American postcard by AZUSA Publishing, Inc., Englewood, Colorado, no. 607 2000. Photo: Elliott & Fry, 1887 / The Annie Oakley Foundation, Greenville, Ohio.
The Annie Oakley Motto
Aim at a high mark and you will hit it.
No, not the first time, nor the second and
maybe not the third. But keep on aiming
and keep on shooting, for only practice
will make you perfect. Finally, you'll
hit the Bull's Eye of Success.
Annie Oakley
American postcard by AZUSA Publishing, Inc., Englewood, Colorado, no. 126, 2000. Photo. David F. Barry, 1898. Caption: Annie Oakley, 'Little Sure Shot' (1860-1926). Annie Oakley joined Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show and toured for 17 years. Many of her shooting records remain unequalled to this day.
Vintage postcard. Photo: M.G.M. Betty Hutton in Annie Get Your Gun (George Sidney, 1950).
Little Sure Shot
Annie Oakley was born Phoebe Anne Mosey in 1860, in a log cabin less than two miles (3,2 km) northwest of Woodland, now Willowdell, in Darke County, Ohio, a rural county along the state line with Indiana. Annie was the sixth of nine children born to an impoverished Quaker couple, the 61-year-old Jacob Mosey and his wife, Susan Wise, who was 31 years younger than her husband. The family originally came from Pennsylvania, where they ran an inn. Annie's place of birth can only be approximated. There is a stone-mounted plaque in the vicinity of the site, which was placed by the Annie Oakley Committee in 1981, 121 years after her birth. In the winter of 1865, Jacob Mosey was caught in a blizzard. Hypothermia turned him into an invalid. He died months later, having never recovered from the ordeal. He left his wife and children destitute. Annie was six years old and she was sent to a county-owned ‘poor farm,’ where she had to work as a child labourer to earn her keep. Her mother also gave some of her siblings away to other families. Annie did not receive any schooling. She was eventually loaned out to a farming family as a maid in a slave-like relationship. According to her later stories, she was mentally and physically abused there, including being left barefoot in the snow in the freezing cold. Oakley later referred to them only as ‘the wolves.’ She ran away several times and returned to live as a seamstress on the poor farm. When her mother remarried to Daniel Brumbaugh and was able to provide a financially secure home, Annie returned to her family. After the death of her second husband, her mother married twice more. Oakley had a half-sister from her mother's second marriage.
In 1867, Oakley learned how to trap animals to supplement her family's income. The petite girl, who was only 1.52 metres tall even as an adult, developed an above-average talent for shooting, which she taught herself using her father's old rifle. From the age of eight, Annie Oakley hunted rabbits and other animals for food and also worked as a trapper. She soon became a professional hunter and supplied game to grocery stores, hotels and restaurants in the area. She was so successful at hunting that she became the main breadwinner for her family. After five years, she was able to pay off the mortgage on her stepfather's farm with her earnings. Her reputation as a sharpshooter spread beyond the borders of her home region throughout Ohio. She took part in shooting competitions and became a regional celebrity. At one of these shooting competitions, she defeated marksman and dog trainer Frank E. Butler, who fell in love with Oakley, ten years his junior, on that occasion. They married in 1882 in Windsor, Canada. Oakley was 21 years old at the time.
Frank Butler taught Annie to read and write, and she later received schooling and endeavoured to fill the gaps in her education. She initially continued to live with her mother, while Butler toured with various male partners, first with a dog training act and later with a sharpshooting act with show troupes and circus companies. Oakley made her first joint appearance with her husband on 1 May 1882 in Springfield, Ohio, when she stepped in for her husband's ill partner in a show. She gave herself the stage name ‘Annie Oakley’ and, from then on, performed with her husband as the duo ‘Butler and Oakley’. Initially, she and her husband toured the United States and Canada with the Sells Brothers Circus. They not only performed shooting tricks, but also continued to perform a dog training act. Annie also performed as an equestrian artist. Oakley presented herself as extremely feminine and attached great importance to all the virtues of a Victorian woman. This image was necessary to perform her skills as a woman with a rifle without being perceived as a threat. She tailored her own stage costumes and designed a kind of Wild West outfit with chaps and a knee-length skirt.
This period saw a momentous encounter that would contribute significantly to the legend surrounding Annie Oakley and her role as an icon of the Wild West (even though she always lived in the eastern United States). During a performance in St. Paul, Minnesota, the famous Sioux chief Sitting Bull visited her in her dressing room after the show and met with her several times in the following period. Sitting Bull is said to have been very impressed by the markswoman and horsewoman's ladylike and dignified demeanour on stage, symbolically ‘adopting’ her and giving her the name ‘Watanya Cecilia’, which means ‘Little Sure Shot’. However, these conversations and the ‘adoption’ are only attested to by Oakley herself and cannot be verified by other sources. During the years of Annie Oakley's greatest international fame, the nickname became her trademark, which she used in her advertising and which remained inextricably linked to her name in the American public consciousness. It is documented that Sitting Bull and the Butlers (Annie Oakley always appeared privately as Mrs Frank Butler) each took up engagements in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show in 1885. Her work for the Sells Brothers Circus had ended abruptly after one season. Oakley had criticised the poor working conditions and lack of safety precautions at the circus company and organised a sit-in protest because of the poor living conditions for employees.
