When Annie Oakley’s husband, Frank Butler, gave up eating in the days after her death in November 1926, those close to him understood what was happening. He had spent his entire adult life devoted to her, first as her rival, then as her partner, and finally as her manager. Her passing left a void he could not fill. Within weeks, he was gone too, his body surrendering to grief that had become too heavy to carry.

It was, by any measure, a tragic end to a love story that had begun decades earlier in an Ohio shooting contest—and it would cement Annie Oakley’s legacy not just as a sharpshooter, but as a woman whose life and death moved those around her in ways few could have predicted. Born Phoebe Ann Mosey in 1860, the girl who would become Annie Oakley entered a world of poverty and loss. Her parents, Jacob and Susan Mosey, were Quakers who held pacifism as one of their core beliefs—a principle that would later stand in stark contrast to their daughter’s chosen profession. They raised nine children, though two did not survive infancy, leaving Annie with six siblings, including only one brother.

When Annie was just five years old, her father, Jacob, caught a severe chill during a terrible snowstorm. The exposure developed into pneumonia, and he died shortly afterward. Annie was too young to fully grasp the cause, but the consequences rippled through her childhood. With the family’s breadwinner gone, the Moseys struggled to survive.

Typical gender roles dissolved out of necessity; everyone had to contribute. Annie never had the luxury of attending school. Instead, she learned practical skills to keep herself and her family alive. She quickly developed into a skilled hunter and markswoman, talents that would define her life.

People would later ask her constantly about her first shot, and she was always happy to share the story. At age eight, she claimed, she saw a squirrel run across the family’s yard and stop to rest on their fence. Little Annie picked up one of the family’s guns, aimed, and fired. She insisted the bullet went through the animal’s head from one side to the other.

Even with all the children pitching in, Susan Mosey could not support seven children alone. She made the difficult decision to send two of her daughters, Annie and Sarah Ellen, to the Darke County Infirmary, where they learned practical skills like sewing. Annie spent a few months under the care of the infirmary’s superintendent. But soon, she was moved again—this time into the care of a neighboring family who agreed to take her in as a nursemaid for their infant son, in exchange for room, board, and a weekly wage of fifty cents.

For a girl raised in extreme poverty, the arrangement must have seemed too good to be true. It was. The family lied about paying her wages, and the parents were ruthlessly cruel. They punished her by making her stand outside in the bitter cold without shoes.

Annie endured their terrible mistreatment for two long years, referring to this family as “the wolves” for the rest of her life. Finally, she gathered her courage and ran away. She found a much kinder family, the Edingtons, who treated her fairly. But they were not her real family, and when she turned fifteen, she decided it was time to go home and reunite with her mother and siblings.

By then, she had become entirely self-sufficient. Her marksmanship had improved so dramatically that she was soon able to pay off the mortgage on her mother’s house simply by selling the game she hunted. Now that Annie was earning enough to support her family, she could occasionally enjoy herself. In the fall of 1875, something exciting was happening in the nearby city of Cincinnati.

The Baughman and Butler shooting act had arrived, and according to a local hotel owner, one of the performers was boasting that he could beat any skilled local shooter in a competition—wagering an astonishing one hundred dollars. That man was Frank E. Butler, and he had heard there was a girl in town who supposedly had the skill to defeat him. To his surprise, his opponent turned out to be a fifteen-year-old girl.

The challenge was to hit twenty-five targets in succession. After hitting the first twenty-four, Frank stumbled and missed his final target. He watched in amazement as Annie hit every single one of hers, winning the competition effortlessly. Frank could have been upset.

Instead, he asked to court her. The following year, they married, despite the thirteen-year age difference between them. After marrying Frank, Annie decided to join him on his travels. She was drawn, of course, to the prospect of adventure and money.

As a performer, she left the name Phoebe Mosey behind and crafted a new identity: Annie Oakley. Many believed she chose the surname because the first home she shared with Frank was in the Oakley neighborhood of Cincinnati. But another origin story traced it back to her harsh childhood days. According to that account, when she was alone and dependent on herself, she once found herself without enough money to ride the train.

