The Life and Legacy of Annie Oakley (5 page)

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Authors: Glenda Riley

Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Women, #History, #United States, #19th Century, #test

BOOK: The Life and Legacy of Annie Oakley
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chaotic nature, Annie not only learned to depend on herself but also developed a strong need to control the details of her daily life and environment. As an adult, Annie followed a strict regimen of practice, nutrition, rest, and public appearances. Although she needed to keep herself in shape, Annie carried her routine nearly to excess. As a case in point, every morning, reportedly without fail, she ate three dried prunes for breakfast and, whenever possible, poached an egg in milk, using a small, black, cast-iron frying pan she carried for that explicit purpose.
Annie also maintained her costumes, tent, and homes with such meticulousness that she frequently annoyed those around her. Even family members lamented Annie's tendency to act "particular," and her husband, Frank, deplored her ability to drive away cooks and other domestic helpers. She treated her own body with similar care, which suggests more than a trace of vanity in Annie's personality. Even when on the road, Annie followed an unvarying nightly routine to preserve her features, skin, and hair. Annie's niece Irene Patterson Black, who nursed Annie during the 1920s, recalled that as a result of Annie's daily care, her body was like a "chunk of marble," with no excess fat and free of marks even on an injured leg.
Annie sometimes responded in an irritable fashion to complaints regarding her near-obsessive behavior. That Annie was not above sharpness is revealed in her autobiography, which gives evidence of how her quick wit could turn into a caustic tongue. In addition, Annie's independent spirit led to her holding her inner self somewhat aloof from others, confiding little, except perhaps to Frank. Of course, Annie's life on the road militated against her making close female friends. Too, she saw family members only intermittently, and she lacked strong writing skills, but she seemed to make little effort to overcome these obstacles and to develop truly intimate relationships, even with her sisters or her niece Anna Fern Campbell Swartwout. During the 1910s and 1920s, for example, Annie took as her companion, confidant, and surrogate child an English setter named Dave. Nor did Annie confide her innermost feelings to a journal or diary or conduct extensive correspondence. Rather, she seemed content to live in the cocoon that she and Frank spun wherever they happened to live.

 

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Annie's companion, partner, and husband, Frank Butler, came into her life sometime during the mid-1870s or early 1880s. The family's financial situation had eased even more because two of Annie's older sisters had married and left home. Now the oldest girl at home, Annie continued to help Susan and to hunt. When Jack Frost, the operator of a hotel that bought her game, suggested that Annie accept a shooting match, she followed his advice. Legend says that Annie was visiting at the home of her married sister Lydia (also called Lyda in some sources) in Fairmount, a suburb of Cincinnati, at the time. Lydia and her husband, Joe Stein, encouraged Annie and perhaps helped arrange a match on Thanksgiving Day, 1875, even though Annie had never been on a shooting range or shot at targets from a mechanical trap.
Annie's opponent, Frank Butler, later stated that the match took place in the spring of 1881 near the town of Greenville, Ohio, probably in the North Star-Woodland area. According to Butler's recollection, he walked approximately eighteen miles north of Greenville. When he arrived, he found "most of the county out" to support "their 'unknown.'" Annie, however, remembered that the match occurred ''two miles out of Fairmount," where her eldest sister lived. According to her, it was the first time she saw a "real city." Certainly, Cincinnati would have provided the ideal setting for such a match. In that city, the Sportsmen's Club kept the first official shooting records in the United States, the American Sharpshooters Society operated, and the clay pigeon was reportedly invented.
The confusion over location is not easily explained, but the discrepancy in dates may have occurred because someone, perhaps the Wild West exposition's publicity agent, John Burke, later lopped six years from Annie's age to enhance her public appeal. If, according to publicity, Annie had been born in 1866 rather than 1860, she would have been only nine years old at the time of an 1875 match. Thus, six years had to be added, making the date of the match 1881. In newspaper interviews given in 1903 and 1924, Frank gave the date of the match as 1881, which was consistent with Annie's revised 1866 birth date, making her fifteen at the time.
Whatever the actual date of the match, Annie had no knowledge

