How Wild West Sharpshooter Annie Oakley Made It in a Man’s World

Annie Oakley, where did you go?

I ner got see you in that while were show knew the Queen of England, the friend of Sinema Measure Shop.

This is Lee Habib. And this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. Annie Oakley was a shooting star in her personal life. Well, she was a sharpshooter. She was devoted to her marriage and her faith as well. It’s no wonder that Annie Oakley inspired scores of books and movies and the Broadway musical, “Annie Get Your Gun.” Here’s Our American Stories contributor Faith Buchanan to tell the story of Annie Oakley.

Late in 1865, a fierce blizzard swept into western Ohio. Phoebe and Moses, the fifth surviving child from a poor Quaker farming family, waited for her beloved father to walk home from the mill fifteen miles away. It wasn’t until midnight when Jacob Moses finally returned. His hands were frozen solid, his speech gone. He never recovered and died a few months later. Phoebe Ann, or Annie, was just five years old. The family soon lost the farm. Bills piled up. They were destitute. To he’s the burden. Annie’s mother, Susan, had to sell the family farm and pet cow just to pay the medical and funeral bills. Here’s grand niece of Annie Oakley, Bess Edwards.

Annie stepped in and she saved the family. They were hungry.

Rather than be hungry, what are you going to do? If you have a talent.

Like hers, you will make use of it just as fast as you can, and she did.

The eight-year-old Annie took it upon herself to provide food for her family, who now leased a smaller farm. She reached for her deceased father’s Kentucky rifle hanging above the fireplace, rested the barrel on the porch railing, and shot her first small gang, a squirrel.

“I was eight years old when I took my first shot, and I still consider it one of the best shots I ever made.” Annie Oakley.

In spite of Annie’s efforts, her family’s financial situation worsened, forcing her mother to place the children with friends and neighbors. Ten-year-old Annie moved into a shelter for the destitute. Here she learned to sew and embroider, a skill she would practice for the rest of her life when she wasn’t shooting. Soon she was hired out to work as a living helper for her family in a neighboring county. Here’s Old West historian Virginia Sharf, Annie Oakley biographer Shoald Casper, and Paul Fees, former senior curator at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming.

Everyone thought this was going to be an improvement, but it turned out to be absolutely nightmarish situation. She never mentioned their name again, and the rest of her life she referred to them as “the wolves.” They locked her in closets; they worked her half to death.

One day, the farmer’s wife, Missus Wolf, throws her out in the snow because she fell asleep while she’s doing some darning.

Suddenly, she will struck me across the ears, threw me out.

Into the deep snow, and locked the door.

I had no shoes on. I was slowly freezing to death, so I got down on my knees, looked toward God’s clear se guy and tried to pray. But my lips were frozen stiff, and there was no sound.

They told her folks. In fact, they told her mother that she didn’t want to go home, and they told her that her mother didn’t want her back.

After three miserable years, in 1872, twelve-year-old Annie Moses could bear it no more. She ran away, flipping into a crowded railroad car and escaped home to her mother in Greenville, Ohio. Susan Moses had remarried, but the family was still desperately poor, and a mortgage loomed over their heads. Instead of going to school, Annie taught herself to shoot with her father’s old cap’n ball rifle. She headed for the woods to hunt. There, in what she called “the fairy places,” she began her lifelong love for the great outdoors. Annie preferred moving targets to city ones. “Gave them a fair chance,” she’d reasoned, “and made me quick of eye and hand.” Soon she was selling hampers of quail to Katzenberger’s General Store in Greenville. Young Annie was now the family breadwinner, earning a living with her gun. Here’s historian Mary Stang.

She was a market hunter and turning a very nice profit, certainly not something that was at all appropriate for a woman to be doing in that time of place.

Eventually, she saved up enough money to pay off the two-hundred-dollar mortgage on the family farm, and her prowess with a shotgun was becoming known around Greenville. Annie wasn’t just good for a girl; she was good for anybody. Here’s Annie Oakley biographer Glenda Riley.

Annie was exceptionally good. Her father had given her instructions.

He was the one that told her, “Always shoot game through the head so that you didn’t spoil the meat.”

By her late teens, Annie had one so many turkey shoots that she was barred from entering them. In the 1870s, shooting well was an important skill for a man, and shooting contests were a favorite spectator sport. Sharpshooters traveled the country, betting on their ability to perform feats of marksmanship and challenging all comers. Here’s firearms historian R.L. Wilson.

