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“Annie Oakley came out of the rough-and-tumble frontier during the well-chronicled period that followed the United States Civil War” (Condon 1991, 47). Thus reads her biographical entry in an encyclopedia of female athletes; so enduring was the legend of Annie Oakley that even this work confuses her stage persona with the historical Phoebe Ann Moses. In reality, Phoebe Ann Moses was an exemplary shot and a riveting entertainer. Nevertheless, Annie Oakley has become a permanent part of the myth of the Wild West. Just as the American cowboy represented a departure from the image of the refined European gentleman, Annie Oakley’s character rejected Victorian women’s roles. Thus, she became associated with the notion of “frontier freedom.” It is this image that made her a popular icon in the early feminist movement. It is also the myth that has been perpetuated by pop-culture portrayals, from the Broadway musical Annie Get Your Gun to the children’s television show The Adventures of Annie Oakley.
Contrary to popular belief, Annie Oakley did not grow up in a wild saloon town on the Western frontier but in a rural community in Darke County, Ohio. Her parents were Quakers who had moved west from Pennsylvania. Born Phoebe Ann Moses on August 13, 1860, Annie Oakley grew up in a family of eight children. Her father died at an early age, leaving the family without much income. Phoebe Ann began work at a young age, bringing in as much money as she could for her family. She left home to live with her employer, an abusive matron of the county’s infirmary. Eventually, she ran away to rejoin her family. By that point her mother had remarried and their fortunes had improved. These trying years as a child gave Phoebe Ann the toughness and independence that she needed on stage to portray a female sure-shot of the Wild West.
As unusual as it may seem for a pacifist to become an expert marksman, the ability to fire a gun was seen as a necessity in rural, nineteenth-century America. Phoebe Ann’s brother John taught her how to shoot a rifle. She was an above-average shot at the beginning but soon was selling the game she had killed to a local storekeeper. According to legend, local hotel owners would only buy meat that Phoebe Ann had shot because it was guaranteed to be free of any residual lead. One of these proprietors inadvertently launched Phoebe Ann’s career as an entertainer by inviting the fifteen-year-old girl to compete against vaudeville marksman Frank Butler. It was a close competition that Phoebe Ann barely won (many have suggested that Butler lost intentionally), but it earned her such admiration from Butler that the two began courting shortly afterward. Their marriage would cement one of the most successful vaudeville acts of the nineteenth century.
For their first few years of marriage, Frank spent most of his time away on tour with his acting partner. However, when his partner fell ill during the 1882 season, Frank let his wife take his place. The act transformed Phoebe Ann Butler into her stage persona “Annie Oakley.” In those early days the act was fairly simple: Frank would shoot an apple off the top of a poodle’s head. Annie would assist him with setting up the act and providing him with the proper firearms. In their first year they toured as a part of the Sells Brothers’ Wagon Circus. Subsequent tours were primarily confined to the Midwest, but one occasion that took them to New Orleans would launch a new trajectory for the Butlers’ careers.
Portrait of frontier heroine Annie Oakley, ca. 1899. A crack shot and born performer, Annie Oakley’s greatest contribution to the mythic Old West was probably her manifestation of the figure of a liberated woman unshackled by traditional Victorian mores. The “frontier freedom” Oakley represented thus was embraced by early feminists. (Library of Congress)
It was highly fortuitous that Sells Brothers’ Wagon Circus happened to be in New Orleans at the same time as Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show was quite a novelty at that time. It was the conception of a Nebraska rancher and former cavalry scout, William F. Cody. The idea was to bring a romanticized version of the Wild West to the cities of the Northeast. The show featured expert equestrian entertainers, sharpshooters, outlaws, and Native American chiefs. The Butlers were very impressed with the performance, so much so that they left the Sells Brothers to join Cody’s troupe.
In their new act, which made its debut in 1885, Annie Oakley was the star. Frank served as Annie’s manager, scheduling appearances and negotiating contracts. The act featured stunts like shooting a dime thrown into the air from ninety feet away or shooting a cigarette out of Frank’s mouth. Later she incorporated more sportsmanlike feats such as shooting 100 birds released from traps. Chief Sitting Bull, who was another one of the show’s attractions, referred to her as “My Daughter, Little Sure Shot.”
