Read The Life and Legacy of Annie Oakley Online

Authors: Glenda Riley

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

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Annie once explained that she had refrained from giving exhibitions until one occasion when her "love of shooting" finally influenced her to accept an invitation. Afterward, she came to recognize exhibitions as opportunities to "show the world that shooting was a healthful exercise and pastime that might be followed with benefit to health." Of course, exhibitions also brought in extra money, as well as advertising Annie Oakley. Only when working for the Wild West did Annie agree to neither advertise nor charge an entrance fee for her exhibitions. Presumably, Cody and Salsbury viewed Oakley's exhibitions as in direct competition with their show and feared that such exhibitions might siphon away viewers. Probably an opposite principle operated: the more people who read about or watched Annie, the more who also developed an interest in attending a performance of the Wild West.
But Oakley's agreement with Cody caused no major difficulties for her because newspapers gave her enough free advertising in notices and reviews, and the organizers of exhibitions often sent Frank a handsome monetary "gift" the following day. Annie remembered that while in London, she shot many exhibitions at "London fetes," and no one ever mentioned compensation. ''The following day my husband and manager, Mr. Butler, always received a check for 50 pounds, $250." According to Annie, she earned $750 extra in a single week. In other cases, however, Annie shot exhibitions absolutely without charge. In Vienna in 1891, for example, she returned the gift of a purse of gold. She requested that its owner give it instead to the orphans' home that had been the beneficiary of her exhibition.
As with match shooting, Oakley used exhibitions to interest women in shooting. As early as 1888, when the Boston Gun Club issued an invitation to members for a "private exhibition shoot" to be held on April 19, featuring Annie, the invitations explicitly included members' "lady friends." Then the invitations added, perhaps at Oakley's instigation, that "ladies" were ''specially invited to participate" and would receive a "cordial welcome."
As the years passed, Annie increasingly extended special invitations to women viewers and expressed her hope that her feats would encourage other women to take up shooting. But Annie,

 

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always tactful and never strident, appealed to women in a way that would not offend men. As a result, Annie drew large numbers of both female and male fans to her exhibitions, which usually combined skill with her own humorous touches. In other cases, her skill created humor unintentionally, as at the Boston Gun Club in 1888, when two viewers tossed half-dollars in the air for her to mark as souvenirs. The force of her bullets carried the coins into oblivion, and "roars of laughter greeted the disappointed souvenir hunters."
Despite huge crowds and attendant confusion, Annie's good nature usually triumphed. When, in 1896, Oakley shot an exhibition in Greenville, Ohio, one observer noted that the surging crowd strained the resources of the police but contained "over four hundred ladies" who lent calm and charm to the occasion. While Annie shot, a mass of friends and well-wishers jostled her, yet she continued to smile and perform.
Soon, medals and gifts began pouring in. In February 1887, a gun club in Pine Brook, New Jersey, presented Oakley with another handsome gold medal inscribed from "her many friends and admirers." Then, during the summer of 1887 the Notting Hill Gun Club in London gave her a gold medal, the first it ever presented, with an engraving of the Notting Hill grounds on its face and with an inscription on its clasps, "Presented to Miss Annie Oakley by the members of the London Gun Club, June 11, 1887." When Annie later shot in Marseilles, France, she received three medals in three weeks.
Over time, Annie also received a sterling silver tea service, silver loving cups, a set of Limoges china, other Limoges pieces including an umbrella stand, a set of crystal glassware, a dagger in a gold-leaf scabbard, and jewelry, including pins, brooches, bracelets, necklaces, and rings. During the mid-1890s, a countess in Paris unclasped her bracelet, which contained seven handsome Roman mosaics, and gave it to Oakley in recognition of her skill. When Annie gave an exhibition to benefit the orphans' home in Vienna, Baroness Rothschild gave her a heavy link pin, each link encrusted with diamonds.
In response, Annie always gave short but gracious thank-you speeches. At Notting Hill, she proclaimed her enthusiasm for

 

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England and promised to wear the club's medal with pleasure. Usually, however, Annie donned only a few of her medals for publicity photographs and special appearances. True to her word, she always wore her favorite, the Notting Hill medal, with obvious pleasure. But Annie never wore any of the jewelry she received or, for that matter, much of any kind of jewelry. When her fans asked to see Annie's collection of medals and jewelry, Frank began shipping it around the United States and Europe and displaying it. As early as June 1891, he laid out in Belgium a magnificent assortment of gold and silver medals as well as gold brooches, bracelets, and rings, some with diamonds or other stones.
Clearly, exhibition shooting often proved more materially rewarding than match shooting, for a shooter could not lose in an exhibition. Still, exhibitions posed their own difficulties. Among these were the frequent presence of scoffers and doubters. At one Tennessee exhibition, a group of skeptics put their heads together and grumbled that Annie Oakley used artifice to achieve her tricks. They even talked of wagering fifty dollars to prove it. Then they witnessed Annie shoot a meadowlark on the wing, smash a brick tossed in the air, and with her second barrel, shatter a piece of the brick as it fell toward the ground. The knot of critics dispersed, forgot their talk of a fifty-dollar wager, and joined the growing ranks of Annie Oakley fans.
Advice-seekers also hounded Annie and sapped her energy. People who wanted to shoot as well as she did asked her again and again for her opinion. In 1891, she responded: "[Shooting] is just like pointing your finger at the object. . . . Do not look at your gun, but simply follow the object with the end of it."
Around 1900, Oakley admitted that she had often taken lightly inquiries regarding her shooting; she had believed they came from curious people. When she finally realized that such people "really wished to be enlightened," Annie issued a more comprehensive statement. "You must shoot until you overcome confusion at quickly sighting on a moving object," she advised. In other words, a would-be shooter had to practice. Annie continued, ''When the game is flushed you naturally bring the gun to the shoulder, glance along the barrel, aim directly at the game, or make the proper allowance ahead, above, or below, according to

