Annie Oakley

NAME: Phoebe Ann Oakley Mozee. She was named Phoebe Ann by her mother, but called Annie by her sisters. Annie promoted the Mozee spelling of the family name. While it has been variously recorded as Mauzy and Moses, Mosey is the version most commonly found in family sources. She took the stage name Oakley, reportedly after Oakley, Ohio.

EDUCATION: Annie did not attend school.

FAMILY BACKGROUND: Quaker parents Jacob and Susan were originally from Pennsylvania. After a tavern fire ended their livelihood as innkeepers, they moved to a rented farm in Ohio. Father, who had fought in the War of 1812, died in 1866 from pneumonia and overexposure in freezing weather. Annie was the fifth of seven children. Her mother remarried, had another child and was widowed a second time. During this time Annie was put in the care of the superintendent of the county poor farm, where she learned to embroider and sew. She spent some time in near servitude for a local family where she met with mental and physical abuse. When she reunited with her family, her mother had married a third time...

For seventeen years Annie Oakley was the Wild West Show's star attraction with her marvelous shooting feats. At 90 feet Annie could shoot a dime tossed in midair. In one day with a .22 rifle she shot 4,472 of 5,000 glass balls tossed in midair. With the thin edge of a playing card facing her at 90 feet, Annie could hit the card and puncture it with with five or six more shots as it settled to the ground. It was from this that free tickets with holes punched in them came to be called "Annie Oakleys."..

Annie Oakley died of pernicious anemia on Nov. 3, 1926, in Greenville, Ohio, at the age of sixty-six.

Additional biography at Women in History; photo via Miss Folly.