Annie Oakley built a life out of contradictions. Born into poverty, she became one of the most famous entertainers in the world. A pacifist Quaker upbringing did not stop her from becoming the finest markswoman of her era. And her love for her husband, Frank Butler, was so complete that when she died, he simply stopped living.
She was born Phoebe Ann Mosey in 1860, the fifth of seven surviving children. Her father, Jacob, died of pneumonia after being caught in a severe snowstorm when she was only five, leaving the family to struggle for survival. School was out of the question. Instead, Annie learned the practical skills needed to keep her family fed.
By the age of eight, she was already telling stories of shooting a squirrel through the head from her family’s fence, a tale she would repeat proudly for the rest of her life. With seven children to feed, her mother, Susan, was forced to make painful decisions. She placed Annie and her sister Sarah Ellen in the Darke County Infirmary, where they learned sewing. Annie was then bound out to a neighboring family as a nursemaid for their infant son, promised education and fifty cents a week.
The family lied about the pay and treated her brutally, punishing her by making her stand barefoot in the cold. Annie called them “the wolves” for the rest of her life. After two years, she ran away and found a kinder home with the Edington family, but she never stopped longing for her real family. At fifteen, she returned to her mother, and her shooting soon became so profitable that she paid off the mortgage on her mother’s house with the game she hunted.
In the autumn of 1875, a traveling shooting act called Bumman and Butler arrived in Cincinnati. The hotel owner mentioned to the performer Frank E. Butler that there was a local girl who might outshoot him. Butler, confident and betting a hundred dollars, accepted the challenge.
The contest was simple: hit twenty-five targets in a row. Butler missed the last one. The fifteen-year-old girl did not. She won easily.
Frank Butler could have been humiliated. Instead, he asked her out, and they married the following year, despite a thirteen-year age gap. Annie adopted the stage name Annie Oakley, possibly from the Oakley neighborhood of Cincinnati where they first lived, or from a kind stranger named Oakley who once paid her train fare when she had no money. As an adult, she stood barely five feet tall, and she knew most people underestimated her because of it.
She used that to her advantage. By twenty-five, Annie was ready for a bigger stage. She and Frank joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World. She had a rival almost immediately.
Another young sharpshooter, Lillian Smith, joined the troupe a year later at just fifteen years old, the same age Annie had been when she started. The press favored the younger woman, and the two clashed fiercely. Annie even began claiming she was twenty rather than twenty-six. But her talent made the rivalry unnecessary.
She shot cigars out of Frank’s mouth, split playing cards edge-on from thirty paces, and sent kisses to her audiences. Frank, despite being the veteran performer, showed no jealousy. He became her manager and her most devoted supporter. Among her fellow performers she found an unexpected friendship.
Sitting Bull, the Lakota leader who had fought the U. S. government, joined the show. He initially dismissed Annie like so many others, but her skill changed his mind.
He asked to have a photograph taken with her and offered sixty-five dollars for the privilege, believing she had a supernatural gift. He regarded her as a daughter, and she was equally fascinated by him. Her feud with Lillian Smith eventually pushed Annie out of the show in 1887. But after Smith left the troupe, Annie returned.
She then embarked on a three-year tour that took her to the Paris Exposition of 1889, where she was the highest-paid performer in the show after Buffalo Bill himself. In Italy she performed for King Umberto I, and in Great Britain for Queen Victoria. One request stood out from all the others. Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, newly crowned, wanted to see the cigar trick for himself.
He lit a cigar and watched as Annie shot the ashes off it. Years later, during the First World War, she joked that if she had shot the Kaiser instead of his cigar, she might have prevented the conflict. Frank later wrote to the Kaiser after the war began, inviting him to try the trick again. He never received a reply.
Back in America, Annie appeared in one of Thomas Edison’s first Kinetoscope films, a short feature simply entitled Annie Oakley, showing her shooting both moving and stationary targets. Fame and money never turned her attention away from the world around her. She wrote to President William McKinley, arguing that women deserved a place in the armed forces, and offered to lead a company of female sharpshooters if America went to war with Spain. The offer was ignored, though the president later borrowed the name of Buffalo Bill’s troupe for his own volunteer cavalry, the Rough Riders.
Undeterred, Annie spent much of her career training other women in marksmanship, eventually instructing over fifteen thousand of them so they could protect themselves. Her life took a violent turn in 1901. A severe train accident left her with serious injuries, and she required five operations and suffered temporary paralysis. She recovered and learned to walk again, but she could not perform the same tricks as before.
She left Buffalo Bill’s Wild West for good and moved into theater, starring in a play written especially for her called The Western Girl. In 1904, her good name came under attack. William Randolph Hearst published a false story claiming that a woman arrested in Chicago on drug and theft charges was Annie Oakley. The rumor spread quickly before she could respond, and it took a torrent of retractions from other newspapers before the truth emerged.
Hearst refused to apologize, and instead hired a private investigator to dig up anything damaging from her hometown. The investigator found nothing. Over the next six years, Annie sued fifty-five publications for libel and won fifty-four cases. The war years passed, and Annie remained active though largely out of the public eye.
In 1922, she planned a comeback, starring in a silent film and entering a competition where she broke one hundred clay targets in a row from sixteen paces. That year, she and Frank were seriously injured in a car accident. She damaged her leg and needed a steel brace, but after a year of recovery she was performing again. Her health failed suddenly after that.
She developed a severe case of pernicious anemia and died on November 3, 1926. Frank Butler, whose life had revolved entirely around her for decades, stopped eating and stopped caring for himself. He died a few weeks later. Some accounts say the family had Annie cremated and placed her ashes in one of her many trophies, which was buried with Frank inside his casket.
Her possessions are preserved at the Garst Museum and Annie Oakley National Center in Greenville, Ohio, where visitors can see her guns, her belongings, and her prizes. After her death, a partially written autobiography revealed that she had donated every penny of her fortune to her family and to the charities she supported. Annie Oakley is remembered as one of the greatest sharpshooters of the American West, but her own legacy was shaped less by the targets she hit than by the generosity and conviction behind them.