In the spring of 1881, a young woman barely five feet tall stepped up to face Frank E. Butler, one of the finest marksmen in the United States. Butler had bet a hundred dollars that he could beat any local shooter in Cincinnati, and the hotel owner who took that bet had found him a challenger: Annie Moses, a country girl from Ohio who had been shooting since she was seven. The match was tied shot for shot until Butler missed his twenty-fifth bird.
Annie won. Within a year, the two were married, and their partnership would make Annie Oakley one of the most famous women in America. Her beginnings gave little hint of such a future. Born on August 13, 1860, in rural Darke County, Ohio, Annie was the daughter of Quaker parents of English descent.
Her father, Jacob Moses, died in March 1866 after being caught in a blizzard and falling ill with hypothermia, leaving her mother Susan to raise seven children in poverty. To help feed the family, Annie taught herself to shoot with her father’s old muzzle-loading gun. She became a gifted hunter, selling the excess game she killed to local merchants, and by the time she was fifteen she had saved enough to pay off the mortgage on the family home. Her childhood was not without cruelty.
In March 1870, Annie and her sister Ellen were sent to the Darke County infirmary, where they were taught to sew and care for younger children. Not long after, a man came asking for a girl to keep his wife company and help with their infant son. With her mother’s permission, Annie went to work for the family. According to Annie, the first month was fine; after that, she was brutally exploited.
She later wrote that she rose at four in the morning, cooked, milked cows, fed the animals, hauled water, weeded the garden, picked berries, and cared for the baby, and only then could she go hunting. When she tried to leave, the couple she called the Wolves forced her to stay, effectively enslaving her and writing letters to her mother claiming she was happy and attending school. On one occasion, after she fell asleep over a basket of stockings, the woman struck her, pinched her arm, and locked her out in the freezing snow without shoes. Annie described praying silently as her lips froze shut.
In the spring of 1872, after nearly two years, she ran away. A stranger at a train depot bought her food and a ticket home. Her captors never recaptured her. Annie’s skill with a rifle eventually made her known throughout Ohio.
After defeating Frank Butler in that celebrated shooting match, the two grew close and married. Sources disagree on the date, though a marriage certificate records the wedding as June 20, 1882, in Windsor, Ontario. They first performed together in a show on May 1, 1882. At first, Frank was the star while Annie stayed in the background.
Her first big break came when she replaced her husband’s ill partner, and it was then that she adopted the stage name Oakley. In private, she remained Mrs. Frank Butler. In March 1884, the great Sioux leader Sitting Bull saw Annie Oakley perform in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
Impressed, he met her after the show, and the two became friends. Having lost a daughter at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, Sitting Bull symbolically adopted Annie and gave her the nickname that would follow her for the rest of her life: Little Sure Shot. In 1885, the couple joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. Oakley quickly became the star, billed as the Champion Markswoman, while Butler worked as her manager and assistant.
The next year, a rival appeared: Lillian Smith, a fifteen-year-old sharpshooter who drew favorable press and may have prompted Oakley to pass herself off as twenty. In 1887, the Wild West show was invited to perform in England as part of Queen Victoria’s golden jubilee celebrations. Oakley’s shooting drew glowing reviews, and she became a celebrity among English shooting circles, receiving gifts and invitations across the country. The tour later continued through France, Italy, and Spain, where Oakley performed before European royalty.
One famous legend claims she shot the ashes off the German Kaiser’s cigarette; in truth, the cigarette was held in his hand. The tour made Oakley America’s first female star, and for years she earned more than any other performer in the show. Her stunts were remarkable. She shot cigarettes from her husband’s lips and dimes from his hand, fired while standing on a galloping horse, and used a mirror to hit small targets from long distances.
In November 1894, she and Butler appeared in one of the world’s earliest films, The Little Sure Shot of the Wild West, made in Thomas Edison’s studio. In 1898, Oakley wrote to President William McKinley offering the services of a company of fifty lady sharpshooters, who would provide their own arms and ammunition, should the United States go to war with Spain. The offer was rejected. In 1901, Oakley survived a severe train accident that left her badly injured.
