Nonfiction Excerpt 1: The True Story of Annie Oakley

Annie Oakley, during the height of her fame in the 1880s as a trick shooter in Buffalo Bill Cody’s West Show, looked like—as people used to say back then—the “spitting image” of a girl raised in the West. She wore boots, a suede skirt and jacket, leather gloves, and a broad-brimmed hat. A newspaper reporter once saw her shoot fifty-five out of fifty-six glass balls tossed in the air. She could also shoot pistols with both hands at the same time, smashing targets. With a rifle, she could hit a playing card at sixty feet, then put five or six more holes in the card as it fluttered to the ground. Her best-known trick shot, though, was aiming over the shoulder using a mirror or a shiny hunting knife. But the truth is, Annie Oakley was not from the West. Her name “Annie Oakley” was made up, too. She was an expert shot, all right. But she had to learn how to be one to help her family survive. Annie Oakley was born Phoebe Ann Moses (her last name has been identified as both Mosey and Moses by different family members) to a Quaker couple, Jacob and Susan, in a log cabin in Darke County, Ohio, on August 13, 1860. Phoebe Ann was the youngest of five daughters. Her sisters didn’t like the name Phoebe, so they called her Annie instead. Disaster struck in 1866 when Annie was six. One winter morning, Jacob Moses set out with a wagonload of wheat and corn. While he was gone, a blizzard roared in. Around midnight, Susan and the children heard the creak of wagon wheels outside the cabin. “Mother threw the door wide open into the face of the howling wind,” Annie recalled years later. There was Jacob, the reins wrapped around his wrists and neck. His hands were frozen. Despite months of bed rest, he died that spring. More troubles followed. The fatherless family moved to a rented farm, but had trouble paying the bills. With poverty facing them, Mrs. Moses took a drastic and painful step. She placed Annie, aged ten, in an orphanage. Annie lived there for five years. When she returned, her mother had remarried. Again, the family was struggling and close to losing their farm. Annie decided one way she could help was to earn money somehow. A pair of brothers in the nearby town of Greenville owned a grocery store. They supplied game animals, such as quail, pheasant, rabbit, turkey, and prairie chickens, to hotel kitchens in Cincinnati. Annie made them an offer. She would supply as

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G5_U12_Westward Expansion After the Civil War_NFE1_FOR PDF.indd 1 27/07/17 4:21 PM much game as they could sell. The brothers agreed, and Annie was in business as a “market hunter.” The petite, dark-haired girl with blue-gray eyes carrying her father’s old-fashioned muzzle-loading rifle became a familiar sight in town. There was no game limit in those days, and Annie brought in a staggering amount of kills—150 to 200 whitetail deer in a single autumn, for instance. With an income higher than most men’s, Annie was able to pay the entire mortgage on her Mother and stepfather’s farm. “Oh, how my heart leaped with joy as I handed the money to Mother and told her that I had saved enough to pay it off!” she wrote in her autobiography. Then, in April 1881, a circus sharpshooter named Frank Butler was staying at a hotel in Cincinnati. A local man who knew Annie bet Butler one hundred dollars that he couldn’t outshoot her. Butler figured he was about to win an easy bet. “I thought there were some country people who thought someone could shoot a little and were ready to lose money,” Butler said later. He took the train out to Shooter’s Hill, a sportsmen’s club. When he arrived, hundreds of people were waiting. He was further surprised when his opponent turned out to be a polite young woman. They were introduced. Her name was Annie Moses. Butler tipped his hat and said it was pleasure to meet her. He was just four years older than she. The contest consisted of shooting at round clay targets, or clay pigeons, flung into the air by a machine called a trap. The style of the contest and the clay pigeons were strange to Annie. Nevertheless, she defeated Butler, twenty-three to twenty-one out of a possible twenty-five. It was Butler’s first loss. Frank Butler wrote to Annie constantly, and within a year of the shooting contest, they were married. Realizing his wife was a far better shot than he was, Frank became Annie’s manager. She took the name “Oakley” after a small town in Ohio, and together the Butlers, as friends knew them, turned professional. Buffalo Bill Cody hired them for his famous Wild West show. For years, they delighted millions with Annie’s trick shooting all over the United States and Europe. Audiences roared approval at her skill. But few knew the real story of how she became a crack shot to support her family.

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