 

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the direction the game is going, press the trigger and feel that you have finished your effort, regardless of the result." She further advised a slow, deliberate shot but explained that she did not mean a "slow, pottering shot," which was little more than a "bad habit.'' Oakley concluded by reemphasizing the necessity of practice, which would, she argued, ''usually make steadiness."
In addition to pressure from advice-seekers, an occasional conflict, such as the one-eye, two-eye debate, engulfed Annie. Although such controversies may now seem petty, they absorbed a good deal of time, energy, and newsprint. They also provide examples of the type of flare-ups that impinged on Annie's personal life and made her long for privacy. The one-eye, two-eye discussion, for example, began innocently enough in 1887 when an ardent shooter raised the question of which was better, sighting with one eye or two. Annie replied, "I will say that I always shoot with both eyes open . . . but I don't mean to say that there are no good shots who shut one eye." Another shooting fan responded that he had tested shooters who claimed they kept both eyes open, only to discover that they actually squinted one eye at the moment of sighting.
At this point, English gunmaker Charles Lancaster stepped in on Annie's behalf. During the summer of 1887, Lancaster had helped Annie overcome her difficulty with the English pigeons called blue rocks, which, according to Frank, flew like "lightning." In Annie's view, Lancaster proved himself "a wide-awake gun maker," for after noticing that she used an American-made gun weighing seven and one-half pounds and measuring a three-inch drop in the stock, Lancaster made her a lighter gun with less drop. Of Lancaster's gun, with its twenty-eight-inch barrel, six-pound weight, light trigger pull, and short stock, Annie said, "The fit is perfection." Lancaster and Oakley became friends, and Annie improved her blue rock scores. Now Lancaster declared that whether a shooter used one eye or two depended on the drop in a gun's stock. He noted that Americans tended to use stocks with a lot of drop, which allowed the gun to come well under the right eye.
Out of this debate came a related dispute, one that must have tried Annie's patience because she finally withdrew from it. The

 

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20-bore dispute erupted from Lancaster's mention of the 20-bore guns he was making for Annie. A London hunter replied that 20-bores were far too light for use in the field. From Berlin, Oakley responded that Lancaster's 20-bores suited her fine and had less recoil than heavier guns. She concluded that she had nothing further to say. "I do not wish to be mixed up in any controversy."
Several of Annie's fans seemed displeased at her defection. As illustrated here, the public's incessant demands on Annie's time and energy may partly explain her occasional retreats from public exposure and her almost obsessive need to keep her life tidy. This dispute also reveals just how much Annie lived in the public eye and how tiring it must have been for her. In this instance, one fan accused her of failing to understand 12-bores and 20-bores. Others spoke out for small bores, whereas still others supported large bores.
Still, Annie held herself aloof. The debate ground to a halt when Annie began to grassor bring downmost of her birds at a distance of twenty-three yards using her new 20-bore guns from Lancaster. After she defeated the birds she described as "little blue streaks of birds that made for the high stone wall like greased lightning," there seemed little left to say against 20-bores.
In spite of such controversies and other drawbacks to exhibition shooting, Annie regularly accepted invitations to demonstrate her skills. Also, sometime during the early 1900s, she joined a rifle squad sponsored by UMC and the Remington Arms Company, firms that eventually merged in 1912. Annie traveled with the UMC squad for a number of years. Probably organized by Frank Butler, the squad consisted of Annie, Frank, and several other men. In 1909, the squad, which then included Annie, Frank, Captain Tom Marshall, who had twice won the Grand American Handicap, William Heer, who held the world's target-shooting records, and George W. Maxwell, who with one arm had won several state championships and the western handicap, drew fifteen hundred people to an exhibition in Bradford, Pennsylvania.
Obviously, Frank shared Annie's love of sport shooting and was widely known among sport shooters. Butler traveled extensively, shot all over Europe and the United States, and twice held the

 

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championship of New Jersey. He was one of the first to use his own shooting as advertising for his company. When Frank resigned from UMC in 1909, the year before Annie went with Vernon Seavers's Young Buffalo Show,
Forest and Stream
stated, "No one's retirement from the professional ranks is more heartily regretted."
After the Butlers joined Vernon Seavers's Young Buffalo Show in 1911, however, Annie gave more exhibitions than Frank, who now returned to his post as her manager. During shows, Annie shot in the company of seventy-eight-year-old Captain Adam Bogardus, who had also returned to the "show" business, but between shows, she gave exhibitions. On March 2, 1912, for example, Oakley shot at the annual Sportsman Show in Madison Square Garden.
Years later, Annie wrote that she had given exhibitions in fourteen different countries. "I have met the enthusiastic shooters of different lands, from the titled nobleman to the person occupying the humblest station in life, and, too, from the lady of royal blood to the rancher's daughter." She was pleased that all "were infatuated with that love of shooting which makes an equality among the shooting fraternity far and near."
Between matches and exhibitions, Annie loved to hunt. As early as 1893, at the height of her fame, Annie admitted, "Truly I long for the day when my work with the rifle and gun will be over with, and when I can take to the field and stream as often as true inclination may lead me there." A few years later she exclaimed, "I have a preference for game shooting, a sport that seems to increase as I grow older."
Perhaps Oakley loved hunting because she began her shooting career as a game hunter or perhaps because hunting allowed her more freedom than did commercial shooting. Or maybe commercial shooting was finally beginning to wear her down. Annie often said that she did fancy shooting only "for the money" there was "in the practice." Then, in 1900 she stated, ''I care very little for exhibition shooting, and only do it as a matter of business." She added, "I love to shoot in the field."
Oddly enough, hunting was the only shooting endeavor that
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