She underwent five spinal operations before recovering. She left Buffalo Bill’s show the following year and acted in a stage play, The Western Girl, before retiring in 1913. The Butlers settled in Cambridge, Maryland, where they hunted, fished, and performed locally to raise money for the county fair. In 1917, they moved to Pinehurst, North Carolina.
When the First World War broke out, Oakley wrote to the Secretary of War offering to teach soldiers to shoot and to raise a regiment of women volunteers. Again, her offer was refused. In 1922, though she was past sixty, she was still setting records and performing before huge crowds. A car crash that November left her in critical condition, and she wore a steel brace on her right leg for nearly a year before fully recovering.
By 1925, her health began to fail. She and Butler moved back to her hometown of Greenville, Ohio, to be near family. Annie Oakley died on November 3, 1926, aged sixty-six, of pernicious anemia. Her ashes were buried at Brock Cemetery near Greenville.
Butler died just three weeks later, reportedly so overcome with grief that he stopped eating; he was buried beside her. It is believed that Annie Oakley taught more than fifteen thousand women to use a gun over the course of her life. She once said she would like every woman to know how to handle guns as naturally as they know how to handle babies. In death, her generosity became well known: much of her wealth went to relatives and charities.
Her life inspired countless books, films, and plays, and she is remembered as one of America’s great western folk heroes. Well before Annie Oakley rose to fame, another frontierswoman was making her own remarkable way through the American West. Known as the Great Western, she was born somewhere along the Missouri-Tennessee border, likely between 1812 and 1818, possibly to an Irish-American family named Knight. The details of her early life are shadowy, but it is certain she was illiterate and grew to an imposing physical stature, standing over six feet tall and weighing nearly two hundred pounds.
Her nickname came from the SS Great Western, the first paddle-wheel steamship built specifically for transatlantic crossings in the 1830s. In the 1830s, Sarah married a soldier and became a camp follower during the Second Seminole War in Florida. In 1846, the outbreak of the Mexican-American War drew her to Texas. The conflict had its roots in the disputed border between Texas and Mexico.
Texas had declared independence from Mexico in 1836 and was annexed by the United States in 1845, but Mexico refused to accept the American claim that the border lay at the Rio Grande. In the war’s opening days, at the Arroyo Colorado River on March 21, 1846, Sarah offered to wade the river and attack the Mexicans herself, earning a fiery reputation. By then she had remarried, this time to a soldier in the 5th Infantry Division. At Fort Brown, she ran an officers’ canteen and became famous for her fearlessness during a Mexican siege in May 1846.
A Texas Ranger, John Salmon Ford, said she could whip any man, fight or fall, shoot a pistol better than anyone in the region, and outplay or out cheat the slickest professional gambler. Newspapers as far east as New York and Philadelphia carried stories of the heroine of Fort Brown, who insisted on serving the troops three meals a day on the front lines while artillery exploded around her. As the war turned against Mexico, Sarah moved south with the army and saw action at the Battle of Buena Vista in February 1847. She later established a hotel in Saltillo, providing meals and lodging for soldiers.
After the war ended with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in February 1848, which forced Mexico to accept the Rio Grande border and the annexation of Texas, Sarah was eager to head west. Her second husband appears to have been killed in the war, and gold had been discovered in California, drawing hundreds of thousands of prospectors west. In 1849, Sarah arrived in El Paso, where she set up a hotel that historians believe doubled as a saloon and brothel. She then moved on to Socorro, New Mexico, where she presided over an establishment with five orphan girls, and married for the third time, to Albert J.
Bowman, a German-born upholsterer who had served as a dragoon in the U. S. Army. The couple continued their nomadic life, eventually reaching Fort Yuma, on the border between California and Mexico.
There Sarah served as a company laundress while Albert sought gold prospects across the border. By the late 1850s, she had become one of southern Arizona’s most prominent businesswomen, running restaurants, saloons, and a network of brothels. One lieutenant passing through the region wrote that among her other good qualities, she was an admirable pimp. She and Bowman divorced in 1864, but her business continued.
She adopted several orphans and Native American girls, teaching them to support themselves through cooking and laundry. The Great Western died on December 22, 1866, from a venomous spider bite, and was buried with full military honors the following day. She remains remembered as one of the most formidable frontierswomen of the American South.