She was barely fifteen when she outshot a man who had built his entire life around a gun. That man, Frank Butler, had come to Cincinnati in the autumn of 1875 as part of a shooting act called Bumann and Butler. He was so confident in his skill that he bet a hundred dollars he could beat any local marksman in town. The hotel owner who heard the boast mentioned a girl, a young one, who was said to shoot better than anyone around.
Frank laughed at the idea. Then he met her. Her name at birth was Phoebe Ann Mosey, born in 1860. By the time she was fifteen, she had buried one parent, survived an abusive apprenticeship, and put food on her family’s table with nothing but a rifle.
That was the girl who stepped up to face Frank Butler in a contest of twenty-five clay targets in a row. Frank hit his first twenty-four. On the last one, he missed. Annie didn’t miss a single one.
Most men of that era would have swallowed the defeat with bitterness. Frank instead asked if he could court her. The following year, despite the thirteen-year difference in their ages, they married. To understand how she got to that point, you have to go back to the beginning.
Her father, Jacob Mosey, died when she was only five. He caught a severe chill during a terrible snowstorm, and it turned into pneumonia. His death left eight children and a struggling widow. The family had never had much, and now they had nothing at all.
There was no money for schooling, so Annie never had the luxury of a classroom. Instead, she learned the skills that would keep them alive. She had six siblings, though two of the nine Mosey children did not survive infancy. With her father gone, the old rules about what women and men were supposed to do simply fell away.
Everyone had to work. Annie learned to handle a gun quickly and well. People would later ask her about her first shot, and she loved telling the story. When she was eight, a squirrel ran through her yard and stopped to rest on the fence.
Little Annie grabbed one of the family rifles, took aim, and fired. She claimed the bullet passed clean through the animal’s head, side to side. It was the beginning of a skill that would become her entire life. Even with everyone pitching in, her mother Susan still could not support seven children.
Desperate, she placed two of her daughters, Annie and Sarah Ellen, into the Darke County Infirmary, where they learned practical skills like sewing. Annie spent a few months there, but she was soon moved again, this time into the care of a nearby family who agreed to take her on as a nurse for their infant son. In exchange, she was promised room, board, an education, and a wage of fifty cents a week. For a girl raised in desperate poverty, it sounded too good to be true.
It was. The family lied about paying her. They were cruel without mercy. When they wanted to punish her, they forced her to stand outside in the freezing cold without shoes.
Annie endured two long years of it. For the rest of her life, she would refer to them only as the wolves. Eventually, she could not take it anymore. She ran away.
She found shelter with a kinder family named the Edingtons, who treated her far more fairly, but they were not her real family. The moment she turned fifteen, she went home to her mother and siblings. By then she was completely self-sufficient. Her shooting had become so sharp that she was able to pay off the mortgage on her mother’s house just by selling the game she hunted.
She had enough money now to enjoy herself from time to time, which was exactly what she was doing when the shooting match with Frank Butler came up. Frank could have been humiliated by losing to a teenage girl, but instead he proposed. After their marriage, Annie joined him on the road. She was drawn to the adventure and the money.
As a performer, she left the name Phoebe Mosey behind and crafted a new one for herself: Annie Oakley. People assumed she had chosen the name because her first home with Frank was in the Oakley neighborhood of Cincinnati. But there was another story from her harsh childhood. It was said that when she was alone and fending for herself, she once had no money to ride a train.
A kind stranger named Oakley paid her fare. She remembered him. She also understood that most people underestimated her, not only because she was a woman, but because she stood barely five feet tall. She turned that into part of her identity as a performer.
Later, her close friend Sitting Bull would give her the nickname Little Sure Shot. At twenty-five, Annie was ready for bigger stages. She and Frank joined the famous traveling show Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of World’s Rough Riders. She was not the only female sharpshooter in the company.
A young performer named Lillian Smith joined the show a year later, and the two clashed immediately. Lillian was only fifteen, the same age Annie had been when she started. The press was fascinated with the younger woman, and it stung. Annie began telling people she was twenty instead of twenty-six.
But she had nothing to worry about. Her skill spoke for itself. She dazzled crowds with stunts like shooting a cigar out of Frank’s mouth, or splitting playing cards edge-on from thirty paces away. She was theatrical in every sense, exaggerating her reactions and blowing kisses to her adoring fans.
Frank could have been jealous of her success. He had been in the business long before she had, but instead he became her biggest supporter, eventually acting as her manager as her fame grew. Not everyone in the show got along, but she formed one remarkable friendship. Sitting Bull was already a legendary figure by the time he joined Buffalo Bill’s show, known for having led his people in rebellion against the American government.
Like many others, he initially underestimated Annie. Then he watched her shoot. Impressed beyond words, he asked to have his photograph taken with her, and he insisted on paying her sixty-five dollars for it. He believed she possessed a supernatural gift.
She was equally fascinated by him, and the two became close. In time, he treated her like a daughter. The rivalry with Lillian Smith eventually became unbearable. The shine of the work began to fade under it, and in 1887 Annie left the show.
It was not permanent. When Lillian eventually departed as well, Annie returned. She expanded her horizons, embarking on a tour that lasted three years, traveling to the other side of the world to appear at the Paris Exposition in 1889. She was a sensation there, just as she had been at home.
