Dorothy Brush "Random Thoughts" Published July 24, 2002

Do you know Annie's real story?

This summer Annie Get Your Gun has been delighting audiences at the Cumberland County Playhouse. Since 1946, Irving Berlin's music and lyrics have immortalized the diminutive heroine's life throughout the world. His fictionalized version is great but so is Annie's true story.

I became interested in Annie because I often traveled U.S. 127 South, which passed through the heart of Annie Oakley country in Darke County, North Star Township, OH. A sign marks the tiny settlement of North Star, a cluster of houses and a store. A little farther along the main route, a large boulder marks the spot where the log cabin of Annie's early days stood. A sign there reads that Phoebe Ann Moses was born here in the hamlet of Willow Dell on Aug. 13, 1860. A short distance south is the small city of Greenville, where each year in July the Annie Oakley Days Festival is held. Here too is the Garst Museum where many of Annie's rifles, wigs and other memorabilia are displayed.

Annie was only 5 when her father died at an early age, leaving her mother and six brothers and sisters. Life had never been easy for the Moses family but with the loss of the father conditions were even worse. Her mother was forced to hire out some of the children. When she was 8, Annie lived with a friend of her mother's who taught her to sew. Through those early lessons she became an expert seamstress and during her professional career she made her own costumes. While on the road during performance breaks she could be seen sitting outside her tent sewing.

Annie was still only 8 when her mother gave permission to a family to hire her. They wrote regularly telling her mother how happy Annie was. In truth she was abused over a two-year period until she ran away and found her way the 40 miles back to home.

Always tiny and frail, she was a hard worker and she kept the family supplied with game through her self-taught skill with her father's old Kentucky rifle. From age 10 to 15 Annie spent hours in the woods hunting, trapping and practicing trick shooting. A Greenville grocer sold all the game she brought him to a fine hotel in Cincinnati. That successful business venture helped pay off the family mortgage.

She was visiting her married sister in Cincinnati when her brother-in-law arranged a shooting match at his gun club for Thanksgiving Day, 1875, between Annie and a visiting theatrical producer who was a crack shot. So it was that Frank Butler came into her life and changed it forever.

Next week's column will follow Annie's life as a star and one of the great love stories of all time.

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Dorothy Copus Brush is a Fairfield Glade resident and Crossville Chronicle staffwriter whose column is published each Wednesday.