Annie Oakley, the Ohio sharpshooter who wanted every woman to learn to shoot

She stood five feet tall, she shot a playing card edge-on from thirty paces, and what most people remember about her is a Broadway musical in which she trades "anything you can do" boasts with a rival. The real Annie Oakley would have found that amusing, and then she would have asked the gentleman whether he cared to put money on it.

Her story is better than the musical's, and it is more useful. It is the story of a poor girl from rural Ohio who learned to shoot because her family needed to eat, who turned a necessity into a career, and who spent much of her long life telling other women that a firearm was no more mysterious than a sewing machine and a good deal more reliable in an emergency. Let me tell it in order, because the order is the point.

A childhood in Darke County

She was born Phoebe Ann Mosey on August 13, 1860, in a log cabin in Darke County, in western Ohio, near the town of Greenville. Her parents, Jacob and Susan Mosey, were Quaker farmers of modest means. Phoebe Ann was one of several children, and the family was poor.

Her father died in 1866, when she was about six, of complications following exposure in a snowstorm. His death left the household in distress. Her mother struggled to keep the farm, and the children were put to work. Phoebe Ann, who was still a small child, began trapping game for the table. Within a few years she had taught herself to use her father's old muzzle-loading rifle, and she was hunting squirrels, quail and rabbits, which she sold to shops and hotels in Greenville and in nearby towns. Hunters of the time prized game shot through the head, which left the meat unspoiled, and by every report she was good at it. The income she earned from her game reportedly helped pay off the mortgage on her mother's farm by the time she was in her mid-teens.

I do not want to make a legend of the early years beyond what the record supports, because the accounts come from Oakley's own recollections and from later biographers, and the details vary. What is consistent is the outline: a child in a hard time and place, with no one to hand her anything, who took up a tool and used it to put food on the family table. That is not a story about guns as a hobby. It is a story about guns as the means of keeping a family fed, which is how most of American history understood them.

The match with Frank Butler

Her break came in the 1870s. As a young teenager she was invited to Cincinnati, where she stayed with a married sister, and she took part in a shooting match against a visiting marksman named Frank Butler. Butler was an Irish-born exhibition shooter who toured the country, and the match was arranged as a challenge, with a purse at stake: the story is that the local hotel owner who bought her game had put up a wager that a local shooter could beat the professional. The match, according to the usual account, took place on Thanksgiving Day, 1875. Butler was a seasoned performer. Oakley was a girl of fifteen who, by all accounts, was nervous, and who beat him by a single shot. Butler missed his twenty-fifth bird, and she had hit all of hers.

The sequel is the part that makes the story endearing. Butler, rather than nursing a grudge, fell for the girl who beat him. They began to correspond, and they married, in 1876 by the generally accepted date, though some sources differ. She took the stage name Annie Oakley, which, according to the common explanation, was drawn from a neighborhood in Cincinnati. Butler stepped back from the spotlight and became her manager and partner on the stage, a decision that in the 1880s required a generosity of spirit that most husbands of any era would find hard to match. Frank Butler's good sense in deciding that his wife was the star, and that his job was to help her shine, is one of the best-known marriages in American show business.

Buffalo Bill's Wild West

By 1885 the two had joined Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West, the traveling spectacle that brought the frontier to audiences across the country and then the world. Oakley stayed with it for about sixteen years. Her act was a showcase of trick shooting: she shot glass balls tossed in the air, she shot the thin edge of a playing card, she split a card in half, she hit a coin tossed overhead, and she shot while riding or while looking at a mirror.

The most famous fact about her performances is a figure from the exhibition world that many sources repeat: that she shot dimes thrown into the air. It is the sort of detail that is part record and part legend. The record shows enough: she was known across the country and abroad for accuracy that was remarkable, and she did it using the ordinary firearms of her time, which were not engineered with the precision of modern ones.

