Thread by @marinamaral2

Annie Oakley, American sharpshooter and exhibition shooter.

Her amazing talent first came to light at 15-years-old when she won a shooting match against traveling-show marksman Frank E. Butler, whom she later married.

Annie Oakley was born Phoebe Ann (Annie) Mosey on August 13, 1860, in a cabin less than two miles (3.2 km) northwest of Woodland, now Willowdell, in Darke County, Ohio, a rural western border county of Ohio.

Her birthplace log cabin site is about five miles east of North Star. There is a stone-mounted plaque in the vicinity of the cabin site, which was placed by the Annie Oakley Committee in 1981, 121 years after her birth.

Annie's parents were Quakers of English descent from Hollidaysburg, Blair County, Pennsylvania: Susan Wise, age 18, and Jacob Mosey, age 49, married in 1848. They moved to a rented farm in Patterson Township, Darke County, Ohio, sometime around 1855.

Born in 1860, Annie was the sixth of Jacob and Susan's nine children, and the fifth out of the seven surviving.

Annie's father, who had fought in the War of 1812, became an invalid from overexposure during a blizzard in late 1865 and died of pneumonia in early 1866 at age 66.

Her mother later married Daniel Brumbaugh, had one more child and was widowed for a second time.

Because of poverty following the death of her father, Annie did not regularly attend school as a child, although she did attend later in childhood and in adulthood.

Beginning in the spring of 1870, she was "bound out" to a local family to help care for their infant son, on the false promise of fifty cents a week and an education. The couple had originally wanted someone who could pump water, cook, and who was bigger.

She spent about two years in near-slavery to them where she endured mental and physical abuse. One time, the wife put Annie out in the freezing cold, without shoes, as a punishment because she had fallen asleep over some darning.

Annie referred to them as "the wolves". Even in her autobiography, she never revealed the couple's real name.

Around the spring of 1872, Annie ran away from "the wolves".

Her mother married a third time, to Joseph Shaw, on October 25, 1874.

Annie began trapping before the age of seven, and shooting and hunting by age eight, to support her siblings and her widowed mother.

She sold the hunted game to locals in Greenville, such as shopkeepers Charles and G. Anthony Katzenberger, who shipped it to hotels in Cincinnati and other cities. She also sold the game herself to restaurants and hotels in northern Ohio.

Her skill eventually paid off the mortgage on her mother's farm when Annie was 15.

Annie soon became well known throughout the region. On Thanksgiving Day 1875, the Baughman & Butler shooting act was being performed in Cincinnati.

Traveling show marksman and former dog trainer Frank E. Butler (1847–1926), an Irish immigrant, placed a $100 bet per side (equivalent to $2,228 in 2017) with Cincinnati hotel owner Jack Frost that Butler could beat any local fancy shooter.

The hotelier arranged a shooting match between Butler and the 15-year-old Annie, saying, "The last opponent Butler expected was a five-foot-tall 15-year-old girl named Annie."

After missing on his 25th shot, Butler lost the match and the bet.

He soon began courting Annie and they married.
They did not have children.

Annie and Frank Butler lived in Cincinnati for a time. Oakley, the stage name she adopted when she and Frank began performing together, is believed to have been taken from the city's neighborhood of Oakley, where they resided.

Some people believe she took on the name because that was the name of the man who had paid her train fare when she was a child.

They joined Buffalo Bill's Wild West in 1885. At five feet tall, Oakley was given the nickname of "Watanya Cicilla" by fellow performer Sitting Bull, rendered "Little Sure Shot" in the public advertisements.

During her first engagement with the Buffalo Bill show, Oakley experienced a tense professional rivalry with rifle sharpshooter Lillian Smith.

Smith was eleven years younger than Oakley, age 15 at the time she joined the show in 1886, which may have been a primary reason for Oakley to alter her actual age in later years due to Smith's press coverage becoming as favorable as hers.

Oakley temporarily left the Buffalo Bill show but returned two years later, after Smith departed, in time for the Paris Exposition of 1889.

This three-year tour only cemented Oakley as America's first female star. She earned more than any other performer in the show, except for "Buffalo Bill" Cody himself. She also performed in many shows on the side for extra income.

She performed for Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom, King Umberto I of Italy, President Marie François Sadi Carnot of France and other crowned heads of state.

Oakley supposedly shot the ashes off a cigarette held by the newly crowned German Kaiser Wilhelm II at his request.

Oakley also promoted the service of women in combat operations for the US armed forces.

She wrote a letter to William McKinley in 1898, "offering the government the services of a company of 50 'lady sharpshooters' who would provide their own arms and ammunition should the U.S. go to war with Spain."

The Spanish–American War did occur, but Oakley's offer was not accepted.

Theodore Roosevelt, did, however, name his volunteer cavalry the "Rough Riders" after the "Buffalo Bill's Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World" where Oakley was a major star.

Throughout her career, it is believed that Oakley taught more than 15,000 women how to use a gun. Annie believed strongly that it was crucial for women to learn how to use a gun, as not only a form of physical and mental exercise, but also to defend themselves.

She said: "I would like to see every woman know how to handle guns as naturally as they know how to handle babies."

In 1904, sensational cocaine prohibition stories were selling well. Newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst published a false story that Oakley had been arrested for stealing to support a cocaine habit.

The woman actually arrested was a burlesque performer who told Chicago police that her name was Annie Oakley.

Most of the newspapers that printed the story had relied on the Hearst article, and they immediately retracted it with apologies upon learning of the libelous error.

Hearst, however, tried to avoid paying the anticipated court judgments of $20,000 (equivalent to $544,741 in 2017) by sending an investigator to Darke County, Ohio with the intent of collecting reputation-smearing gossip from Oakley's past.

The investigator found nothing.

Oakley spent much of the next six years winning 54 of 55 libel lawsuits against newspapers. She collected less in judgments than the total of her legal expenses.

She continued to set records into her sixties, and she also engaged in extensive philanthropy for women's rights and other causes, including the support of young women whom she knew. 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, the couple were in a car accident that forced her to wear a steel brace on her right leg. She eventually performed again after more than a year of recovery, and she set records in 1924.

Her health declined in 1925 and she died of pernicious anemia in Greenville, Ohio at the age of 66 on November 3, 1926. Her body was cremated in Cincinnati two days later and the ashes buried at Brock Cemetery near Greenville, Ohio.

Butler was so grieved by her death, according to B. Haugen, that he stopped eating and died 18 days later in Michigan, and his body was buried next to Oakley's ashes.

One rumor claims that Oakley's ashes were placed in one of her prized trophies and were laid next to Butler's body in his coffin prior to burial.

After her death, her incomplete autobiography was given to stage comedian Fred Stone, and it was discovered that her entire fortune had been spent on her family and her charities.

A vast collection of Annie Oakley's personal possessions, performance memorabilia, and firearms are on permanent exhibit in the Garst Museum and the National Annie Oakley Center in Greenville, Ohio.

She 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.

*Done*