Annie Oakley: the One and Only

You'll be pleased to know that my Annie Oakley impersonating days are long over.

Born August 13, 1860 in Patterson Township, Ohio, in a log cabin, Phoebe Ann Oakley Mozee was dealt a tough hand in her early life but she overcame enormous obstacles to achieve fame and an abundance of awards throughout her life. 

An alternate spelling of her name is Mosey and as you may know, around here moseying is a very popular way of getting from point A to point B whenever the opportunity arises in these fast-paced times. But the prevalence of moseying is lamentably sparse, you might say, thanks to our speed needs.

Annie Oakley 1860--1926:

Ann's parents were of the Quaker persuasion, and her father, Jacob, who had fought in the War of 1812, died of pneumonia in 1866 after suffering from exposure in freezing weather.  I'm not sure how his Quaker beliefs factored into his War service but he would be the one to ask, I imagine.

Perhaps he had no choice in the matter.

So Ann's father passed away, leaving his wife with several children and little or no choice but to find another man...I would also imagine.

Well, her mother remarried only to become widowed a second time, and it was then that Ann, called Annie by her several siblings, was put in care of the superintendent of the county poor farm. Yet she was given sewing and embroidery lessons while living there...that's something helpful at least.

After some time spent with a local family in near-servitude with mental and physical abuse thrown in for bad measure, Annie returned to her own family where her mother had remarried--number three.

Now Annie had begun shooting game at age 9 to help feed her ma and siblings, so by the ripe old age of 16, she was an excellent markswoman. She traveled to Cincinnati to enter a shooting contest which she won by one point--and the next-best shootist became her husband for she stole his heart, they say.

So apparently you can get a man with gun, in spite of what Herbert and Dorothy Fields put into their popular musical, Annie Get Your Gun, in 1946. One imagines that the script was partially based on Annie's mother's travails in getting (and keeping hold of) a man. I'm not sure if she was a good shot or not.

Well, Annie and her husband, Frank Butler, were with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show for 17 years and Annie was the star attraction, racking up many awards along the way.

She also had a soft spot in her heart for orphans and widows, and was generous and kind-hearted toward them--a good example for our troubled times. 

Well, it seems Chief Sitting Bull was a prophet of sorts--he had nicknamed her Little Sure Shot when she was a five-foot-tall kid, and she was just that, for sure and then some.

And considering all those cigarette ashes she shot off the end of her husband's cigarettes in the Wild West Show--well, today, it'd be the 600+ chemicals in the cigarette smoke that got 'im...but Annie never did! She's well-out of the second-hand smoke, too, I might add.

Perhaps I seem to be taking pot-shots at Annie Oakley, pardner, but I don't mean it thataway.

She was a real heroine in my childhood when there weren't so many feminine heroes around for little girls to emulate...

...unless you pined  to spend your days baking cookies, pies, and cakes with Betty Crocker in your Easy Bake Oven. Now I loved my Easy Bake, but let's face it--a light bulb heating source loses its excitement after a couple of weeks of s-l-o-w cooked raw-in-the-middle goodies which mom can create with ease and aplomb. And moseying isn't always appropriate in the kitchen especially since you have to know when to fold 'em when you're home on the range.

That's why, between watching Roy Rogers, Tex Ritter, Gene Autry, Zorro, and the Lone Ranger on tv, I just had to have an Annie Oakley outfit for my very own, as you see pictured here.  These photos just came to light last evening--I haven't had a gander at them in years. You can see the resemblance, can't you?

And yet my parents waited a bit too long on buying the guns and holster to go with my gen-u-wine outfit so I had to settle for Roy Rogers guns which, as it turned out, gave me some smidge of cache with the boys in the neighborhood. I was packin' the same heat they were packin' and had some amount of good eyesight to go with it. Watch out, sidewinders!

Here you see me "threatening" our springer-cocker spaniel mix, a brilliant puppy dog, if there ever was one, named Andy who was just my age and about twice as smart. This mock-Western gambit was instigated by my older brother who was holding the camera and who had the dastardly ulterior motive of ambushing me for my little red wagon, the varmint.

But it's now 2006:

And did you know they hold an Annie Oakley Festival in these modern days in Greenville, Ohio?

http://www.annieoakleyfestival.org will tell you all about it: they have a Parade, Antique and Collectible Markets, a Bingo Breakfast (yee-haw!), a Shooting Contest (smoke 'em if ya got 'em?), and more.

Now Greenville is in Darke County where Annie was born, but they'll leave a few lights on for ya, pardner, if ya need 'em to see those ashes--and that dime tossed 90 feet into midair as Annie used to do.

And when you hit that dime, hit it for Annie, okay?

Just take your time and squeeze the trigger real s-l-o-w now, ya hear?

(Annie Oakley image from above-mentioned website)