In 1885, Oakley and Butler were hired as performers by 'Buffalo Bill's Wild West, a circus-like attraction that toured annually. The owner was the showman Buffalo Bill'Cody. Oakley developed a professional rivalry with one of her co-workers, the sharpshooter Lillian Smith. Smith was younger than Oakley and was trying to upstage her. Soon, Annie Oakley became the only non-Native American woman in the troupe and became the star in an otherwise male-dominated show area, trick shooting. Her husband, Frank Butler, largely withdrew from the stage and from then on acted as his wife's assistant and manager. Over the course of 17 years, Oakley travelled the world as the main attraction with the Buffalo Bill Show and became an international star. She hit dice and small glass balls thrown into the air from a distance of 30 paces, pierced playing cards thrown into the air at lightning speed, hit the edges of the cards with precision, and shot the burning cigarette out of her husband's mouth. She also aimed at distant targets over her shoulder while looking in a mirror. According to eyewitnesses, she always hit her target. Colleagues report that Oakley acted like a precision-tuned machine on stage as soon as she picked up a rifle. She toured several times in Europe, and Queen Victoria and Oscar Wilde were among her admirers, as were the King of Italy and the Tsar of Russia. The Prince of Wales, Edward VII, presented her with a medal of honour with a personal dedication and inducted her into the London Gun Club as the first woman in the club's history.
American postcard by AZUSA Publishing, Inc., Englewood, Colorado, no. 124, 2000. Photo: David Notman, 1885. Caption: Sitting Bull and Buffalo Bill. Sitting Bull made only one tour with William F. Cody's Wild West Show - this photograph was taken during that tour.
American postcard by AZUSA Publishing, Inc., Englewood, Colorado, no. 610, 2000. Photo. J.E. Stimson, 1907. Caption: Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, Grand Entry. The American Wild West became legendary in its own time due to Buffalo Bill's vision, bringing the action and personalities of the Old West to audiences around the world. Cody is credited with inventing both the rodeo and the Wild West Show in North Platte, Nebraska, during a July 4th Celebration amply termed the "Old Glory Blowout". Later that year, the first Wild West Show premiered in Columbus, Nebraska, and performances continued for 31 years until 1913.
American postcard by Fotofolio, New York, N.Y., no. P291. Photo: W.K.L. Dickson / International Museum of Photography / George Eastman House. Caption: Thomas A. Edison, 1893.
Spanish postcard by Archivo Bermejo, no. 4820. Photo: M.G.M. Howard Keel and Betty Hutton in Annie Get Your Gun (George Sidney, 1950). The Spanish title was La reina del oeste.
Annie get your gun
In 1901, Annie Oakley suffered serious spinal injuries in a railway accident. She retired from the Buffalo Bill Show. She was left partially paralysed, but after several operations she recovered enough to set a few more records, take part in shooting competitions and appear in a stage play written especially for her, 'The Western Girl' (1902). Oakley tried to keep her private life largely out of the public eye. However, inaccurate press reports in 1903 ruined her image, making further appearances impossible. A 28-year-old burlesque dancer who performed under the stage name Annie Oakley had stolen from a customer in Chicago to finance her cocaine addiction. She was arrested and sentenced to 45 days in prison. Newspapers from William Randolph Hearst's media empire linked the conviction to the real Oakley and reported on it in detail. Other newspapers jumped on the bandwagon and spread the news throughout the United States. In 1904, Annie Oakley fought back and filed 55 lawsuits for libel against newspapers, including those owned by the Hearst Corporation. The lawsuits lasted until 1910. She won 54 of them and was awarded a total of $27,500 in damages, which was unprecedented at the time. However, she collected less in judgments than the total of her legal expenses.
Oakley continued to set records into her sixties and also engaged in extensive philanthropy, including the support of young women she knew. She was politically active in support of women's rights and advocated equal pay for women for equal work and championed women's right to carry weapons for self-defence. She gave firearms courses for women and, during the First World War, offered to train female sharpshooters for the army to President Woodrow Wilson. The government never responded to this proposal. Throughout her career, it is believed that Oakley taught more than 15,000 women how to use a gun. From today's perspective, it is difficult to understand why she simultaneously rejected women's suffrage. Biographers debate whether she was expressing conservative principles or acting tactically so as not to appear threatening. She embarked on a comeback and intended to star in a feature-length silent movie. She hit 100 clay targets in a row from 16 yards (15 m) at age 62 in a 1922 shooting contest in Pinehurst, North Carolina. In late 1922, she and her husband were involved in a car accident from which she never recovered. Four years later, she died in Greenville, Ohio, in 1926, at the age of 66. The cause of death was listed as pernicious anaemia, caused by a deficiency of vitamin B12. She was cremated and her ashes buried at Brock Cemetery, near Greenville. Her distraught husband, Frank Butler, reportedly stopped eating and died eighteen days later in Michigan. He was buried next to her ashes. The couple had no children.