Shooting was of such immense popularity that there were professionals. Dark Carver, “an evil spirit of the Plains,” is what he was called. Captain Bogardis, who eventually had four sons who traveled with him, and people were flocking to see shooters like this.

One such shooter was Frank Butler, an Irish immigrant in his mid-twenties who was starting to make a name for himself on the vaudeville circuit. He was passing through Southern Ohio one fall, claiming he could outshoot anyone around.

And you’ve been listening to Faith, you can and tell one heck of a story about Annie Oakley. Her dire circumstances would lead all. They would lead to something positive. That’s suffering would lead to a talent in the discovery of one. She would have to get home, escaping the wolves, to provide for her own by becoming a sharpshooter in essence, and in the end so good that she was banned from turkey hunts in Southern Ohio. When we come back, more of the anti Oakley story here on Our American Stories. Here at Our American Stories, we bring you inspiring stories of history, sports, business, faith, and love. Stories from a great and beautiful country that need to be told. But we can’t do it without you. Our stories are free to listen to, but her not free to make. If you love our stories in America like we do, please go to OurAmericanStories.com and click the donate button. Give a little, give a lot, help us keep the great American stories coming. That’s OurAmericanStories.com.

Five feet tall, she could beat anyone, even Francis Butler.

She could beat anyone.

She was born in Dark just.

By the Western Nights.

She was one of nine after her father died.

And we returned to Our American Stories and the story of Annie Oakley. Frank Butler was a world-class shooter. We’d just heard about him and was passing through Southern Ohio, claiming he could outshoot anybody. Let’s return to Faith Buchanan for what Frank Butler soon learns.

Here again is Oakley biographer Sheryl Casper.

Frank is staying at a hotel in Cincinnati, and he starts talking with a bunch of farmers. The farmers say, “Hey, we have someone in our county who’s a really good shot, and we’re in a bet, one hundred bucks, that this person can beat you.”

Here again is R.L. Wilson, Paul Fez, and Virginia Sharf.

Frank Butler, this already professional shooterist, shows up for this match with hundreds of people watching, and who is it that comes as his opponent but a fifteen-year-old girl who was only five feet tall.

Away one hundred pounds.

I almost dropped dead when a little slim girl in short dresses stepped out to the mack with me.

I was a beaten man in the moment she appeared right then and there.

“I decided, if I could get that girl.”

“I would do it.”

Frank Butler, 1924.

They shot evenly for twenty five for twenty four birds, and on the twenty-fifth bird he missed. But he was a very gracious loser. He thanked her for the match, complimented her on her skill, and then courted her for a year. He was in his twenties when they met; she was fifteen, and yet within a year they were married.

He made himself appear safe to her. He clearly admired her. He sparked and courted her as few of us have ever been sparked or courted, and every one of us would like to be by someone. And she was lucky to find him, and I think he knew he was lucky to find her.

For the next six years, however, while Butler and his shooting partner John Graham performed on the vaudeville circuit, and he stayed in the background. That was about to change.

The story is that Butler’s partner, a fellow named Graham, was ill, and she was called up as a member of the audience, and was so obviously good at it, and so charming and such a novelty to the audience that Graham was never heard of again. At some time, she adopted the name Oakley as a stage name, and nobody knows why. And Butler and Oakley became a shooting sensation.

“From that day to this I have not competed with her in public shooting. She outclassed me.” Frank Butler, 1925. When the shooting team of Butler and Oakley hit the road, traveling entertainment was in its heyday. Circuses, theater companies, and vaudeville acts traveled the country, playing venues from outdoor arenas to smoky saloons. For Frank and Annie, it was an exhausting life of noisy train rides, cd hotels, and one-night stands. Their shooting act might be sandwiched in between a body songstress and a scantily clad acrobat. Here’s theater historian Don Wilmoth the right.

He was a largely male-oriented form of entertainment. There was a great deal of double ontoller. In comedy, there were suggestive lyrics and there was a good deal of semi-nudity. The acts could be of tad salacious.

It was the Victorian Age. Annie Oakley, the Christian girl from Ohio, feared being thought a loose woman. She resolved to set herself apart, both in manner and in dress. She began wearing an outfit that completely covered her body: a kaflink skirt, long sleeves, and leggings, and a hat that sparkled with a silver star. Her look became her trademark. In this costume, though distinctive and eye-catching, was as modest as Annie’s attitude towards her talent. Here’s Old West historians Joy Cassen and Roger McGrath.

She made her own costumes. That was very important to her. Was part of her desire to control her self-presentation. She could move easily in them, and yet she looked respectable; she looked childlike.

