When Annie Oakley was eight years old, she picked up one of her family’s rifles, aimed at a squirrel resting on a fence post, and fired. The shot passed clean through the animal’s head. It was an early sign of a talent that would carry her out of crushing poverty and into the arenas of Europe, where she would perform for queens and emperors. But her greatest test came not from a rival sharpshooter or a demanding crowd.
It came at the end of her life, when her husband of more than forty years was left so shattered by her death that he stopped eating, stopped caring for himself, and followed her to the grave within weeks. Born Phoebe Ann Mosey in 1860, the girl who would become Annie Oakley grew up in a household that had no room for childhood comforts. Her father, Jacob Mosey, died of pneumonia after severe exposure during a blizzard when she was only five. The family, already poor, was left without its primary provider.
Jacob and Susan Mosey had nine children, but two died in infancy, leaving seven to raise. With the father gone, traditional gender roles collapsed. Everyone had to contribute, and Annie learned quickly. She took to hunting and shooting with an instinct that surprised even her.
Her mother, Susan, struggled to feed so many children, so she placed Annie and her sister Sarah Ellen in the Darke County Infirmary, where they learned practical skills like sewing. Annie spent several months there before being sent to live with a neighboring family. The arrangement promised education and fifty cents a week in exchange for her work caring for their infant son. It was a lie.
The family never paid her and treated her cruelly, forcing her to stand outside in the bitter cold without shoes. Annie endured the abuse for two years, later referring to her captors as “the wolves,” until she finally gathered the courage to run away. She found refuge with the Edington family, who treated her with decency, but they were never a substitute for her real family. At fifteen, she returned home to her mother and siblings.
By then, she was so skilled with a rifle that she could pay off the mortgage on her mother’s house simply by selling the game she hunted. In the autumn of 1875, word reached her that a shooting act called the Baughman and Butler show had arrived in Cincinnati. A local innkeeper told her that one of the performers, a man named Frank E. Butler, was betting one hundred dollars he could beat any local marksman in a competition.
Rumors had circulated about a young girl in town with uncanny aim. Frank, confident in his abilities, accepted the challenge. His opponent turned out to be a fifteen-year-old girl. The contest required hitting twenty-five targets in a row.
Frank hit the first twenty-four cleanly, then missed the final target. Annie did not miss a single one. She won easily. Frank could have sulked, but instead he asked her out.
They married the following year despite the thirteen-year age difference between them. Annie left behind the name Phoebe Mosey and adopted a new stage name: Annie Oakley. Some believed she chose the surname because her first home with Frank was in Cincinnati’s Oakley neighborhood. Others said it came from an act of kindness during her childhood.
According to that account, when she was alone and penniless, a stranger named Oakley paid her train fare. Whatever the origin, the name stuck. Most people underestimated her. She was a woman, and she stood barely five feet tall.
The Lakota chief Sitting Bull, who had led his people in resistance against the United States government, would eventually come to see her talent and give her the nickname that followed her for life: “Little Sure Shot. ” But before that friendship formed, Annie had to prove herself in the world of professional performance. In 1885, at age twenty-five, Annie and Frank joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World. The show was already famous, and it attracted another rising female sharpshooter named Lillian Smith, who joined a year later.
Smith was fifteen, the same age Annie had been when she began, and the two clashed immediately. The press gravitated toward the younger woman, and Annie, stung by the comparison, began telling people she was twenty instead of her true age, twenty-six. The rivalry festered until Annie left the show in 1887. When Smith eventually departed as well, Annie returned.
During her years with Buffalo Bill, Annie refined her act into something spectacular. She shot cigars from Frank’s mouth, split playing cards edge-on, and struck targets from distances of thirty paces or more. She performed with theatrical flourishes, blowing kisses to the audience and exaggerating her reactions. Frank, who had been in show business long before her, might have resented her rising fame, but he did the opposite.
