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Annie Oakley
World's Champion Shot
by Richard W. Haupt
She was given the name Phoebe Ann Moses at her birth in 1860, and during her life was variously known as Annie Mozee,
Mrs. Frank Butler, Missie and Little Sure Shot. At her death, however, none of these names were memorialized. On a simple stone in
Darke County, Ohio, there is inscribed:
Annie Oakley
1926
At Rest
Her life was not the life of a person "at rest." Her fame as the "World's Champion Shot" made her a living legend. Annie was born in
1860 near North Star, Ohio, in Darke County. Her family, always poor, was reduced to gnawing poverty at the death of her father. Annie and her
five brothers and sisters were "bound" to neighbors who provided care in return for work. After two years, Annie rejoined her mother and
trapped and hunted small game to help sustain the family.
At 15, while visiting an older sister in Cincinnati, she won a 50-dollar first prize in a sharpshooting contest at Schuetzenbuckel Park.
The marksman she defeated was Frank Butler and within a few months Annie Moses married Frank Butler and adopted the stage name,
Annie Oakley. By the time they joined Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show in 1884, Butler and Oakley had become nationally famous.
For the next 17 years Annie astounded audiences everywhere with her uncanny marksmanship. She could shoot pennies out of the air or the
ash from a cigar while riding a horse or from behind her back. Her ability to shoot the spots out of a card permanently gave the name "Annie Oakley" to
any prepunched complimentary ticket.
She was admired in America and in Europe because, though petite and totally feminine, she demonstrated her
superiority in what was traditionally a masculine skill. After severe injuries suffered in a 1901 train accident she recovered and starred in a
number of popular plays. For the last 10 years of her life she and Frank Butler mixed business with travel. With health failing they returned to
Ohio, and in the fiftieth year of their marriage Annie Oakley and Frank Butler died in November of 1926.
At a time and in a nation where pioneer life was still part memory and part reality, Annie Oakley seemed to, and
perhaps did, epitomize in a dramatic way the unsung virtues of the pioneer woman.
This article was first published in the 1974 Ohioana Year Book. At the time, Richard W. Haupt
was the director of the Cincinnati Historical Society.
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