On TV: The Real Annie Oakley

Annie Oakley takes aim (a black-and-white photograph colorized).

(Courtesy of The Annie Oakley Center at the Garst Museum)

It's one of those names we all know, maybe a little vaguely: Annie Oakley. But who was she? Most people today know very little about her; in fact, you may think she’s a myth, a character from Western lore like Paul Bunyan, Pecos Pete, or the Lone Ranger.

Even the musical Annie Get Your Gun, which is supposedly about the real person, twists her life significantly. In it she loses a shooting match on purpose to a male marksman, then marries him; in real life, the 16-year-old Annie both won that match and married her man. And he became her press agent.

The real Annie Oakley was among the best-known and best-loved Americans of her day, perhaps the first female superstar in this country. From 1885 on, for almost three decades, she was at the pinnacle of the entertainment world as an exhibition markswoman. Tonight the real Annie Oakley shoots again, in a one-hour documentary (I am its writer) in the PBS series The American Experience. And she really does shoot—in an almost magical clip of early motion-picture footage made by Thomas Edison in 1894.

Annie Oakley was never a cowgirl, but she sure could shoot. For 16 years she starred in Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show. In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, Wild West shows were a wildly popular form of live entertainment. Real cowboys and real Native Americans rode real horses, chased real buffaloes, and acted out stories about the West in arenas all over the East. Audiences were dazzled and stunned.

What was perhaps the most astonishing act in Cody’s explosion of sound and fury started quietly. A small, almost girlish woman skipped into the arena and waved. Then she began firing bullets. Annie Oakley could throw six glass balls in the air, grab a gun, and explode them all before they hit the ground. And that was not all. She could shoot with her left hand. She could hit targets while holding her gun upside down. She could aim by sighting in a mirror. She could shoot through the center of a playing card at 30 paces, or even split a card held edge-on in two.

Much of her story is a true drama bearing many of the hallmarks of a dime novel from the era. She was born into backwoods poverty; her father died when she was five; she was then sent by her mother to a poor farm and later spent two years as an indentured servant and suffered physical and (probably) sexual abuse. When she finally returned home, she single-handedly saved her family from destitution—at the age of 15. She went on to marry the man she loved and become an enduring star.

So it is that the life of Annie Oakley has all the elements of the basic, mythical American success story. She was hired by Buffalo Bill, adopted by Sitting Bull, admired by Mark Twain and Queen Victoria and Kaiser Wilhelm; she sued William Randolph Hearst in scores of states and won. Most important, she won the hearts of millions.

The story is a familiar one. She was nothing; she became famous and beloved. But behind that simple plot is a character who wasn’t simple. In fact Annie Oakley was rife with contradictions. She symbolized the West for millions (her husband and manager even advertised her as “the Girl of the Western Plains”), but she came from Ohio, and for her entire life she lived well east of the Mississippi. Her fame and fortune derived from her skill with guns, but she was a Quaker. She was a savvy public performer, an enormous star who seemed to adore the limelight, yet by nature she was quiet, modest, and shy. As fiercely competitive as anyone alive, she projected the image of a sweet and gentle soul. She was a curvy little woman, and sexuality was a distinct part of her persona, but she preached every homely value and chaste virtue. She was a feminist heroine who was not a feminist at all. She directly challenged basic male assumptions about women, but she thought it wrong for women to have the right to vote. The authentic Annie Oakley was a genuinely complicated person.

In fact Annie Oakley was as much a paradox as her country itself. The historian Henry Adams famously described late-nineteenth-century America as pairing the Virgin and the dynamo—virtuous purity and aggressive technology. So did America’s leading female entertainer. As the century headed to its last roundup, the frontier West was quickly disappearing. The citizens of an increasingly urbanized United States grew nostalgic for a preindustrial past, when everything (it seemed) had been simpler and better. The Old West became an idealized place where all cowboys were brave straight-shooting men, the only good Indian was a dead Indian ("The only good Indians I ever saw were dead," was what General Sheridan actually said), and all the cowgirls were . . . Annie Oakley. Like Annie herself, the Old West was part fiction and part reality. Perhaps that was why Annie herself passed so readily into the territory of legend. It was the land she (like Buffalo Bill) represented for so many years.

This was the Progressive era, but it was also the Victorian age, a time offering an almost bewildering set of standards, obstacles, and opportunities to women. Even as Annie Oakley blasted apart glass balls, women marched for their rights; yet many, too, stayed cloistered in their rooms, the delicate victims of the vague set of syndromes that were called hysteria. Small wonder, perhaps, that she herself was such a mixed bag, so mixed that this great champion in a man's sport could say, “To be considered a lady has always been my highest ambition.” For Annie Oakley was a legendary figure of both womanly power and female virtue. Yes, all of this was the real Annie Oakley.

—Ken Chowder has written more than twenty documentary films and published three novels.