The Life and Legacy of Annie Oakley Read Online Free PDF Page A

hearty man who refused to smoke, drink, or gamble. In an era when most men indulged in all of these pastimes, Frank Butler stuck to his own beliefs. As far as Annie's family were concerned, only two possible strikes stood against him: he was ten years older than she, and he had been married and fathered two children. The first issue dissipated when Annie's family saw how lovingly he treated her.
The second, however, lays shrouded by lack of information. Frank is usually described as a divorced man at the time he met
     

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Annie, but whether he had already obtained a divorce or did so after meeting Annie is unclear. At the time, the divorce rate in Darke County numbered slightly more than sixty divorces to slightly more than three hundred marriages. Although Frank probably would not have divorced in Darke County, these figures suggest that divorce would not have been foreign to Annie and her family. But, like other Darke County residents of the time, they would have considered divorce dishonorable.
Typically, Annie never spoke of Frank's former wife or child. If she and Frank contributed financially to his earlier family, Annie never commented on it. And if the issue of his divorce troubled her, she never mentioned it. She, and her family, apparently accepted Frank without reservation or regret. In turn, Frank sometimes left Annie with Susan while he toured. Later, Frank and Annie regularly visited Annie's Ohio home and her mother, sisters, and neighbors.
The usual date given for Annie and Frank's marriage is 1876, but this cannot be verified. On the one hand, in Annie's autobiography, probably written during the mid-1920s, Annie gave her marriage date as August 23, 1876. She also claimed that she was fifteen at the time of the shooting match with Frank and that they had been married for nearly fifty years, both of which would support the 1876 marriage date.
Still, no marriage certificate or other documents exist to prove the 1876 date. Some family members speculate that Annie and Frank traveled together before they married and that Annie's niece Fern may have revised Annie's autobiography to disguise this indiscretion. If Fern indeed changed the wedding date to 1876 so that it would appear that Annie and Frank were married while they traveled together, her ruse succeeded; in spite of the lack of documentation, the 1876 date remains widely accepted.
On the other hand, sometime during the 1920s, Annie entrusted her niece Bonnie Patterson Blakeley with a marriage document issued to Frank and Annie on June 20, 1882. It is possible that once again Annie's revised birth date of 1866 demanded revision of other important dates in her life. If Annie had been born in 1866, as early publicity may have claimed, the wedding date of 1876 would have needed to be accordingly
     

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adjusted to 1882; otherwise, Annie would have been only ten years old at the time of her marriage. Thus, it is possible that Annie and Frankwho in the 1882 document, obtained in Windsor, Ontario, Canada, listed themselves as residents of Saginaw, Michiganremarried to support the fiction of the 1866 birth date. The possibility also exists that they remarried because Frank's divorce had not been valid earlier.
At least one of her relatives by marriage, Rush Blakeley, and one of her biographers, Shirl Kasper, however, have assumed that the 1882 date was genuine and that Annie was twenty-two rather than sixteen at the time of her marriage. Certainly, the possibility that Annie and Frank met in 1881 is supportable. Newspaper accounts indicate that Frank Butler played in Cincinnati with a man named Baughman. Butler and Baughman earned brief mention in the Cincinnati Enquirer when they decided to join the Sells Brothers Circus. Shortly thereafter, circus posters advertised "Baughman and Butler . . . in a bulls-eye programme of startling, dexterous, critical hits." In 1882, similar advertisements indicated that Frank Butler had gained a new partner by the name