During her active career, Annie Oakley became a living legend of the Wild West. In 1894, she appeared on camera alongside other performers from Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, shot at Thomas Alva Edison's Black Maria studio by William Heise. Buffalo Bill Cody was friends with Thomas Edison, and Edison built the world's largest electrical power plant at the time for the Wild West Show. Buffalo Bill and fifteen of his show Indians appeared in two Kinetoscopes filmed on 24 September 1894. Oakley and Butler performed in The Little Sure Shot of the Wild West, which later became known as Annie Oakley shooting at glass balls (William Heise, 1894). The short film lasts 21 seconds and was shot for the Kinetoscopes, which were all the rage at the time. Numerous biographies about Annie Oakley have been published. Penny dreadfuls featuring Wild West stories about her character were popular. She also appears as a comic book character, e.g. in the album ‘La légende de l'ouest’ (A Wild West Legend) of the Lucky Luke series. The Playmobil company released her as a toy figure in the Western set 3804. She is also represented as an action figure on the American toy market. Oakley has also made her way into the computer world: in the first-person shooter Smokin' Guns, she is available as a character or one of the opponents.
In the cinema, Barbara Stanwyck was the first actress to portray her on screen in Annie Oakley (George Stevens, 1935). The film focuses primarily on Oakley's love affair with Toby Walker (representing Oakley's real-life husband Frank E. Butler) rather than on her career as an exhibition sharpshooter. It also does not depict how Butler (Preston Foster), himself a skilled marksman, willingly ceded the spotlight to Oakley in the Wild West shows. According to Wikipedia, several scenes, such as those in which Oakley deliberately loses a shooting match and Oakley and Walker are reunited by Sitting Bull (Chief Thunderbird), were likely concocted to appeal to contemporary audience tastes and expectations. In 1946, Irving Berlin honoured her with his stage musical 'Annie Get Your Gun', which was loosely based on her life story. The original Broadway production starred Ethel Merman, who also starred in the 1966 revival. The 1946 production was a hit, and the musical had long runs in both New York (1,147 performances) and London. In 1950, the story was made into a Technicolour film starring Betty Hutton and Howard Keel as Oakley and Butler, Annie Get Your Gun (George Sidney, 1950). There were several casting problems. Judy Garland was fired from the lead role after a month of filming, in which she clashed with the director and repeatedly showed up late or not at all. Louis Calhern replaced Frank Morgan, who played Buffalo Bill but died of a sudden heart attack shortly after filming had begun. Despite the production problems, the film garnered mostly favourable reviews from critics and won the Academy Award for Best Original Score of a Musical Picture and received three other nominations. Betty Hutton was recognised with a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress. The film was one of the top-grossing pictures of the year.
From 1954 to 1957, Gail Davis played Annie Oakley on television in 81 episodes of the American TV series Annie Oakley. In the cinema, Angela Douglas played Oakley in the British comedy Western Carry On Cowboy (Gerald Thomas, 1965), the eleventh in the series of 31 Carry On films (1958–1992). In 1976, she was portrayed by Geraldine Chaplin in the revisionist Western Buffalo Bill and the Indians (Robert Altman, 1976), starring Paul Newman as Buffalo Bill. Also, after the turn of the millennium, cinema and television films, as well as plays in which Annie Oakley plays a role, were regularly produced. In 2006, Elizabeth Berridge played Annie in the biographical Western Hidalgo – 3000 Miles to Glory (Joe Johnston, 2006) starring Viggo Mortensen as the legendary American distance rider Frank Hopkins. Sarah Strange portrayed Oakley in an episode of the TV series Murdoch Mysteries (2009), titled Mild Mild West. A vast collection of Annie Oakley's personal possessions, performance memorabilia, and firearms is on permanent exhibit in the Garst Museum and the National Annie Oakley Centre in Greenville, Ohio. Annie has been inducted into the Trapshooting Hall of Fame, the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame in Fort Worth, Texas, the National Women's Hall of Fame, the Ohio Women's Hall of Fame, and the New Jersey Hall of Fame. In 1994, she was pictured on one of a set of twenty 29¢ US commemorative postage stamps celebrating Legends of the West.
British postcard in the Picturegoer series, London, no. W. 866. Photo: Metro Goldwyn Mayer. Betty Hutton as Annie Oakley in Annie Get Your Gun (George Sidney, 1950).
British postcard in the Picturegoer series, London, no. W. 868. Photo: Metro Goldwyn Mayer. Betty Hutton as Annie Oakley, J. Carrol Naish as Sitting Bull and Louis Calhern as Buffalo Bill Cody in Annie Get Your Gun (George Sidney, 1950).
British postcard in the Picturegoer series, London, no. W. 869. Photo: Metro Goldwyn Mayer. Betty Hutton in Annie Get Your Gun (George Sidney, 1950).
Annie Oakley shooting at glass balls (1894) by Thomas Edison Company.
Sources: Dimos I (IMDb), Wikipedia (Dutch, German and English), and IMDb.
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