Outside of Buffalo Bill himself, she was the highest-paid performer in the show. Her name became known everywhere. She performed in Italy before King Umberto I and in the United Kingdom before Queen Victoria. Most world leaders were content simply to watch her and meet her.
One leader wanted more. The newly crowned Kaiser Wilhelm II asked to see the trick she performed with Frank, where she shot a cigar from his mouth or hand. The Kaiser wanted to be the participant. He lit a cigar and watched as Annie raised her weapon, fired, and, according to the story, knocked the ash clean off.
Even when she returned home, opportunities kept arriving. Motion picture technology was still in its infancy, but Thomas Edison had recently introduced his kinetoscope, and Annie appeared in one of his earliest films. It was simply titled Annie Oakley and showed her shooting at a variety of moving and stationary targets. Fame brought her excitement and wealth, but she knew she could do more with it.
She wrote to President William McKinley, arguing that women deserved a place in the armed forces, and she offered to lead a company of female sharpshooters if America went to war with Spain. She also devoted enormous time to training other women in marksmanship. She believed women had the same right and the same ability to fight as men did in the old West, a belief that clashed with the pacifist Quaker upbringing her parents had instilled in her. By the end of her career, she had trained more than fifteen thousand women.
When America declared war on Spain, as she had predicted, her offer was ignored. The nation was not ready for an all-female company of sharpshooters. That did not stop President Teddy Roosevelt from borrowing the Buffalo Bill name for his own volunteer cavalry, calling them the Rough Riders. For all the stunts she had performed with Frank, she had rarely been in real danger.
That changed in 1901. She was traveling by train as she had countless times before when the train derailed in a terrible accident. She survived, but she suffered devastating injuries to her back. It took five operations and a bout of temporary paralysis before she recovered enough to walk again.
Even then, she was never the same. She had to face the truth that she could no longer perform the feats she once had. With a heavy heart, she left Buffalo Bill’s show for the final time. She was not ready to give up performing completely.
Hoping that acting would be easier on her health, she took to the stage in a play written especially for her, The Western Girl. She had countless admirers across America, but she was not immune to bad publicity. In 1904, her name appeared in headlines claiming she had a history of drug use and theft. The rumors were completely false and traced back to the notorious newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst.
They grew out of an incident in Chicago where police arrested a burlesque dancer on similar charges. After her arrest, she told authorities her name was Annie Oakley. The rumor spread like wildfire before Annie had a chance to respond. Because Hearst owned so many papers, other outlets reprinted the false story as fact.
It was only a matter of time before the truth came out, and many publications quickly apologized and retracted the story. Hearst knew the story was pure fabrication, but he refused to apologize or face consequences. In an attempt to destroy her reputation further, he hired a private detective to visit her hometown and dig up anything that could tarnish her good name. After a thorough search, the detective returned empty-handed.
Even with all the retractions, her reputation had been damaged. Annie had grounds to sue each publication for defamation, especially Hearst. Over the next six years, she filed fifty-five lawsuits. She won fifty-four of them.
In 1914, the First World War broke out. Annie was able to look at the situation with a certain dark humor, specifically because of her earlier trick with Kaiser Wilhelm II, who played such a central role in the war. She joked that she could have stopped the entire conflict if she had shot the Kaiser instead. Frank later revealed that he had written to the Kaiser after the war began, inviting him to come and repeat the trick.
He never received a reply. Annie had long since left Buffalo Bill’s show, but she remained active in society. Her idea for female sharpshooters had failed, but that did not stop her humanitarian work with women and other causes. Astonishingly, even at sixty years old, she still had the skill to break shooting records.
She had largely stayed out of the public eye, still performing steadily, but now she was ready to return in a bigger way. In 1922, for her comeback, she planned to star in a silent film and entered a competition in which she hit one hundred clay targets in a row from sixteen paces. Unfortunately, another stroke of terrible luck was waiting for her. It turned out the train accident had not been the last time she would suffer such a horrifying event.
In 1922, she and Frank were involved in a very serious car accident. They both survived, but she injured her leg and required a steel brace. After a full year of recovery, she was back on her feet and acting again. She tried her best to keep performing, but at some point time caught up with her.
A year after the car accident, just when she believed she was past the danger, her health suddenly declined again. Over the following year, she developed a terrible case of pernicious anemia that rapidly wore her down. On November 3, 1926, Annie Oakley died. Frank was left to deal with the aftermath of losing her.
It was easier said than done. Since the day they met, his entire life had been devoted to supporting her. Her death left a hole in him that he could not fill. In the days that followed, he stopped eating and stopped caring for himself.
He surrendered to his grief just a few weeks after Annie’s passing. Some say the family had her cremated and placed her ashes in one of her many trophies, which was later buried with Frank inside his casket. Her possessions have been preserved and continue to stand the test of time. Visitors can see some of her most treasured belongings, her original merchandise, and of course her favorite firearms, on display in Greenville, Ohio, at the Garst Museum and the National Annie Oakley Center.
History remembers Annie Oakley as one of the greatest sharpshooters and performers of the American West. But she left an even greater mark as a philanthropist, fighting for women’s rights and other causes. That became even clearer when her partially written autobiography appeared after her death. In it, she revealed that she had donated every cent of her fortune either to her family or to the charities she supported.
Her legacy is a combination of unshakable confidence and brilliant marksmanship, but it is also the legacy of a truly generous person who gave as much as she took.