Introduction
A Heroine for All Time
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The incredible woman who called herself Annie Oakley overcame poverty, prejudice, physical setbacks, and her own inner shyness to become a star shooter and a durable legend. Beginning in 1885, her shooting and riding skills helped draw standing-room-only crowds to open-air arenas, to Madison Square Garden, and to sites throughout Europe. Billed as ''The Rifle Queen,'' "The Peerless Lady Wing-Shot," "Little Sure Shot," and "The Western Girl," she thrilled audiences at home and abroad. She also burned into the public mind a vision of the archetypal western womandaring, beautiful, and skilled.
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Was Annie Oakley really a press agent's dream or simply a press agent's creation? The answer is more the former than the latter, for Annie had the makings of a star even as a very young woman. She quickly learned how to combine talent, skill, beauty, femininity, and humility in one very appealing package. Throughout her career, critics rated her shooting ability as superb and her personality as sweet and unassuming. First the American public, then European audiences, idolized Annie Oakley; they admired her skill as a shooter and respected her attempts to remain a "lady." During an age of accelerating industrialization, war, divorce, and fear of moral decline, people evidently appreciated a shooting star who covered her ankles and calves with pearl-buttoned leggings, set riding and shooting records from a sidesaddle, and did fancy embroidery between shows.
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But Annie Oakley was also a creation. Although she grew up on an Ohio farm long after the frontier had moved west of the Mississippi River, show-business hyperbole turned Annie into a gun-toting woman who hailed from the Old Wild West. Rifles, western-style dresses, boots, and saddles soon became her trademarks. Oakley's fans readily accepted this public persona; their fascination with the American West, their growing nostalgia for open spaces and simpler times, and their fear that the values Annie
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