Challenged by Annie's clients to a prize match with a local shooter, Frank was stunned that his opponent was a petite girl of about 15. Shooting acts were a popular attraction in those days. In five years, so the story goes, she had earned enough money to pay off the mortgage on the family farm.įrank Butler, about 26, Irish, charming and darkly handsome, had been touring as a shooting act for several years before his show rolled into Ohio. Annie sold her game to brokers, who in turn supplied hotels and restaurants. In those days, market gunning was a respectable occupation, although there were probably few women, and fewer young girls working with a muzzle loader and a string of traps. Her prowess as a gunner became local legend. All her long and frugal life, Annie's favorite charities were orphans and indigent girls.īack at home, Annie took up the rifle again, hunting and trapping to feed the family. Eventually, she escaped the Wolves, but the experience left her with permanent physical and emotional scars. Annie, a true Victorian, never spoke about such things. Others speculate that she was sexually as well as physically abused - theories that they use to explain her childlessness. Some biographers attribute her tiny size to this period of malnourishment and ill-treatment. She describes a two-year Dickensian nightmare of endless work, brutal beatings, starvation and virtual slavery. They lied, Annie asserted in her memoirs. From there, Annie was boarded out to a couple she called "He-Wolf" and "She-Wolf." The "Wolves" promised she would be treated as one of the family and be educated, that she would be allowed to shoot and trap. There Annie learned to sew so well that she would someday make all of her own stage costumes. Unable to support her brood, Annie's mother sent her daughter to board with friends who ran the county almshouse.
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