Step right up, folks, and prepare to be amazed by the true story of a legend who defied all expectations. Annie Oakley wasn’t just a shooting star; she was a force of nature who transformed a man’s world with a gun in her hands. At a time when women were expected to stay home, this incredible sharpshooter blazed a trail through American history, becoming the world’s greatest markswoman and a global icon of the Wild West. Her magic wand was a gun, and whether riding a horse, through a mirror, or shooting right- or left-handed, Annie Oakley simply couldn’t miss.
But before she became the famed Annie Oakley, Phoebe Ann Moses came from the humblest of beginnings in Dark County, Ohio. She faced early tragedy and hardship, including abuse and indentured servitude, learning to hunt to support her family and even pay off her mother’s mortgage. It was her unmatched skill with a firearm that led her to challenge and then marry fellow marksman Frank Butler, launching her into the grand spectacle of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. From those challenging roots, Annie traveled the world, demonstrating her incredible versatility with shotguns, pistols, and rifles, captivating audiences and cementing her place as an enduring figure in American legend.
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Speaker 2: Here’s Ashley. One of the most famous women in American history has become the subject of legend and speculation and adoration. Annie Oakley, who is a famed marxwoman that lived in the late nineteenth through the twentieth century, is known for a lot of different colorful history, and she actually comes from really humble beginnings.
Speaker 3: She was born Phoebe n Moses.
Speaker 2: In eighteen sixty in Dark County, Ohio. Pretty much tragedy followed a lot of her younger life. Her father passed away around the time she was eight, and as a means to support her mother and her siblings, she started hunting, and she would be so successful with the hunting that at some point she would pay off her mother’s mortgage. So she definitely had a lot of skill, even for a very young woman.
Speaker 3: But as she’s doing this.
Speaker 2: There are a lot of other things that go on in her life that aren’t talked about, and one of them is that she suffered from pretty extreme abuse when.
Speaker 3: She was a little bit older.
Speaker 2: In eighteen seventy, she and her sister were actually sent off to go.
Speaker 3: To a school, and she was.
Speaker 2: Kind of it’s almost like indentured servitude without being indentured servitude. She was basically put into this family so that she could work and make money and that they would educate her. It would have been great had those people not been incredibly abusive and not really held up their end of the bargain for the educational component. So fortunately, she was reunited with her family years later, and she continued to support the family through the means that she knew how through hunting. And it’s that sporting part of her life that would ultimately make her famous. And the story goes that in the eighteen seventies, although there are some people that claim it could have been eighteen eighty one, when she was fifteen years old, a famed marksman came into her town and was basically challenging people all over the country, peacocking, if you will, to try.
Speaker 3: To see if people could beat him. You know, he was well known.
Speaker 2: Everybody knew Frank Butler, and it’s kind of ironic that people knew Frank Butler then, and now we don’t really remember Frank Butler.
Speaker 3: We only know Annie, and partly because she won.
Speaker 2: As a teenager, she did accept the challenge, and she beat Frank Butler. And while you might think a lot of men would be a little bit upset about that, he found it very attractive, and he ultimately courted her, and they got married about a year later. And they started traveling together, and he already had a partner that he was doing kind of shooting exhibitions with, and so she started kind of traveling along there, and she got her start shooting with Frank. But she quickly got involved with a man named William F. Cody that people tend to know better as Buffalo Bill. And Butler, too, was a part of all of this, you know, kind of world for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, and he did serve as kind of her manager of sorts in addition to continue being a world record setting shooter. And so they decide that they’re going to join the fanfare and the real movement that becomes Buffalo Bill’s Wild West.
Speaker 3: Now, if you’re not familiar with that, it is what we.
Speaker 2: Would call a Wild West show, although it’s important to note that Buffalo Bill did not call His Wild West ever a show, because he argued that it was a specific reenactment of how the West truly was. And now, they did do stagecoach scenes, they did do recreated different military bottles, but obviously it was a little bit more glamorized than it really was. But he also employed a huge number of people that he traveled around the world with. So Annie gets to basically see the entire world by the time she’s in her early twenties, and she makes a name for herself doing a.
Speaker 3: Lot of different things.
Speaker 2: She does shoot shotgun, which she’s super well known for, but she was a pistol shooter and she was also a rifle shooter, and so the versatility of what she did is really pretty impressive.
Speaker 3: One of the.
Speaker 2: Things that she would do is she would ride a bicycle. So she did do mounted shooting on a horse, but she would actually ride a bicycle. She was really well known for riding her bike everywhere. It was kind of synonymous with her image, and so she would ride a bicycle and use a shotgun or a smooth bore lever action rifle. A smooth bore lever action rifle is kind of an oxymoron because it basically is a ‘quote unquote’ rifle that’s been converted to not have any rifling, so you can fire.
Speaker 3: A shotgun shot out of it.