At a stop in St. Paul, Minnesota, in the 1880s, she is said to have met the Hunkpapa Lakota leader Sitting Bull, who was traveling with the show for a time and reportedly gave her the name "Little Sure Shot." The nickname stuck. I give it with the caveat that the traditional accounts of their friendship are the sort that grow in the telling, though the nickname itself is firmly attached to her name.

Europe, and the queen

In 1887 the Wild West crossed the Atlantic to London, to be part of the celebration of Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee, and Oakley was among its stars. Victoria saw the show, and Oakley was presented to her. The troupe toured Britain and, in later seasons, the Continent. Audiences in Europe, accustomed to the formal, aristocratic traditions of shooting, were astonished to see a young woman from Ohio hit targets in the way that she did, and she became a figure of international fame.

There is a story, repeated in many popular accounts, that in the late 1880s she shot the ash off a cigarette held by a German royal, and that she later said, jokingly, that if she had known what would follow she would have aimed differently. That story is the kind a careful writer should mark as legend. I include it only so that the reader who has heard it knows it is told, and I will not vouch for it.

What I will vouch for is the effect of the tour. An American woman, a farm girl without a day of formal schooling in rifles, stood in front of crowned heads and ordinary crowds and did something extraordinary with a firearm,. It was a fine thing for a republic to export.

"Every woman should learn to shoot"

This is the heart of the matter. Oakley did not merely perform. She taught, and she spoke about it. She believed, and said, that women should learn to handle firearms, for self-defense, for sport and for the confidence that comes from mastering a skill. By her own and others' accounts, she gave lessons to many women over the years, and some biographers credit her with teaching thousands, a number that is hard to verify and that I would treat as a round figure rather than a count.

Her argument was practical. A woman who knew how to use a firearm could protect herself and her home. She could feed her family, as Oakley had. And, Oakley added, the discipline of the sport was good for the character: it taught patience, steadiness and responsibility. In a period when many people thought of a woman with a gun as unladylike, she was a living refutation. She was graceful, modest and polite, and she could out-shoot almost anyone in the hall. She was the best advertisement for her own argument.

That is a point worth pressing, because the culture today sometimes treats the idea of a woman with a firearm as a political stance rather than a skill. Oakley's generation took the opposite view. A rifle was a tool, and a person who had learned to use it was a person to be respected. The idea that sex should determine who may learn to use one would have struck her as silly, and I suspect she would have said so, politely, with a card to be split to illustrate the point.

The offer to the army

In April 1898, as the United States was on the verge of war with Spain over Cuba, Oakley wrote to President William McKinley. She offered to raise a company of fifty women sharpshooters, who, she said, would provide their own arms and ammunition and be ready to serve if the country went to war. The offer was not accepted. The war was short, and the volunteer cavalry that gained fame in it, Theodore Roosevelt's Rough Riders, was recruited from a different pool.

It is easy to smile at the idea of a women's sharpshooter company in 1898, and the government's reasons for not taking it up are not hard to guess. But look at the offer for what it says. Here is a woman at the peak of her fame, with a lucrative career, who offered to put her skill and her money at her country's disposal. She did not ask for a commission or a pension. She asked to serve. It is the same instinct that moved ordinary citizens in earlier generations to form militias, which is the very thing the Second Amendment's preamble describes: a free people, armed and ready to defend a free state, without waiting to be ordered.

Charity and character

Oakley gave much of her money and time to others. She is reported to have supported the education of orphan girls and to have given exhibitions to raise money for charitable causes, including shows for the benefit of widows and children and, later, for soldiers in the First World War, when she was in her fifties. She and Frank Butler performed for troops at military camps and offered their services to the Red Cross.

I note that kind of fact with some caution, because the details come from biographers, and some of the charitable activity may be embellished. But it fits her character, which by every account was modest and hardworking, and she carried herself with a quiet dignity that her fame did not alter.

The libel suits

Her reputation was tested in 1903, when newspapers published a false story that a woman named Oakley had been arrested in Chicago for stealing to support a drug habit. The woman arrested was not Annie Oakley, but the story, which originated with a newspaper and was repeated by others, spread rapidly, and it did real harm. Oakley, then in her early forties, went after the newspapers. She sued dozens of them for libel, 55 suits by the count most accounts give, and she won or settled 54 of them, though the damages she collected barely covered her costs. She is said to have regarded the cases as a matter of principle: she would not allow a lie about her name to stand.

