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Authors: Glenda Riley

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brought Annie satisfaction but no income, an interesting turnabout, since hunting had brought in her first wages. She no longer went into the field as a game hunter, as she had when young; now she sought relaxation and sport there.

Of course, Annie had never given up her first love, hunting. Every time Annie and Frank visited Ohio, they hunted. Irene Patterson Black, the daughter of Annie's half-sister, Emily Brumbaugh Patterson, and thus a niece of Annie's, remembered that during Annie's visits, the family could be assured of a tasty evening meal. When the women brought up the subject of supper, Annie went to the woods and brought down a quail or other small game. She then returned to the kitchen, laid out some newspapers, and plucked the birds, without leaving a feather behind her to litter the table or floor. In addition, Annie cleared her mother's farm of snakes. According to the nearest neighbor, Lela Border Hollinger, Annie hit blue racers and blacksnakes as they sunned themselves on the old wooden fence.

Frank and Annie also hunted in between Wild West performances. On one occasion, she, Frank, and Johnny Baker went hunting and bagged, in Annie's words, "a large hare brought down by Johnny Baker, and a small roebuck brought in by a briar-scratched Annie Oakley." Other times, they downed prairie chickens, rabbits, ducks, and grouse.

Annie and Frank also accepted numerous invitations to hunt. In 1887, for example, they gratefully accepted Englishman R. Edward Clark's invitation to hunt with him. Annie and Frank subsequently spent twelve days roaming over Clark's five thousand acres, "shooting partridges, pheasants and black cock," despite "the latter being scarce and the mountain climbing hard." Rising at dawn to follow the pointers for twelve to fifteen hours and returning to "a hot bath, a delicious dinner," and ''gathering around to open fire in easy chairs to talk over the day's sport and bygone days," all followed by a 9:30 bedtime, was Annie's kind of life.

Then, in 1888, Annie and Frank hunted in Virginia. "We both enjoyed the quail shoot in the Shenandoah valley," Annie recalled. "The shooting was hard enough to bring the blood to our cheeks." She brought down three birds before her guest got off a

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shot and, during the course of the hunt, killed twice as many birds as he and three times as many as Frank.

When, in 1896, Annie and Frank hunted near Hot Springs, Arkansas, a member of the party wrote that Oakley killed quail while others hoisted their guns to their shoulders. He joked that because she shot so rapidly, he twice shot at one of her birds after she had already killed it. In that hunt, Annie killed sixteen more birds than any other hunter.

The following fall, the Butlers hunted in Crowson, Tennessee, where one observer remarked that Annie's shooting in the field "excited a great deal of admiration from all who were fortunate enough to see" this "clever hunter." Tennessee hunter Joe Eakin, who held a record of six dozen quail in one day, said of her, "Miss Annie's so quick with her gun that if you want to get a shot at a bird you must shoot mighty quick or wait till she misses, and that may keep you waiting some time."

Despite her love of hunting and her accuracy, Annie sometimes demonstrated sympathy for her quarries. She recalled that while in Germany, she spent a day hunting on a private preserve where she hoped to "shoot a roebuck." When she entered a five-acre tract of buckwheat, Annie spotted three roebuck just as "they filled their little mouths with the green sweet." Her guide instructed her to bring down the male. But because she always preferred to give the game a fair chance by shooting them on the move, Annie replied, "Not for a million marks." She later remembered, "Just then I gave a low whistle and three little heads went up like lightning, and three pairs of clean little heels were about all we could see as they entered the thick clover.''

Another time, Annie did shoot at a roebuck but failed to make a clean kill. Because she had no more cartridges, she crept into the thicket to help the wounded deer. She grabbed one of its hind legs, then whistled for Frank's assistance. But Frank mistakenly seized her heels, so both Annie and the deer rapidly emerged from the thicket backward.

Like Annie, Frank also loved to hunt and sometimes proved his own brand of cleverness. In 1903, when a band of hunters near Atlantic City, New Jersey, chased down a UMC banner "rising, falling and waving over the reeds," they discovered Frank Butler

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using it to flush out mud hens. Butler immediately supplied them with similar banners and gave out UMC advertising packets to more than twenty hunters in boats.

Of course, hunting also had its dangers. Both Annie and Frank recognized the perils involved in hunting, especially after a stray bullet hit the field clubhouse in Nutley, New Jersey, and another came close to hitting Frank while he hunted in a field nearby. A few years later, Annie, or perhaps Frank if he was indeed its author, included a safety statement in the pamphlet titled
Annie Oakley
. It concluded that anyone handling a firearm carelessly or aiming at a person he or she "did not intend to shoot" deserved to be forever shunned.

To both Annie and Frank, a careful and dedicated hunter was the ultimate sportsperson. Annie liked to relate an incident that occurred when she played in Milan. A telegram to a gun club member on a hunt in Africa advised him, "Your manager has robbed you and skipped." The intense hunter replied: "Cannot leave. Am on the track of a lion."

As a match and exhibition shooter, as well as a hunter, between 1885 and 1913 Annie Oakley established herself in the annals of American sports. The guns, medals, and other memorabilia she and Frank Butler collected at first filled trunks, then entire rooms. Many who viewed Annie and Frank's collection of guns, medals, and gifts ranked it as the finest in the United States and Europe.

As an entertainer, Annie's reputation would have persisted to some degree, but Oakley extended herself beyond the Wild West arena. Thus, she gained widespread respect as a competitor who was also obviously a skilled athlete. These qualities gave her reputation incredible longevity. Since Annie's death, more articles about her have appeared in sports and hunting magazines than in any other type of publication. The premier edition of the
Winchester Repeater
, published in 1986 by the Winchester Club of America, carried just one story about a shooter. That shooter was Annie Oakley.

Moreoever, Annie Oakley, sport shooter and hunter, bridged the world of women and men. With what was then regarded as

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feminine dignity and decorum, Annie operated in a male culture based on guns, shooting, and killing. At the same time, Annie proved herself as competition-minded as any man; she was pleased that she beat Frank Butter in their initial match and delighted that she later bested male competitors or outshot other hunters. Because Annie found it possible to combine sweetness with toughness, and recognized the benefits of doing so, she not only opened the world of sport shooting for herself but worked to slash a wide enough path for other women to follow.

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Annie Oakley, Frank Butler, and poodle George, 1884.
Courtesy of the Annie Oakley Foundation, Greenville, Ohio.

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Annie Oakley with shotgun, ca. mid-1880s. No medals as yet adorn her chest.
Courtesy of the Buffalo Bill Historical Center, Cody, Wyoming.

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Annie Oakley with some of her early guns, medals, and a loving cup, ca. 1887.
Courtesy of the Buffalo Bill Historical Center, Cody, Wyoming.

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A Buffalo Bill Wild West lithograph advertising Annie Oakley, ''The Peerless Lady
Wing-Shot," ca. mid-1890's. Courtesy of the Buffalo Bill Historical
Center, Cody, Wyoming.

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