Speaker 2: It’s a little bit safer than using an actual projectile when you are in an arena full of people. So one of the things that she would do—she would do it on horseback, you also do in the bike—is that they would launch glass balls into the air, and she would shoot them out of the sky. And this tape of fire arm was actually really important because there’s this great, potentially apocryphal story that the reason they switched from solid bullets to shot with these iconic Western firearms was that during a performance at an arena, they actually—the bullet went beyond the arena and broke a greenhouse window.
Speaker 3: Now we don’t know if that’s true.
Speaker 2: But it’s not without the one, you know, outside the realm of possibility. She also carried several revolvers with her and did a lot of tricks with that, but really some of the most impressive things.
Speaker 3: She did was with a.
Speaker 2: Twenty two caliber. So that’s a really small caliber lever action rifle, so it’s something that’s specifically geared towards target shooting. And one example that I’ll give you is on March tenth, eighteen ninety three, Annie put on a very memorable display where she fired twenty five shots in twenty seven seconds from this twenty two caliber lever action rifle, punching one ragged hole.
Speaker 3: In the middle of an Ace of Hearts.
Speaker 2: So pretty accurate and also awesome. And this kind of became synonymous with getting into their performances, where people would basically have these playing cards—and it was the Ace of Hearts—and it was almost like your free ticket to the theater.
Speaker 3: So she was able to do speed, she was able.
Speaker 2: To do accuracy. And even though you might not be familiar with all of the different firearms and weapons that she utilized, you know, a lot of people know and have seen the images of her holding a rifle backwards, looking through a mirror, and splitting up playing card in half at distance. She also snuffed out candles and did a whole host of other things. But she wasn’t without some difficulties. Now, you would think everybody loved Annie, and they did for the most part. And nowadays, she’s basically, you know, her demure attitude or femininity. That’s something that is, you know, totally iconic to so many people. But what people don’t know is that even though she was all these things—wholesome, pure, talented—there was a lot of speculation about whether she was as good.
Speaker 3: As she was. And there’s a meme that goes around a lot of times.
Speaker 2: It’s a photo of Annie Oakley, and it says, ‘When a man hits a target, they call him a marksman. When I hit a target, they call it a trick.’ I never really liked that very much, so this is shared everywhere by pretty much everyone. It’s a great, you know, statement on the talent of women maybe being subverted by a male dominated culture. However, we don’t think she actually ever said that even though, you know, don’t believe everything you read on memes. But there’s no evidence that she ever said that direct quote, although we do know from an interview she did with The Rodden Gun and Country House Chronicle that the interviewer said, ‘you know, do people ever insinuate that there is some trickery about your shooting?’
Speaker 3: Insinuate? She cried on.
Speaker 2: On one occasion, the audience became so persuaded that the targets contained some explosive which broke them as I fired, that they appointed a committee to investigate the matter. So she might not have said that really kind of beautifully rounded up quote, but she did know that people sometimes doubted her abilities, and so much so that I haven’t found the evidence of the committee, but I believe her that there was one.
Speaker 1: And we’re listening to Ashley Libinski tell the remarkable story of Annie Oakley, and when we come back, more of Annie’s life story here on Our American Stories. And we continue with Our American Stories and the story of Annie Oakley. Let’s pick up with Ashley Libinski. Ashley is the former co host of Discovery Channel’s Master of Arms, the former Curator in charge of the Cody Firearms Museum, and President of the Gun Code LLC. Here’s Ashley.
Speaker 2: The other thing that she ended a lot of conflict was—was there another very talented shooter in the Buffalo Bill circuit, and her name was Lillian Smith. She went by The California Huntress, as Annie Oakley went by Annie Oakley.
Speaker 3: And Little Short Shop. And Lillian could not have been.
Speaker 2: More different than Annie Oakley. She was brash, she swore, she wore ‘quote unquote’ provocative clothing for the time, and she was younger than Annie. And there’s a lot of speculation around the rivalry that they had, but there is a belief that Annie did change her age because she was eleven years Lillian Smith senior when Lillian Smith came on to the stage with Buffalo Bill. And believe it or not, Buffalo Bill really favored Lillian Smith, and the media did too. And that’s not to say they didn’t like Annie, but they really were fascinated by this different type of woman that was also very skilled. And a good example of that actually goes to a performance that Annie Oakley and Lily Smith did in England. Basically, there was a lot of double standards that were put onto Annie and Lilian, and Annie really felt like the press was kind of cruel to her when she saw Lillian Smith as someone that was boastful, prideful, kind of too out there. And one example that’s really interesting was on a tour of England, Oakley was actually vilified for shaking the hand of Prince Edward’s first wife. The funny thing about that was the press kind of—they were all over it. ‘How dare you! That’s so, you know, disrespectful.’ Lillian Smith also shook her hand, and she received no press on the subject matter, and the feud kept getting worse and worse.
