A walk through some of the most badass women in history wouldn’t be complete without women who are equally infamous as they are famous. Two names that immediately conjure up images of the old west are Annie Oakley and Calamity Jane. They were two capable gun-toting females that refused to take orders from anyone or let their gender define them.
Annie Oakley
Annie Oakley, born Phoebe Ann Moses, was born on August 13, 1860, in Ohio. Throughout her childhood, things were pretty meager for her family, with her mother being twice widowed. As a youngster, she started using her deceased father’s old Kentucky rifle to hunt small game for the local grocery store, who in turn sold the game to hotels in Cincinnati, as a way to help support her family. She did so well that at the age of 15, she was able to pay the $200 mortgage for her mother’s house.
When well-known marksman Frank E. Butler came to Cincinnati, Jack Frost, an owner of one of the hotels that had bought her hunted game, invited her to enter a shooting contest against Butler. Butler offered challenges while on tour for a local shooter to compete against him. Annie entered and won the match by making 25 hits in 25 shots, one better than Butler. The two were enamored with each other and were married in August of 1876.
On May 1, 1882, Frank’s usual partner was sick, so Annie filled in. This marked the first time they appeared in the show together. While on stage together, she would hold objects for Frank to shoot. She also did some shows of marksmanship herself and adopted the stage name of Annie Oakley. Over the next few years, the couple toured the country with their shooting exhibitions. It was at one of these shows that Annie met Sitting Bull.
It was March 1884 when the pair met in Minnesota. Sitting Bull was impressed with Annie’s shooting abilities, among other attributes. Sitting Bull was the one who dubbed Annie Oakley, “Little Sure Shot.” After a brief stint as a part of a traveling circus and on their own, the Butlers joined Buffalo Bills Wild West show in 1885. As a part of this show, Annie became the star of the pair heralded as the “Champion Markswoman,” while her husband was happy to be her assistant and manager. They stayed with the show for 17 years.
During her time with the Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, the group toured England, where Annie added to her shooting medals, awards, and trophies in 1887. In 1889 the show returned to Europe, and they had a six-month exhibition in Paris and then went on to other areas where Annie earned star billing. Through her popular performances, Buffalo Bill made the most of her celebrity power to show that shooting was not too intense for women or children.
The Butlers left the show in 1901, partly due to Annie’s back injury from a serious train accident and a shared desire to travel less. But she continued to perform in various shows and signed on to be a representative for the Union Metallic Cartridge Company in Connecticut. In 1913, they retired from the show arena and settled in Maryland.
Retirement didn’t come easy for Annie. In 1917, Annie and Frank relocated to North Carolina, the same year that Buffalo Bill Cody passed away. During the years of World War I, Annie offered to raise a regiment of woman volunteers to fight in the war, but the offer was turned down, in addition to the offer to teach marksmanship to the troops. She volunteered to help through various organizations during wartime.
After the war, in 1922, Annie was trying for a comeback, drawing large crowds in major cities, and even garnering a role in a motion picture. But before she could begin filming, however, she and Butler were severely injured in a car accident. While both survived, it was a long road to recovery, and the comeback didn’t come to fruition. In 1925, the pair moved to her hometown in Ohio and she began to write her memoirs. Annie’s life of quietly proving she was as good or better than most men ended in November 1926 when she passed away of natural causes. Her husband of 50 years died three weeks after her.
Calamity Jane
Calamity Jane was known as one of the rowdiest frontierswomen of the American West. She was born Martha Jane Canary in May 1852 in Missouri, and from an early age, she loved the outdoors and riding horses. When she was just a teen, her parents, five younger siblings and Jane migrated to Virginia City, Montana. En route to Montana, Jane spent most of her time riding horses and hunting with the men of the caravan, becoming a remarkably good marksman and a fearless rider.
Soon after arriving in Montana, her mother passed, and her father passed the following summer. Eventually, Calamity Jane decided to relocate to Fort Bridger, Wyoming with her siblings in 1868.