A kind-hearted stranger named Oakley paid her fare. Annie was well aware that most people underestimated her—not only because she was a woman, but because she stood barely five feet tall. Rather than fight this, she made it part of her persona. A fellow performer and friend, Sitting Bull, would later give her the nickname that stuck: “Little Sure Shot.

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At twenty-five, Annie was ready to move to bigger stages. She and Frank soon joined the famous traveling show, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World. Annie was not the only sharpshooter in the troupe. Another rising performer, Lillian Smith, joined a year later, and the two clashed immediately.

They became fierce rivals, perhaps because they were too similar. Lillian was only fifteen—the same age Annie had been when she started—and this fact irritated Annie more and more. As the press gravitated toward her younger competitor, Annie began telling people she was twenty instead of twenty-six. In truth, Annie had nothing to worry about.

She spent her years with Buffalo Bill’s show perfecting her craft. She amazed audiences with stunts like shooting a cigar from Frank’s mouth or hitting playing cards from their edge and splitting them in half, all from a distance of at least thirty steps. She was theatrical, exaggerating her reactions and blowing kisses to adoring fans. Given that Frank had been in the business long before Annie and performed alongside her, jealousy over her growing fame might have been expected.

Instead, he was entirely supportive, becoming her business manager as her celebrity grew. Annie did not get along with some of her fellow performers, but she formed a close friendship with one in particular. Sitting Bull, the Native American leader widely known for having led his people in rebellion against the U. S.

government, initially underestimated Annie like so many others. But he quickly changed his mind. Impressed by her shooting skills, he immediately asked to have a photograph taken with her, offering to pay sixty-five dollars for the privilege. He believed Annie possessed a supernatural talent.

She was equally impressed by him, and the two grew close—so close that he eventually came to care for her like a daughter. As the years passed, the enmity between Annie Oakley and Lillian Smith became unbearable. At first, the best parts of the work outweighed these problems, but the shine began to wear off. Finally, in 1887, Annie decided to leave the show.

It would not be forever. After a long interval, when Lillian decided to leave as well, Annie returned to Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. Around this time, Annie decided to broaden her horizons. She began a three-year tour that took her to the other side of the world, performing at the Paris Exposition of 1889, where she enjoyed success equal to her fame at home.

In fact, apart from Buffalo Bill himself, she was the highest-paid performer in the show. Her reputation reached across the globe, becoming especially evident when she performed in places like Italy and the United Kingdom, appearing before King Umberto I and Queen Victoria respectively. Most world leaders were content to watch Annie perform and meet her. One, however, wanted to go further.

By then, she had shot a cigar out of Frank’s mouth or hand many times. So imagine her surprise when the newly crowned Kaiser Wilhelm II wanted to see the trick himself. He insisted on being the participant, lit a cigar, and watched as Annie aimed her weapon and fired—reportedly striking precisely the ashes. Even when she returned home, once-in-a-lifetime opportunities kept appearing.

Film technology was still in its infancy, but Thomas Edison had recently introduced his kinetoscope, and Annie appeared in one of his earliest films. Its title was simply “Annie Oakley,” and it featured a compilation of her shooting at several targets, both moving and stationary. Fame brought excitement and wealth, but Annie knew she could do more with both. She wrote to President William McKinley, arguing that women deserved a place in the armed forces, and offered to lead a company of female sharpshooters if America entered a war with Spain.

She also devoted much of her time to training other women in marksmanship, believing that beyond being good for personal discipline, women needed to know how to protect themselves as best they could. By the end of her career, she had trained more than fifteen thousand women. As many expected, including Annie, America soon declared war on Spain. Annie wanted to honor her promise, but her offer was ignored—the United States was not ready for an all-female sharpshooter company.

This did not stop President Teddy Roosevelt from using the name of Buffalo Bill’s show for his volunteer cavalry, calling them the Rough Riders. Despite all the thrilling stunts she performed with her husband, Annie was rarely in real danger. That changed on a fateful day in 1901. While traveling as she had done countless times before, she was involved in a terrible train accident.

She survived, but suffered severe injuries to her back. She recovered over time, but only after five surgeries and a bout of temporary paralysis. Even afterward, she was not the same, though she was not ready to give up. Annie eventually regained the ability to walk and live a somewhat normal life, but she had to face the fact that she could no longer perform the same routines she once had.