 

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of her opponent's identity; she simply trusted in Frost's judgment and her own skill. Had Annie known that she would compete against Francis E. Butler, an accomplished shooter then appearing at a Cincinnati theater, the Coliseum on Vine Street in the Over-the-Rhine District, her audacity might have amused her.
As it turned out, Frank Butler was amused, at least initially. He frequently offered a challenge to local champions wherever he played and had bragged that he could outshoot "anything then living, save Carver or Bogardus," two of the era's shooting greats. In 1875, Captain Adam H. Bogardus earned a medal proclaiming him champion of the world; three years later, Dr. W. F. Carver declared himself "champion rifle shot of the world" after breaking 5,500 glass balls out of 6,208 in less than 500 minutes. When Butler saw Annie drive up to the grounds, he asked the identity of the pretty, slim country girl wearing a calf-length skirt. He reportedly laughed when he learned that she would be shooting against him.
Butler's smile soon faded. According to Annie, they used "two traps, gun below the elbow, one barrel to be used." Butler won the toss and took his position. He called "pull," which was quickly followed by the report of his gun and the referee announcing "dead." Then Annie, with her knees shaking, stepped up and yelled "pull.'' Again the call of "dead'' followed. Their scores kept even until Frank missed his last shot; he had scored twenty-four out of twenty-five. Annie had to make her last shot to win the match. She exhibited the supreme self-confidence that would see her through thousands of future matches. "I stopped for an instant before I lined my gun. . . . I knew I would win!"
Annie scored twenty-five out of twenty-five. When she walked away with the fifty-dollar prize as well as the return from the side bet she and her brother had placed, Annie felt ecstatic. Gallantly, Frank Butler saw Annie and her family to their carriage. He handed them several passes to his show; someday such free passes would be called "Annie Oakleys." After attending the show, however, Annie seemed more impressed with Frank's poodle, "George," than with Frank. Annie never forgot that George, who reputedly disliked women, had brought her "a piece of apple that his master had shot from his head, and laid it before me." Later,

 

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she sent George her greetings, and George sent her a box of candy. The courtship had begun in earnest.
"Well, what fools we mortals be!" Annie later wrote. "If that poodle didn't lead me into signing some sort of alliance papers . . . that tied a knot so hard it has lasted some 50 years." Despite her youth and inexperience, however, Annie made an excellent choice. In Frank Butler, she found a husband, friend, shooting partner, teacher, business manager, agent, and father-figure. Ten years older than Annie, Frank contributed to their relationship a measure of stability and maturity that Annie had always lacked. With his shooting skills, Frank could always earn an income. And with his stage experience, Frank understood how to train and package the young, inexperienced shooter that he saw in Annie.
Annie and Frank even shared similar backgrounds. When Frank was eight years old, his impoverished parents had left him with an aunt in Ireland. Planning to send for him later, they sailed from Ireland for the United States. In the meantime, Frank objected to his aunt's treatment and in 1863, at age thirteen, worked his own way to America. Once in the United States, he largely educated himself and tried a variety of jobs, then turned to managing a dog-and-pony act that turned into a disaster in Philadelphia when one of his troupe, a former fire dog, deserted the stage for the fire station next door and was followed by the rest of Frank's canine performers. Probably during the early 1870s, Frank began shooting on stage, usually between acts while workers moved the heavy scenery. He developed both a true aim and a sound sense of the theatrical.
In addition, almost everyone liked Frank, for he was a genial, hearty man who refused to smoke, drink, or gamble. In an era when most men indulged in all of these pastimes, Frank Butler stuck to his own beliefs. As far as Annie's family were concerned, only two possible strikes stood against him: he was ten years older than she, and he had been married and fathered two children. The first issue dissipated when Annie's family saw how lovingly he treated her.
The second, however, lays shrouded by lack of information. Frank is usually described as a divorced man at the time he met

