Our Own Hall of Fame

 

ANNIE OAKLEY

 

DARKE’S DARLING

Hot Shot Annie Oakley got Herself Cool Million

 

DAYTON DAILY NEWS,  MARCH 5, 1961

BY MARY ELLEN LYNCH

Daily News Staff Writer

 

     Annie Oakley couldn’t read or write until her husband taught her, but from childhood she could do one thing better than anybody else in the world—shoot.

     And pretty, petite (five feet tall, 100 pounds) Annie parlayed her trigger finger into a $1 million fortune and the acclaim of kings and queens.

     Born Phoebe Ann Moses (she pronounced it “Mozee”) at Woodland in northeast Darke county in 1860, Annie was blowing the tiny heads off running quail with a gun bigger than she was by the time she was nine.

     The family –a widowed mother and eight children—was living on a backwoods farm near North Star then and the birds and rabbits Annie shot to sell were its main source of income.

     The little, hazel-eyed beauty also attracted attention by winning rifle matches.  When Frank Butler, a professional marksman, swaggered into Cincinnati and bet $100 that nobody could outshoot him, 15-year-old Annie did.

     BUTLER LOST the match, but he won the girl and a year later he and Annie were married.

     She took the stage name of Oakley (from a Cincinnati suburb because she thought it was pretty) and soon Annie was the star of the act.

     In 1885 she signed with the original Buffalo Bill Wild West show and started a fabulous 17-year career that saw her travel 170,000 miles in Europe and America and miss only four performances.

     Annie beat the grand duke of Russia in a shooting match.  After a command performance, Queen Victoria told her: “You are a clever little girl.”  A sort of blend of Lillian Russell and Buffalo Bill, she combined dainty charm with lead bullet, lived in an aura of powder blue gun smoke.

     At 30 paces, Annie could slice the thin edge of a plying card held by her husband.  (Butler gave up his own career to be Annie’s manager and assistant.)

     IN ONE DAY she shattered 4,772 glass balls out of a possible 5,000.  She once shot the ashes off a cigar clenched in the teeth of young Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany.

     It was a press agent’s stunt, but Sitting Bull, the fabled Sioux medicine man, named her “Watanya Cicilia” (“Little Sure Shot” in Sioux), “adopted” her and made her a full Indian princess.

     Annie left the Buffalo Bill show for a time, appeared in two plays (one, “Deadwood Dick,” was described as “one of the most dreadful turkeys ever seen”) and vaudeville.

     In 1901 she was partially paralyzed in a show train accident, underwent five operations and saw her thick brown hair turn white.

     But two years later, Annie was back shooting again and some of her greatest triumphs were ahead of her.  When she was 62 she was still a hot shot, broke 100 clay targets in a row.

     The same year, though, her hip was shattered in an auto accident and her career ended. (After she retired, Annie had most of the medals she had won melted down, got $150 for the gold and silver and gave it to a children’s home. Although she and Butler had no children, they educated 18 orphans.

     ANNIE DIED Nov. 3, 1926 in Greenville and was buried at Brock cemetery south of North Star.  Her heartbroken husband lived for only 20 days.

     In 1946 Ethel Merman immortalized Annie in the hit musical “Annie Get Your Gun.”  And the little Darke county girl that Buffalo Bill Cody called “Missie” left her mark in another way, too.

     The term “Annie Oakley” for complimentary tickets was coined because the holes punched in them look like something riddled by her bullets.

 

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