Women in the West was just like the men: enterprising, courageous, bold, adventurous, intelligent, whos really selected and filtered people. And the women had to be all those things the men were in spades, because they were doing most of the things the men were, but lacked the same degree of physical prowess. The women in the West were simply the very best America had to offer, and what better example of that than Annie Oakley?

Frank soon realized that Annie was the main attraction of Butler and Oakley. In a remarkable reversal of 19th-century rules, Frank Butler became Annie Oakley’s assistant.

I think Frank Butler understood that she had a kind of star quality that he didn’t want to overshadow it. And Frank Butler didn’t have a problem with that. I think he adored her. I think he also was a savvy businessman who understood that she was pretty, she was ladylike, she was petite; she would do what needed to be done to make that rise to the top, and he didn’t want to get in her way. As a matter of fact, he understood that for the two of them, the best thing possible was for to let her take the lead.

In 1884, Butler and Oakley landed a forty-week job with Sell’s brother Circus, one of the biggest traveling shows in the country. Finally, they had steady work with a clean, family-oriented show, but circus life was hard, and the pay unreliable. When the season ended in New Orleans that December, it looked as if Frank and Annie would have to go back to a life of one-night stands and unsavory characters.

When the circus season is ending the very week that Buffalo Bill’s Wild West comes to New Orleans, and it’s like, “Wow, the circus is ending. We need a job!” So they ask Cody if they can come on with the show.

To Annie, it was a dream job. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show was a lavish historical pageant, part melodrama, part circus, and part rodeo, and it featured the finest performers in the country. It offered a taste of the life on the Old Frontier to an America that was rapidly industrializing. In the crowded urban centers of the East, people flocked to Buffalo Bill’s show, eager for a glimpse of the Wild West. This spectacle was the forerunner of Western movies and TV programs.

The whole world was fascinated with the West. Audiences saw the real stagecoach; they saw real soldiers; they saw realed Indians and cowboys.

There were courses, there were steered, were live buffalo.

It was into this roiling microcosm of the Wild West that Annie Oakley, the little girl from Ohio, first stepped in April 1885. Cody placed her low on the bill, but she soon became an audience favorite. Her ten-minute program combined Frank’s Faudville experience with her talents as a sharpshooter, athlete, and actress. The result distinguished her from other shooters. Annie didn’t just aim a gun and fire; she performed. Here again is Sheryl Casper.

Miss Annie Oakley. She tripped into the arena; she didn’t walk in.

She blew kisses; she waved.

She was like animated a love like this sweet person, but with this big-bang gun.

And you’ve been listening to Our American Stories. Contributor Faith Ukenan and others tell the story of Annie Oaka. When we come back, more of the story of Annie Oakley on Our American Stories sent to Way.

When she was very young, she sewed n slang.

Too.

She could go back home.

And do wise.

Ma married another man. She had no school; she couldn’t spend any.

Sharpshooter daughter and why she could split cards for eighteen nine feet, beautiful Annie Oakley, little.

Shore shot of the wild glass.

Won’t you take me?

Bring you when you go?

When you go?

Sharpshooter daughter and wife, she could split card from eighty nine feet.

Beautiful. And we continue with Our American Stories and our story about Annie Oakley. When we left off, Annie had earned her way to top billing for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. Let’s continue with this remarkable story.

Here again is Sheryl Casper, R.L. Wilson, and Paul Fees.

She starts off slow: one ball, two balls.

Glass balls, which when they’re hit, they explode and feathers fly out.

Frank would toss up one, and then two at a time, and then three at a time. Then Annie Oakley would toss them up herself. She’d toss two or three or four target balls in the air, grab a shotgun, shoot two, grab another, shoot two more, and she could.

Hit all three before any one of them would reach the ground. Then she go to six.

Her ackets faster and faster and faster and faster, until you know, it’s just like, “Boom, boom!” Things are just being broken.

All around, she could shoot with her left hand.

With her right hand, she like turns her gun upside down or sideways, or sighting in the mirror.

One of her favorite tricks was to have Frank hold a plane card up, and she could either shoot through the heart when it was flat against her, or if it was held sideways, she could split the card in two, which is a pretty amazing shot. Occasionally, she’d missed a shot on purpose, and then she’d kind of pout, and this was part of the act because she could always hit the target. She was somebody who never missed.

“I think it’s an innate skill,” she said. “You know, nobody ever taught me to shoot. I think it was just a love of a gun, was just born in me.”

Was an instinct and a skill and an ability that only person who have phenomenal vision, have a wonderful sense of timing, who have hand-to-eye coor