In 1870, Jane joined General George Armstrong Custer as a scout at Fort Russell, Wyoming, and wore the uniform of a soldier. This was the beginning of Jane’s habit of dressing like a man. The campaign headed south to Arizona to relocate Native Americans to reservations. Jane said that during this time, she was the most reckless and daring rider and one of the best shots in the West.
She went back to Wyoming in 1872 and was ordered to be a part of the Muscle Shell Indian outbreak. The campaign would last until the Fall of 1873 and involved Custer, Nelson Miles, and George Crook. This was where she reportedly earned her nickname of “Calamity.” Over the next few years, Jane spent time at Fort Custer and Fort Russell and ultimately ended up in the Black Hills where the soldiers would protect the settlers and miners from the Native hostilities.
In the spring of 1876, she was on the move again, this time ordered north with General Crook to join the other soldiers at the Big Horn River. During the trip, she fell sick after swimming the Platt River near Fort Fetterman and was hospitalized for two weeks to recover. When Jane did recover, she headed for Fort Laramie where she met Wild Bill Hickok on his way to Deadwood, South Dakota. With a shared reputation for being heavy drinkers and spinners of elaborate tales, the two hit it off quickly. Jane joined their journey and arrived in Deadwood in June 1876.
After her arrival in Deadwood, Jane worked as a Pony Express rider carrying the mail between Deadwood and Custer, 50 miles of some of the roughest trails in the Black Hills area. After her stint with the Pony Express, she stuck around Deadwood, visiting many camps in the area, and even prospecting at various mines. Jane helped in town during the smallpox outbreak and was said to be a great humanitarian in the area.
Don’t be fooled, though. Jane was still a rough gal to have around. In one instance at the Lynne Opera House, Jane didn’t like how a play ended, so she stood up and spat a stream of tobacco juice that landed on the star. Her associate or boyfriend, Arkansas Tom, laughed and started to shoot out the lamps of the theater. The theatergoers apparently didn’t mind the antics as it was said they went wild with delight. The pair marched out of the theater, arm-in-arm before he was killed the following day in a bank robbery.
Jane’s exploits continued on into the late 1870s when she delivered a stagecoach to Deadwood after the driver was wounded by pursuing Native Americans. Then she rounded out the decade with some prospecting and driving mule trains between Fort Pierre and Sturgis. She had also garnered attention from several magazine writers, with one dubbing her “The White Devil of the Yellowstone.”
Never one to settle for too long, she was on the move by 1882 into Montana, California in 1883, and Texas in 1884. She met and married Clinton Burk, a native Texan in August 1885 and had a child with him on October 28, 1887. They left Texas in 1889 and moved to Boulder, Colorado where they owned a hotel until 1883. Over the next three years, the family would move between Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Washington, Oregon, and South Dakota, trying to sell her life story where she could.
Jane’s skills as a marksman and a rider earned her a spot in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show in 1895. She performed sharpshooting demonstrations while on horseback while the show toured through Minneapolis, Chicago, St. Louis, and Kansas City. While on tour, she brought the wild to the show and managed to get drunk and get fired from the show without much fanfare. This would be a theme for her for the rest of her life.
Jane returned to Deadwood for the last time in 1903. By August of that year, she was at the end of her battle with alcoholism and passed on August 2 of that year. One of her dying requests was to be buried next to Wild Bill Hickok in Deadwood. The funeral was the largest to be held in Deadwood for a woman. Thus ended the life of one of the loudest, alcohol-loving, foul-mouthed women of the West. She spent her life on her terms and eschewing the gender norms of the time, opting to spend her time with men and hunting or mining, even if some of her exploits were heavily exaggerated.
The incredible stories and lives of these women have become a thread in Americana, sometimes exaggerated and sometimes romanticized in the telling. Regardless, these women forged their own trails, making their own rules as they went, and changed the course of their lives and the lives of women that came after them.