A modern reader can learn two things from the episode. First, that a free press has always been capable of getting a story wrong, and that the remedy, then as now, is the courts and the truth. Second, that Oakley, a woman who could have walked away from the matter, spent years of effort defending her good name, which is a fair guide to what she thought a good name was worth.

Later years and death

She left the Wild West in 1901 after a railroad accident that injured her, and she returned to performing in stage plays and exhibitions. She continued to shoot, to teach and to give demonstrations into her sixties. She died on November 3, 1926, in Greenville, Ohio, at the age of sixty-six. Frank Butler, her husband of fifty years, died eighteen days later, reportedly having stopped eating after her death. They were buried in Brock Cemetery, in Darke County, not far from where she was born.

What her life says

Annie Oakley's story offers lessons that go beyond the shooting tradition, and I should name them.

1. Self-reliance is a skill that can be taught. She began as a child who had to feed a family, and the habit of relying on herself stayed with her. A tradition that treats competence as a virtue, rather than as a threat, is one worth keeping.

1. Arms and character go together. The discipline of shooting, the care it takes with a loaded weapon, the respect for the rules, are habits of a responsible citizen. The Founders, who prized the "well regulated" militia, understood that arms were not merely tools but schools.

1. Women are not an exception to the right of the people. The Second Amendment says "the people," and the Constitution's later history, including the Nineteenth Amendment of 1920, confirmed that women are part of the people in the fullest sense. The idea that a woman cannot be trusted with a firearm is an old prejudice, and Oakley was one of the first to prove it wrong.

1. The hunting tradition is a tradition of conservation. The girl who hunted for the table in Ohio was part of the same tradition of hunters that later paid for wildlife conservation, which Duck stamps and the Dingell-Johnson Act, conservation the sportsman paid for describes.

1. A good name is worth defending. She stood on principle and went to court, and she was right to.

A fair objection

A critic might say that it is a mistake to build an argument about modern gun policy on a nineteenth-century showwoman. Oakley's rifles were not today's rifles, her America was not today's America, and one famous woman's career does not settle any question about licensing, carry or magazine limits.

I agree, and I am not using her for that. She settles nothing about a statute. What her life does is to rebut a particular picture: that firearms belong to a narrow group of people, that learning to use one is a mark of aggression or of men's culture, and that a woman who takes it up is acting against her nature. Oakley, a small, soft-spoken woman from a Quaker family, took it up out of need and kept it up out of pride. She is a reminder that the shooting tradition belongs to everyone, and that the people who have most to gain from the ability to defend themselves are often the ones who have been told they do not need it. the equalizer, why a firearm matters most to the smallest person in the room makes that argument in full.

For other pieces on the people and rights that shaped the tradition, see The Powder Alarm and the British arms embargo that came before Lexington, What Jewish and Christian teaching says about defending your own life and How often Americans use guns in self-defense and why the estimates differ. The Constitution page has the full text of the Second and Nineteenth Amendments.

The case in brief

1. Phoebe Ann Mosey, born August 13, 1860 in Darke County, Ohio, began hunting as a child to feed her family after her father's death and became a celebrated marksman by her teens.
2. Her 1875 match against Frank Butler led to marriage and a partnership, and to sixteen years with Buffalo Bill's Wild West and tours of Europe from 1887.
3. She urged women to learn to shoot, taught many, and in 1898 offered the President a company of women sharpshooters for the Spanish-American War, which was not accepted.
4. She gave generously to charity and sued newspapers that printed a false story about her in 1903, defending her good name on principle.
5. Her life shows that self-reliance, competence and the shooting tradition belong to women as fully as to men.

What you can do: if you have never handled a firearm, find a certified safety course in your area and attend one, or take a friend who has not, and treat it as the skill Oakley said it was.