It was highly unusual in those days for a woman to tour with an almost exclusively male group, but she quite enjoyed the life. “A crowned queen was never treated by her courtiers with more reverence than I by those wholesouled Western boys,” she wrote. Even more extraordinary was her husband’s willingness to let her be the star of their act. Her stage name, “Miss Annie Oakley,” and her lack of children led many of her fans to conclude that she was unmarried.
During the Butlers’ early years with Buffalo Bill, they crisscrossed the Midwest and Northeast, performing in Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and New York. However, Annie Oakley would go on to become an international celebrity as a result of her performances before Queen Victoria during the 1876 Jubilee in England and at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair. She met many of Europe’s notables and aristocrats, including the Prince Regent of Bavaria, King Wilhelm II of German, Emperor Franz Josef of Austria, and Pope Leo XIII. However, her meeting with Queen Victoria was perhaps the best remembered. The queen approached her after the performance and declared, “You are a very, very clever little girl.”
Though the Butlers would remain a part of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show until 1901, the 1893 season at the Chicago World’s Fair was the high water mark in Annie Oakley’s career. In 1901, while traveling through Virginia on tour, Annie Oakley was seriously battered in a train wreck. She sustained injuries to her back and hand, both of which made finishing the season impossible. While she eventually regained her ability to shoot, she never rejoined Buffalo Bill. However, Annie Oakley hardly left show business. She frequently took part in Western plays and shooting exhibitions around the Midwest, continuing to make public appearances until her death in 1926.
Within ten years of her death, Hollywood latched onto her character, producing the first Western featuring Little Miss Sure Shot. Encouraged by Annie’s continued popularity, Rodgers and Hammerstein produced a Broadway musical, Annie Get Your Gun, which ran during the late 1940s. Both the film and the musical ignored the actual biographical details of Phoebe Ann Moses’s life and over-glamorized the life of a woman in the lawless West. Later in the 1950s, Annie Oakley was featured in a popular children’s television program. In it Oakley was a sheriff in a frontier town. She administered justice, taming the town’s masculine excesses with her feminine, moral uprightness. Because of this focus on feminine virtue, Annie Oakley became a role model for young girls of the 1950s.
This, of course, leads to the most controversial aspect of Annie Oakley’s legend: her legacy. Women’s roles underwent an enormous transformation during her career, and the character of Annie Oakley seemed to promote it. However, it is well known that in spite of her somewhat nonconformist ways and self-reliant spirit, Phoebe Ann Moses was a strong opponent of women’s suffrage and the changes in sexual norms. She saw no need for women to vote and to the end of her life refused to wear anything but a dress. Regardless of her personal views on the subject, supporters of women’s rights in the early twentieth century took inspiration from her character, largely because of what her character represented.
In the late nineteenth century, the frontier was often romanticized as a place where women could achieve both wealth and freedom, far away from the restraints of Victorian society. The reality, of course, was far grimmer. In a culture of lawlessness, individualism, and masculine strength, the majority of women resorted to prostitution to survive. Oakley, however, was a woman who had both wealth and freedom without compromising her moral character. This was what made her such a powerful symbol.
Andrew Wickersham
See also Cody, William F. “Buffalo Bill”; Sally Ann Thunder Ann Whirlwind; Women in Folklore
Further Reading
Condon, Robert J. 1991. “Annie Oakley: “Doin’ What Comes Naturally.” In Great Women Athletes of the 20th Century. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
Cooper, Courtney Riley. 1927. Annie Oakley, Woman at Arms. New York: Duffield.
Havighurst, Walter. 1954. Annie Oakley of the Wild West. New York: Macmillan.
Riley, Glenda. 1994. The Life and Legacy of Annie Oakley. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
Sayers, Isabelle S. 1981. Annie Oakley and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. New York: Dover.