 

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Annie, but whether he had already obtained a divorce or did so after meeting Annie is unclear. At the time, the divorce rate in Darke County numbered slightly more than sixty divorces to slightly more than three hundred marriages. Although Frank probably would not have divorced in Darke County, these figures suggest that divorce would not have been foreign to Annie and her family. But, like other Darke County residents of the time, they would have considered divorce dishonorable.
Typically, Annie never spoke of Frank's former wife or child. If she and Frank contributed financially to his earlier family, Annie never commented on it. And if the issue of his divorce troubled her, she never mentioned it. She, and her family, apparently accepted Frank without reservation or regret. In turn, Frank sometimes left Annie with Susan while he toured. Later, Frank and Annie regularly visited Annie's Ohio home and her mother, sisters, and neighbors.
The usual date given for Annie and Frank's marriage is 1876, but this cannot be verified. On the one hand, in Annie's autobiography, probably written during the mid-1920s, Annie gave her marriage date as August 23, 1876. She also claimed that she was fifteen at the time of the shooting match with Frank and that they had been married for nearly fifty years, both of which would support the 1876 marriage date.
Still, no marriage certificate or other documents exist to prove the 1876 date. Some family members speculate that Annie and Frank traveled together before they married and that Annie's niece Fern may have revised Annie's autobiography to disguise this indiscretion. If Fern indeed changed the wedding date to 1876 so that it would appear that Annie and Frank were married while they traveled together, her ruse succeeded; in spite of the lack of documentation, the 1876 date remains widely accepted.
On the other hand, sometime during the 1920s, Annie entrusted her niece Bonnie Patterson Blakeley with a marriage document issued to Frank and Annie on June 20, 1882. It is possible that once again Annie's revised birth date of 1866 demanded revision of other important dates in her life. If Annie had been born in 1866, as early publicity may have claimed, the wedding date of 1876 would have needed to be accordingly

 

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adjusted to 1882; otherwise, Annie would have been only ten years old at the time of her marriage. Thus, it is possible that Annie and Frankwho in the 1882 document, obtained in Windsor, Ontario, Canada, listed themselves as residents of Saginaw, Michiganremarried to support the fiction of the 1866 birth date. The possibility also exists that they remarried because Frank's divorce had not been valid earlier.
At least one of her relatives by marriage, Rush Blakeley, and one of her biographers, Shirl Kasper, however, have assumed that the 1882 date was genuine and that Annie was twenty-two rather than sixteen at the time of her marriage. Certainly, the possibility that Annie and Frank met in 1881 is supportable. Newspaper accounts indicate that Frank Butler played in Cincinnati with a man named Baughman. Butler and Baughman earned brief mention in the
Cincinnati Enquirer
when they decided to join the Sells Brothers Circus. Shortly thereafter, circus posters advertised "Baughman and Butler . . . in a bulls-eye programme of startling, dexterous, critical hits." In 1882, similar advertisements indicated that Frank Butler had gained a new partner by the name of John Graham. Other evidence indicates that in 1882 Annie began appearing with Frank, in which case she would have joined him on the stage almost immediately after their marriage if it occurred in 1882.
Whether Annie married in 1876 or 1882, her life has a gap of six unexplained years. Did Annie, between the ages of fifteen and twenty-one, live at home with her family as a single woman? If so, did she allow neighborhood men to court her, or did she reject the idea of men and marriage until Frank appeared on her horizon? Or was she already a married woman who waited for her husband to return from his theater engagements?
In any case, Annie very likely became restive with the passive, waiting role assigned to women during the late nineteenth century. She probably also longed to escape a life of minimum comforts and little excitement. Certainly, her actions after 1882 suggest that both these suppositions are valid. Annie gradually adopted as a personal cause the need to revise prevailing ideas regarding women in shooting and in show business. She also worked hard to earn and save income that would provide more than a minimum

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