fully recovered after temporary paralysis and several spinal operations. She soon left the Buffalo Bill show and began a quieter stage career, in The Western Girl. In 1903, the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst published a false story that Oakley had been arrested for stealing to support a cocaine habit. She spent much of the next six years winning 54 of 55 libel lawsuits against newspapers that printed the story.
Annie continued to set records into her 60’s, even after suffering a debilitating automobile accident that forced her to wear a steel brace on her right leg. She engaged in extensive though quiet philanthropy for women’s and other causes. She died on November 3, 1926, of pernicious anemia, at the age of 66. Her husband, Frank Butler, died just 18 days later.
The musical Annie Get Your Gun is very loosely based on her life. From 1954 to 1956, Gail Davis played her in the Annie Oakley television series. 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”.
Source: Wikipedia contributors (2006). Annie Oakley . Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 16:52, May 15, 2006