With a heavy heart, she left Buffalo Bill’s show for the last time. She did not intend to retire from entertainment completely. Hoping that acting would be easier on her health, she took to the stage in a play called “The Western Girl,” written specifically for her. She had countless fans across America, but Annie was not immune to bad publicity.

One day in 1904, her name appeared in headlines claiming she had a history of drug use and theft. The rumors were completely false, and they originated from the notorious newspaper and magazine magnate William Randolph Hearst. The story grew out of an incident in Chicago, where police arrested a showgirl on similar charges. After her arrest, she told authorities her name was Annie Oakley.

The rumor spread like wildfire before Annie had a chance to respond. Hearst was the first to publish the false story, but because of his monopoly over the press, many other outlets took it as fact without question. It was only a matter of time before the truth came out, and other publications were quick to apologize to Annie and retract the story. Hearst realized the story was a complete lie, but there was no chance he would apologize for his error or face the consequences voluntarily.

In an attempt to further smear Annie’s reputation, he hired a private investigator to visit her hometown and search for anything that could tarnish her good name. After a careful search, the investigator returned empty-handed. Even after all the retractions from various publications, Annie’s reputation had been damaged. This meant she had grounds to sue each of them for defamation—especially Hearst.

Over the next six years, she filed a total of fifty-five lawsuits. Fortunately, she won fifty-four of them. The year 1914 marked the beginning of World War I. During this time, Annie was able to look at the situation with some humor, specifically because of her earlier trick with Kaiser Wilhelm II, who played a major role in the Great War.

Looking back, Annie joked that she could have stopped the entire conflict had she shot the Kaiser instead. According to Annie and Frank, neither of them realized the chain of events the Kaiser would set in motion when they first met him. Frank later revealed that he had actually written to the Kaiser after the war began, inviting him to come and repeat the trick once more—but he never received a reply. Although Annie had long since left Buffalo Bill’s show, she remained determined to stay active in society.

Her idea for the armed forces may not have worked, but that did not deter her from continuing her humanitarian work with women and other causes. What is even more surprising is that even at age sixty, she retained enough skill to break shooting records. She even made an effort to reclaim some of her stardom. While she had continued performing consistently for audiences, Annie had largely retreated from the public eye.

Now she was ready for a comeback. For her grand return in 1922, she planned to star in a silent film and participated in a competition where she hit one hundred clay targets in a row from a distance of sixteen steps. Unfortunately, she was due for another bout of severe misfortune. It turned out that her train accident had not been the last time Annie would suffer such a terrible incident.

In 1922, she and Frank were involved in a very serious car accident. Though they both survived, she injured her leg and required a steel brace. Fortunately, after devoting a year to her recovery, Annie was back on her feet and acting again. Annie tried her best to continue being a performer, but at a certain point, time caught up with her.

A year after the car accident, despite believing she was out of danger, her health began to decline suddenly once again. Over the following year, she suffered from a terrible case of pernicious anemia that weakened her rapidly until she sadly passed away on November 3, 1926. In her absence, Frank was left to deal with the aftermath of her loss. But saying that was easier than doing it.

Since they had met, Frank’s life had been entirely devoted to supporting Annie. Her death left a void in him that he could not overcome. Over the following days, he stopped eating and stopped caring for himself. He eventually succumbed to his grief just a few weeks after Annie’s death.

Some say that after they both passed, the family arranged for her cremation and placed her ashes in one of her many trophies, which was later buried with Frank inside his casket. Annie Oakley’s possessions have been preserved and are enduring the test of time. Visitors can view some of her most prized belongings, her original merchandise, and of course her favorite firearms, displayed in Greenville, Ohio, at the Garst Museum and the National Annie Oakley Center. While history remembers Annie Oakley as one of the greatest shooters and performers of the American West, she left an even greater impact as a philanthropist, fighting for women’s rights and other causes.

This became even more apparent when her partially written autobiography appeared after her death. It revealed that she had donated every penny of her fortune either to her family or to the charities she supported. Annie Oakley’s legacy is a combination of unwavering confidence and shooting prowess, but it is also the legacy of a truly generous character who gave as much as she took.