Annie Oakley was one of the most famous women of the early 20th Century in America. She rose from poverty and became a very accurate sharpshooter. She became the star of a famous traveling Wild West show and counted among her fans Queen Victoria.

She was born Phoebe Ann Mosey in a log cabin in Darke County, Ohio, on Aug. 13, 1860, the sixth of the nine children of Jacob and Susan Mosey. Her father, a veteran of the War of 1812, died when young Phoebe was just 6. Her mother remarried, but he died soon afterward.

When Annie, as she preferred to be called from an early age, was 9, she and her older sister, Sarah Ellen, went to live at the Darke County Infirmary. She learned to sew and also had a basic education in school subjects. She lived there for a year and then went to live another family, who treated her badly.

She had demonstrated a good markswoman's eye early on and had begun to hunt when she was 8. She saw it as a way to make money, to help support her family. Among those who bought the game she took were hotels, restaurants, and shops. By the time that she was 15, she had earned enough money in this way to pay off the mortgage on her mother's farm.

Also in that year, 1875, Annie won her first big shooting competition. A Cincinnati owner named Jack Frost invited Annie to participate in a shooting match against a traveling marksman named Frank E. Butler. One of the stars of the Baughman & Butler act, Buter had such confidence in his abilities that he bet Frost $100 that he could defeat anyone Frost could find to compete against him. Butler and Annie squared off, and Annie won when Butler missed his 25th shot.

Butler was so impressed that he pursued Annie romantically. They were married a year later and lived in Cincinnati. They were on the road a lot, touring together, and it was at this time that Annie took on the stage name of Annie Oakley. (One theory on why she chose this last name is that it was after the name of the Cincinnati neighborhood in which they lived.) She also began to join her husband onstage, after an emergency performance to replace an injured colleague resulted in Annie's wowing the crowd.

The famous Native American warrior Sitting Bull named her Watanya Cicilla, or Little Sure Shot. He also gave her one of his prized possessions, the moccasins that he had worn at the Battle of Little Bighorn.

Annie and Frank joined Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show in 1885. (Sitting Bull was also part of this traveling troupe for a time.) They liked it so much that they stayed with the show for 16 years, a highlight of which was attending the Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria in 1887. Annie met the Queen, and both women said they were impressed with each other. Filled with the travel bug and guaranteed of large audiences, the Wild West Show went back to Europe in 1889, staying for the three years. They performed for six months in Paris alone and then took the show to France, Germany, Italy, and Spain.

Annie's accuracy and novelty made her a top drawing card. She could split cards on their edges, shoot the corks off bottles, and snuff out candles, all while standing back and firing her trusty gun. One of her most famous tricks was facing away from her target, viewing it through a handheld mirror, and then, firing over her shoulder, still hitting the target. Reports of her hitting the target 943 times out of 1,000 were common. Another thing that Annie was quite good at doing was shooting the end off a cigarette in her husband's mouth. On the European tour, she performed the same trick, on a cigarette in the hand of Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm II.

The Wild West show returned to the U.S. in 1892, and Annie and Frank settled in New Jersey. They still toured around the country, performing an average of more than twice a week. The famed inventor Thomas Edison used one of his inventions, the Kinetoscope, a predecessor of the movie camera, to film the show> The Little Sure Shot of the Wild West later showed at movie theaters.

Annie left the Wild West Show in 1902, after suffering serious injuries in a train crash. She soldiered through parial paralysis and five spinal operations and then turned to acting, starring in the play The Western Girl, which had been written for her. She joined another wild west show for a time. She and Frank adopted a dog named Dave, and Dave would join them onstage at times.

She was proud of her marksmanship and of the many awards that she won because of it. She was also proud of having taught more than 15,000 women how to shoot a gun, not only to prove that they could (meaning that it wasn't a man-only thing) but also so they could protect themselves. She also wrote a letter in 1898 to then-President William McKinley, offering to provide the U.S. Armed Forces a group of 50 female sharpshooters for an expected war with Spain. (That war, the Spanish-American War, did occur; McKinley did not take Annie up on her offer.) She made a similar offer in 1917, during World War I, to then-President Woodrow Wilson; she heard nothing and, instead, demonstrated her shooting at army camps around the country, raising money for the Red Cross. She also campaigned for women's rights issues.

Annie and Frank moved twice more, living in Maryland for a time and then in North Carolina. She continued to excel at shooting. When she was 62, she stood 16 feet away and hit 100 clay targets in a row. She suffered injuries in a car accident in 1922 and died four years later, on Nov. 3, 1926. She was 66.