Read The Life and Legacy of Annie Oakley Online

Authors: Glenda Riley

Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Women, #History, #United States, #19th Century, #test

The Life and Legacy of Annie Oakley (4 page)

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away?" Annie's loyalty to her mother and her family had gained the frail child scars and marks across her shoulders and back. She was no closer to knowing how to read and write than when she had arrived. And she had only a few sparse belongings to tie up into a bundle. Yet she locked the "wolves'" door and "put the key in a tin cup that set on a shelf in the spring house" before she started toward Woodland.

On that spring day, Annie made her way to the railroad station, where she boarded a crowded car and slid into a seat beside a kindly-looking gentleman who moved over to make room for her. When she told him she was running away and had forty-eight cents, he paid her fare and asked another passenger to put her off at the stop nearest Woodland. Annie later wrote that for the rest of her life, she regretted that she had neglected to ask her benefactor his name before he left the train. "But for years," she said, "I prayed to God each night to keep the good man who helped me get away from the wolves."

Annie walked the rest of the way home. During her absence, her mother's second husband, Daniel Brumbaugh, had died, leaving Susan with a baby girl named Emily. Susan had soon embarked on a third marriage with a widower named Joseph Shaw. Annie liked Shaw; she thought him a good man and a scholar who "was always reading one of his history books." Annie reveled in their warm welcome. But when she learned of her mother's bout with typhoid, her stepfather's bad knee and fading eyesight, and their loss of his land to a scoundrel, she said she returned to the Edingtons to earn her keep and contribute what she could to the family.

Here, according to Annie, one day the "he-wolf" burst into the schoolroom in search of her. She told Nancy Ann Edington of her troubles with the "wolves." "I could not sit down or sleep on my back for over three weeks. I had to milk the cows with my head braced against the cow's flank.'' When Nancy Ann saw Annie's shoulders, she cried out: "Your poor little shoulders and back are still green! How did you live through it?" She instructed her husband and son to throw the "he-wolf'' out, with orders never to return. "That night," Annie wrote, "I slept untroubled for the first time in long months."

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For the next few years, Annie lived first with the Edingtons, then with her own family. Legend says that because Annie had always disliked the name Moses and perhaps had even suffered the cruel taunts of other children regarding her name, she now called herself Annie Mozee. More likely, a long-standing variation in the spelling of the name underwrote Annies choice. The 1860 census for Patterson Township, Darke County, for example, reported the family's name as "Mauzy"; a family Bible dated 1867 spelled the name "Mosey," and the headstone on Jacob's grave near Yorkshire, Ohio, says "Mosey." Annie, who lacked both a birth certificate to supply a spelling and the education to pursue the prevailing spelling in documents, probably heard it as ''Mozee,'' but her brother John chose "Moses."

During her "Mozee" years, hard work and economic privation continued to dominate her life. Yet Annie later remembered these years as the "happy" part of her childhood. Because she had learned that death and cruelty abounded in the world, she cherished the security she found with the Edingtons and her own family. Also, she finally had an opportunity to learn to read and write, thus remedying a deficiency that bothered her greatly. Annie recalled that at the Edingtons, "there was a half-hour of reading aloud each night" and an occasional few hours in the schoolroom. Also, Nancy Ann Edington, who believed that Annie would be "a great woman if given the chance," encouraged Annie. Nancy Ann's son remembered that his mother moved Annie into the Edington family's living quarters rather than allow her to crowd together with the other children and the infirmary's collection of unfortunates.

For the most part, however, Annie had to sacrifice her thirst for knowledge to the need to earn money. She remembered that during her first week after returning to the infirmary, she "went to work on pinafores for the little school girls." She finished two for each child, six baby dresses, and six comforters. What Annie chose to remember from her first months of toil was not the hard work but rather her ability to buy Christmas presents for her brother and sisters. Instead of "the blows on her back given by a cruel Santa" on prior Christmases, she now received a skirt "finished in exquisite needlework" from her mother, hemstitched

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handkerchiefs from her older sisters, and a box of hazelnuts picked by her brother and two younger sisters.

After the holidays, Annie continued to work at the sewing machine and tackled other jobs as well. When the Edingtons asked her to take stock of the goods in the storeroom, she sat "by a kerosene lamp till midnight, listing the things we needed. It was a big job for so young a girl and my heart thumped for fear I could not do it." She concluded her inventory with a personal request. "And please may I have five yards of oil-boiled turkey red [fabric]?" She wanted to make bright cuffs and collars for the little girls' dark dresses; she thought the ''little tots" should have "something pretty." Annie also oversaw the springhouse. With the help of Fannie, an inmate who "had lost her mind because her husband did not keep his marriage vows,'' Annie halted the perennial theft of butter and cream, produced "enough butter for everyone," and "saw that each tot had a glass of milk a day." Annie wrote with pride, "I got a raise that January."

Underneath Annie's cheerful exterior, her own personal needs and desires smoldered. She still feared the "he-wolf" and seemed afraid to return home, thinking that he might seize her there. Today, some of Annie's family members and several residents of Darke County believe that the "he-wolf," or perhaps a hired man named Wolf, had sexually abused Annie and that she suffered from the aftershocks of what some Greenville residents refer to as "molestation" and "rape." Even today, citizens of Greenville who know Annie's story remain divided on this point, some brushing off the charge as a fabrication of a young tomboy who failed to understand what she was implying and others claiming that Annie's employer most certainly sexually misused her. After investigating the matter during the early 1980s, novelist Marcie Heidish not only adopted the latter view but wrote an entire novel organized around the theme of sexual abuse in Annie's life. Heidish, however, has since revealed her own abusive childhood, an occurrence that may have disposed Heidish toward believing in the existence of sexual mistreatment in Annie's life. All that can be stated with certainty is that Annie had suffered and was now trying to make sense of her unhappy experience.