Speaker 3: And what some people may not know is that Annie.
Speaker 2: Actually left Buffalo Bill’s Wild West for a period of time while Lili and Smith kind of continued on.
Speaker 3: She was tired of the.
Speaker 2: Favoritism with Buffalo Bill, and she—she had had enough for the time being. And she was talented; she didn’t really need them to some extent, but she did have some great time I’m s during that initial run. And one of the things was she actually—well, this is according to the story. It sounds mildly mortifying, but I believe she could have done it.
Speaker 3: But she performed for.
Speaker 2: Queen Victoria, King am Bioto of Italy, and then the president of France. And the story goes that she allegedly shot the ashes off of a cigarette held by the newly crowned Kaiservillehelm the second, which, in some dark humor, you feel like maybe she could have missed, and it would have gone better for history, but she was too good for that. And so if the story is true, she definitely showed off her abilities for everyone. Annie Oakley does ultimately go back to Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, and she’s a part of the performance until nineteen oh two. For so many different reasons, Annie Oakley was really ahead of her time, and throughout her life, she would actually be a fierce advocate for women’s right to self defense.
Speaker 3: And there’s a lot of.
Speaker 2: Images and stories depicting Anniokly training women in shotguns and target shooting and self defense, and it’s believed that she actually taught over fifteen thousand women during her lifetime. There’s images of her at different firearms clubs with, you know, lines of women learning how to shoot shotgun because, according to Annie, she said, quote: ‘I would like to see every woman know how to handle guns as naturally as they know how.’
Speaker 3: ‘To handle babies.’
Speaker 2: Now that might be controversial today, but it was certainly something that she was trying to advocate for safety, and that’s something we should always remember: that even though it might not be something other people agree with in the culture of the time, this was something that she believed in and worked really hard to teach women to basically take care of themselves in a time when that was a very progressive concept.
Speaker 3: And I would say.
Speaker 2: It’s fascinating, too, because the firearms market really kind of got behind her on that and were marketing to women for self defense. They were marketing women to be target shooters in their.
Speaker 3: Own culture of the timeway.
Speaker 2: But she really believed that women should be strong, they should be able to protect themselves, and she did so to the point where she wanted women on the battlefield, and she believed that that’s that they could do it, and she supported it, even if the government wasn’t ready for that. She also tried to get women more involved in the military, and the first time she did that was she wrote to President McKinley and eighteen ninety eight, and she offered the government the services of fifty lady sharpshooters who would provide their own arms and ammunition, which is pretty imimpressive, should the US go to war with Spain.
Speaker 3: So we do know that the US did go to war with Spain, the Spanish American War, but the name that we associate with that war is Theodore Roosevelt and his Rough Riders, although Theodore Roosevelt was also a fan of Antiokle.
Speaker 3: So her initial attempt to.
Speaker 2: Get women on the battlefield was denied by the president, and unfortunately that would come into play during World War One where she would make a similar offer to have women come and, you know, be a part of the military, and that was denied.
Speaker 3: Once again.
Speaker 2: There’s this kind of, if you look at World War One, World War II history with the involvement of women, a lot of times women would work the communication lines during World War One, and even by World War Two, when women were actually a part of marksmanship units, that was really downplayed, and other parts of their roles were, you know, what the government wanted to focus on. So she was ahead of her time in that. But she made the offers even though they were rejected, and she kind of continues to set world records for the rest of her life. But she is very much impacted by a train accident in nineteen oh one where she is greatly injured. There are a few other things that kind of happened around this time period that weaken her ability to continue on as a performer. She was actually locked in a public bathhouse and almost died. And then the other one was that people argued that perhaps, you know, being around so much ammunition from that time period might have caused a lot of lead poisoning, and so she was wearing wigs towards the end.
Speaker 3: But one of the things.
Speaker 2: That I really like about the Annie Oakley story, is that she and Frank Butler truly loved each other till the very end. You know, you’ve got a strong, successful man and a strong, successful woman who supported each other throughout their whole lives, and they end up dying really close together, which is kind of romantic when you think about it. But since her passing, there have been so many popular culture renderings of Annie Oakley—’Annie Gets Your Gun’—which is, I haven’t seen it in a long time, but it definitely obfuscates a little bit of Annie’s importance in terms of the shooting competition, where she does let a man win, but that, you know, kind of took off, still popular today. There was a television series that was called ‘Annie Oakley,’ and nowadays it’s kind of interesting because, while, you know, our culture is very divided about a lot of firearms things, Annie Oakley is probably a name that everybody knows, regardless of their involvement with firearms or target shooting. And so she really did bridge that gap between a male dominated community in the late nineteenth century.
Speaker 3: And then being someone that people did.
Speaker 2: Respect, and that she was a fierce advocate, and that that didn’t hurt her reputation.
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