Fittleworth Rifle Club

That Superstar in Buckskin, Doin' What Came Natur'lly

By NEIL GENZLINGER

Published: May 8, 2006

Plenty of women accomplished plenty of things in the first century or so of United States history, so it's a little dismaying to think that the country's first female superstar was famous not for her voice or her musicianship or her brain, but for her ability to shoot firearms accurately. Yet Annie Oakley was the first American woman whose fame and knack for spawning legends (a close cousin of gossip) qualified as superstardom. Even if her particular talent is not to your liking, it would be difficult not be awed by the woman's life. Oakley, born Phoebe Ann Moses in Ohio in 1860, lived during a remarkable stretch of history that encompassed both the Civil War and World War I, one that began on horseback by lamplight and ended in automobiles under electric bulbs.

So familiar are the images of Oakley in old-time Western regalia, making her seem like some pre-industrial artefact, that it's surprising to see movies of her, shot by Thomas Edison in his New Jersey studio. It's surprising too to track the incredible array of luminaries she met or performed for or with, Sitting Bull on the one extreme, Oscar Wilde on the other.

Oakley escaped the hard life through a serendipitous encounter as a teenager with a crack shot named Frank Butler, whom she first bested in a shooting competition, then married. He eventually put her in his travelling marksmanship show, and she quickly became the main attraction. In 1885 she began a long association with Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West extravaganza. The show's summer residency on Staten Island the next year was a breakthrough.
"Half a million people sailed past the new Statue of Liberty, and then rode on special trains straight to the Wild West," says Ken Chowder. Perhaps most striking, Oakley's life shows that superstardom has never been all it's cracked up to be. During her fame Oakley brought lawsuits against 55 newspapers after William Randolph Hearst's chain erroneously reported in 1903 that she was destitute and in prison for theft. Then as now, it was often no fun being famous.