In addition to her fear of the "he-wolf," Annie missed her

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family intensely. Yet Annie seemed to bear no animosity regarding her circumstances. In Annie's day, farm children all over the United States labored at home; their parents also frequently hired them out to other farm families or businesses. Also, family members and friends often offered assistance or sometimes a home to help out an overburdened family or a widow. Unfortunately for Annie, state legislatures had not begun to pass protective legislation for children, and Susan was in no position to provide her daughter with a modicum of school and leisure time, choose jobs carefully for her, or protect her in someone else's home. Consequently, Annie experienced, and learned to endure, hard work and privation.

While with the Edingtons, Annie longed for many other things as well: her home, the woods, the animals, and fresh air. "I was homesick for the fairy places," she wrote, "the green moss, the big toadstools, the wild flowers, the bees, the rough grouse, the baby rabbits, the squirrels and the quail." Finally, Annie decided to return home. She invested some of her savings in two linsey dresses with knickerbockers to match, a coat, heavy mittens, yarn stockings, copper-toed boots, traps, powder, and shot. While many of her contemporaries still played games and sat on school benches at least part of the year, Annie readied herself to work.

Once again, Annie labored alongside Susan in what she called the "struggle to build a little home." Watching her mother save every patch of material and every bit of food reinforced Annie's own growing sense of frugality. Then, when fall came, she disappeared into what she called "the deep, quiet woods." She studied animals' habits, then set and baited her traps. She not only supplied her family with game but sold the surplus to a Greenville shopkeeper named Charles Leopold Katzenberger of the G. A. Katzenberger & Bro. general store for cash or ammunition. Katzenberger, in turn, shipped her produce to hotels in Cincinnati and other cities, which bought all that Annie could supply. According to legend, she was one of the few hunters who shot game through the head, thus supplying meat untainted by bits of lead shot.

If Annie experienced ecstasy, it was in the woods and fields. "Oh, how grand God's beautiful earth seemed to me as I glided

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swiftly through the woods." Annie claimed that she often "shot and wounded many a cottontail with the old single muzzle-loading shotgun, then dropped the gun and run the rabbit down, so that the rabbit might not suffer." Although she was a market-hunter, she maintained that she avoided being what she called a "game-hog." Certainly, in a day when plentiful game roamed the woods, including wild turkeys, geese, pigeons, deer, coons, minks, foxes, muskrats, rabbits, and squirrels, few people even thought about limits, yet Annie tried to exercise caution.

Years later, Annie remarked that she never had an aversion to handling a gun. On the contrary, shooting came easily to her. "I don't know how I acquired the skill, but I suppose I was born with it." As a result, her little business prospered. One Christmas, in gratitude, Katzenberger sent her two boxes of percussion caps, five pounds of shot, and one can of DuPont Eagle Ducking Black Powder. She was thrilled, never expecting to own another can of such fine powder.

Annie's small income proved the family's salvation. In Annie's eyes, her mother had put "two marriages of hardship and poverty behind her," then stepped into a third. Now Annie watched Susan and Joseph, who was going blind, worry as the due date for the mortgage drew closer. Annie laid by nickels and dimes from sales of game, and when the mortgage came due, she placed her savings in Susan's hands. "Oh, how my heart leaped with joy," she remembered, "as I handed the money to mother and told her that I had saved enough from my trapped game to pay it [the mortgage] off!''

Understandably, this high point in Annie's young life later became the stuff of legend and myth. Perhaps as a result of her own publicity, Annie too came to think of herself as a girlhood heroine. Also, time smoothed away the sharp edges of the pain she had suffered. In her autobiography, written shortly before her death in 1926, Annie looked back on her childhood as a "happy" period of her life; she now described her early life as "wonderful days of simplicity."

Had Annie possessed the ability to be more analytical, she might have written about the crucial lessons she had learned as a

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girl. Clearly, Annie had come to understand the basics of adapting, making do, and surviving. She adopted her mother's propensity to save and squeeze, even when unnecessary. Annie also responded to hardship by honing her skills and talentsranging from sewing to shootingfor present and future use. Then, as she discovered that she could survive life's difficult situations, Annie proceeded to pursue her life with enormous self-confidence and pride in her work. When she began to prosper, Annie, recalling her own poverty, spent modestly, saved regularly, and shared her income with others in need, especially poor and orphaned children.

As a girl, Annie had also learned that meanness and anger kill the spirit; thus she looked for the positive or humorous side of every situation. For example, whenever Annie recalled the dangerous scrape that her brother, John, had with an infuriated wild boar, she added a touch of levity. Annie wrote that when the snorting, bristling animal, his mouth dripping white froth, pinned John under the house with no avenue of escape, she helped dig a hole and pull John through. "The angry brute charged," she remembered. "But too late. His nose came through the hole, but we hit it with a heavy spade, and in an hour he slipped out to the road, uttering threats as he went."

Moreover, young Annie absorbed traditional Quaker values. For the rest of her life, she put her family first. Also, she believed in honesty and hard work. She exhibited modesty and humility. And she shared the Quaker persuasion that women could make important contributions.

This last belief would have been reinforced by the fact that Annie grew up largely within a woman's culture. It was Annie's mother, her sisters, and Nancy Ann Edington who nurtured her and proved the stable, continuous figures in her life. As the men in Annie's life faltered, died, or even abused her, the women often stood ready to assist, comfort, or try to protect her. That women could and did indeed endure would have been firmly implanted in Annie's thinking.

In addition to these positive qualities, Annie also developed some negative traits. She tended, for example, to turn inward as a result of her girlhood experiences. Because of her childhood's

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