Remember Your HERStory

 

Annie Oakley, the famed American sharpshooter and star of Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, was born in 1860 in a log cabin in rural Ohio. She began shooting and hunting at age eight to collect wild game to help support her widowed mother and siblings.

From a young age she performed shooting acts at circuses and shows and, over time, Oakley became one of the first global superstars renowned worldwide for her incredible skill. One of her most famous feats was splitting a playing card, edge-on, and filling it with holes before it hit the ground at 90 feet using a .22-caliber rifle.

Oakley championed women's right to education, as well as taught an estimated 15,000 women how to shoot for purposes of hunting, exercise and recreation. As she once said, "God intended women to be outside as well as men, and they do not know what they are missing when they stay cooped up in the house.”