Forget the anthem from Annie Get Your Gun, the Broadway musical, that “You can’t get a man with a gun.” That was way too easy a target. The real Annie Oakley could nail the edge of a playing card. Backward. With either hand. And she got the man, too.
Five-foot-nothing, with big eyes and a quiet voice, Annie Oakley acted like a lady. She could also shoot out a cigarette held between Kaiser Wilhelm’s fingers. Or the pips on a playing card. Oakley literally made her name (she was born Phoebe Ann Mosey) in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West extravaganza. But that should not obscure the fact that she was also an extraordinary athlete in an era when the idea of a woman making a living through sports was unknown. And she is one of the few women, then or since, who not only competed with men on an equal basis, but creamed them. Her fellow sharpshooters had to concede her excellence. Before she was 20, she was barred from local turkey shoots because she won them all. Later she was regarded with awe in both Europe and the United States, where she instructed army sharpshooters. Although Oakley’s heyday was in the 1880s and 1890s, she was still shooting well into the twentieth century; in her sixties, she could hit a hundred clay targets in a row. This deluxe .22 caliber target rifle dates from around 1910.
For those who still aren’t sure that Annie Oakley counts as an athlete, consider the following feat. She would put her shotgun on the floor about 10 feet away from a table. When her husband, Frank Butler, released the clay target, she would jump over the table, pick up the shotgun, and blast the target before it hit the floor. She could also pick off glass balls with her shotgun while standing on the back of a running horse.1 Looked at this way, Annie Oakley might be America’s first great female professional athlete—and 120 years later, still one of the finest.