He became her manager and her most devoted supporter. She also formed a remarkable bond with Sitting Bull. Having already achieved worldwide renown as a leader of his people, he initially dismissed her, but her shooting changed his mind. Impressed by what he called her supernatural talent, he asked to have a photograph taken with her and offered to pay sixty-five dollars for it.
The two became close friends, so close that he treated her like a daughter. In 1889, Annie embarked on a three-year European tour, performing at the Paris Exposition. Apart from Buffalo Bill himself, she was the highest-paid performer in the show. Her reputation preceded her across the Atlantic.
She performed for King Umberto I of Italy and Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom. But one request was stranger than the rest. Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, newly crowned, asked to participate in her famous trick. She had shot cigars from Frank’s mouth and hand countless times, but she had never expected a monarch to demand the same.
Wilhelm lit a cigar and stood as she aimed and fired, reportedly striking the ash cleanly. Back home, opportunity kept finding her. Thomas Edison had recently invented the kinetoscope, and Annie appeared in one of his early films, simply titled “Annie Oakley,” which showed her shooting at both moving and stationary targets. She also tried to use her fame for a cause she believed in deeply.
She wrote to President William McKinley, arguing that women deserved a place in the armed forces and offering to lead a company of female sharpshooters if America entered war with Spain. The offer was ignored, but she kept training women anyway, eventually teaching more than fifteen thousand of them how to shoot. When President Theodore Roosevelt later named his volunteer cavalry unit the Rough Riders, he borrowed the title from Buffalo Bill’s show rather than from Annie’s proposal. The danger Annie faced on stage was largely theatrical, but real danger found her anyway in 1901.
While traveling by train, she was involved in a horrific accident. She survived, but suffered severe injuries to her back. Five surgeries and a period of temporary paralysis followed, and though she eventually recovered enough to walk again, she could never perform her old tricks the same way. With a heavy heart, she left Buffalo Bill’s show for good.
Hoping acting would be easier on her body, she took to the stage in a play written for her, “The Western Girl. ”
Her reputation, however, faced its own attack. In 1904, newspapers ran stories claiming she had a history of drug use and theft. The allegations were invented entirely.
They traced back to William Randolph Hearst, a notorious newspaper magnate, who had latched onto the case of a burlesque dancer arrested in Chicago who told police her name was Annie Oakley. The false story spread across the country before she had a chance to respond. Hearst, realizing the story was a lie, refused to apologize. Instead, he hired a private detective to dig up anything damaging in her hometown.
The investigator found nothing. Her name had been tarnished, and Annie did not let it rest. Over the next six years, she filed fifty-five defamation lawsuits. She won fifty-four of them.
When World War I began in 1914, she could look back on her encounter with the Kaiser with dark humor. She joked that she could have ended the entire conflict if only she had shot him when she had the chance. Frank later revealed that he had written to the Kaiser after the war started, inviting him to try the trick again, but he never received a reply. Even at sixty, Annie retained her skill.
In 1922, she returned to the public eye, planning to star in a silent film and competing in a shooting contest where she hit one hundred clay targets in a row from sixteen paces. But bad luck struck again. She and Frank were involved in a serious car accident. They survived, but Annie injured her leg and required a steel brace.
She spent a year recovering before returning to performing. After that, her health declined suddenly. Over the following year, she was stricken with pernicious anemia, which weakened her rapidly. She died on November 3, 1926.
Frank was left to face life without her. From the moment they met, his existence had revolved around supporting her. Her death left a void he could not survive. Over the following days, he stopped eating and stopped caring for himself, succumbing to grief just weeks after her passing.
According to family accounts, the two were cremated, and her ashes were placed in one of her trophies, which was buried with Frank inside his casket. Her belongings survived her. Visitors can still see her prized possessions, original merchandise, and favorite firearms on display at the Garst Museum and the Annie Oakley National Center in Greenville, Ohio. History remembers her as one of the greatest marksmen and performers of the American West, but her deeper legacy is that of a generous woman who fought for women’s rights and gave away nearly everything she earned, either to her family or to charity.
Annie Oakley was a combination of unshakable confidence and genuine kindness, a woman who gave as much as she took.