Annie Oakley and Stagecoach Mary: Wild West Gunslingers

Up until her death in 1914 at the age of 82, Old West badass "Stagecoach" Mary Fields had a standing bet at her local saloon: Five bucks and a glass of whiskey said she could knock out any cowboy in Cascade, Montana with a single punch. After the third or fourth fool tried to take her up on it, nobody ever had the guts to do it again. In this week's episode author Ben Thompson and professor of history Dr. Patricia Larash talk about Stagecoach Mary and Annie Oakley,  two of the fastest guns in the old west. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Badass of the Week is an iHeartRadio podcast produced by
High five Content.

Speaker 2 (00:06):
The young woman lifts up her rifle. She points it
at her husband. He holds perfectly still. He has just
lit a cigar and he holds it between his teeth smattering.
He doesn't say a word. Will she shoot? She narrows
her eyes, focuses down the iron sides of her winchester,

(00:30):
waits for the pause between breaths, and pulls the trigger bag.
The crowd goes wild. Annie Oakley, sharpshooter Extraordinaire, has once
again shot out a cigar from the mouth of her husband.
This is just one of many daring and dangerous feats
she routinely performs on a nightly basis for average Americans

(00:54):
and European royalty alike as the star of Buffalo Bill's
Wild West Travel Show. But Annie Oakley is more than
just a crack shot with a thirty odd to six.
She's an international celebrity, the closest thing the Old West
has to a movie star, And every time she put
six rounds through the center of an ace of spades,

(01:16):
she's using her influence to make a meaningful impact across America.

Speaker 1 (01:25):
Hello and Welcome back to Badass of the Week. My
name is Ben Thompson and I am here as always
with my co host, doctor Pat Larish. Pat. This is
an episode that I've been very excited to do for
a while.

Speaker 2 (01:38):
Me too. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:41):
We've been planning this one for a while and we
wanted to do like an old West episode, like some
cool cowboys stuff, and we found two characters that I
think fit really well together in this way.

Speaker 2 (01:54):
Even though on the surface they might not look connected.

Speaker 1 (01:59):
Yeah, And that's kind of what we want to get
into with this episode, which is we're going to be
talking about Annie Oakley, who was one of the most
famous performers and entertainers in wild West history. She was
a frontliner for Buffalo Bill's wild West Show. And we're
going to talk about a less well known nineteenth century
woman with a gun in stagecoach, Mary Fields, who is

(02:22):
probably among the most badass employees in the history of
the United States Postal Service. And it's going to be
really fun, I think as we go through this, because
that they have very similar the time periods in which
they're operating matchup very well.

Speaker 2 (02:39):
Yeah, we can take a moment in time and say Okay,
what's Annie Oakley doing? And meanwhile, what's stagecoach Mary up to?

Speaker 1 (02:47):
Yeah, and the stories go together really well because we're
going to be kind of traveling through this wild West
time period and we're going to be visiting two women
who are similar in a lot of ways, but different
in just as many Structuring this episode was a little
bit of a fun challenge. I enjoyed kind of structure,

(03:12):
and I hope that it is something that you guys
are going to enjoy. So when we come back, we
are going to talk about two women of the Wild
West who knocked down every barrier that was put in
front of them and destroyed anything that tried to stop
them and anybody that tried to stop.

Speaker 2 (03:30):
Them, whether it's literal or metaphorical exactly.

Speaker 1 (03:33):
And the way they went about doing this, as we'll see,
is very different. Both of their stories are amazing and interesting,
and we're going to get into it after this.

Speaker 2 (03:53):
Hey, welcome back. Let's talk about Annie Oakley. Annie Oakley
got her start in rural western Ohio, providing for her
modest Quaker family, including six surviving siblings, and this was
after her father died when she was only five. Family
didn't have many resources. The way Annie tells it, at

(04:13):
age eight, she had her first shot and she saw
a squirrel running after a hickory nut. And that was
the last hickory nut that squirrel ever went for. And
as Annie put it later, it was a wonderful shot,
going right through the head from side to side. So
sounds like a clean shot to me.

Speaker 1 (04:30):
Sounds like a clean shot. But it's interesting to me
that eight year old Annie Oakley, And you said she's
from Ohio, So we're picturing an Ohio farm in eighteen
sixty and this eight year old girl sees a little
squirrel running after a hickory nut, and she thinks, man,
I got to blow that squirrel's head off.

Speaker 2 (04:49):
Apparently, yes, that's apparently. That must have been a thought
that went through her head. And I do wonder if
she was thinking that she might be able to provide
for her family. They didn't have many resources. You know,
maybe they ate the squirrel.

Speaker 1 (05:03):
Yeah, they ate Oh, they ate it, I think. So.

Speaker 2 (05:05):
I don't know about this particular squirrel, but she did,
you know, young Annie, or I guess Phoebe was her
birth name. Young Annie did trap and shoot a lot
of animals to support her family. And also she was
such a clean shot that she could sell the animals,
some of the animals that she.

Speaker 1 (05:23):
Shot for me for the pelts and stuff too. Yeah, yeah, okay,
all right, so this is a little different than I
think a farm life in eighteen sixty Ohio is probably
a little different than city life in twenty twenty three,
I would imagine. So well, yes, so okay, so she
ate it or she sold it, sold its pelts or yeah, yeah,

(05:46):
she's helping out because you said that the father was
dead and there's several other siblings.

Speaker 2 (05:50):
And all right, yeah, they're, yeah, trying to make the
most out of what they could. Yeah, and she was
such a clean shot. She would shoot these animals through
the head and that would save the rest of the pelt,
saves the rest of the meat without any of that
pesky bullet stuff messing it up. So yeah, Now, her
early life was rough. At age nine, she was quote

(06:13):
bound out to a family which was sort of like
being in a foster home, sort of being some sort
of a servant. They treated her miserably. She never ever
ever named these people by name. She just called them
the wolves. That doesn't sound good, and she hated them.
She survived. When that was over, she was able to
go back to her family, and she trapped animals and

(06:36):
actually was able to pay off their mortgage by age
fifteen from hunting animals and selling Yeah. Wow, yeah, sell
selling the meat.

Speaker 1 (06:46):
Yeah, that's amazing.

Speaker 2 (06:47):
Yeah, good for her. Now, I don't know, I don't
know what real estate was like in rural Ohio back
in eighteen sixties or eighteen seventies.

Speaker 1 (06:54):
It's the time period where like your farm and all
of the seventy five acres that it exists cost twenty
five dollars. But people don't make that if they work
for fourteen years exactly.

Speaker 2 (07:05):
Yeah, and they had a mortgage, and young Annie was
just so proud that she was able to contribute to
her family and pay off the mortgage. Now, also going
on around this age, according to some reports, and then
the sources are a little bit inconsistent on exactly how
old Annie was when, because maybe Annie herself was a
little inconsistent about her age when she talked about her age.

(07:28):
But I'm just going to roll with this and tell
the story. Yeah, let's go with let's go with what
we got. Yeah, as all historians must. Yes, So it's
Thanksgiving Day in the year eighteen seventy five in Cincinnati, Ohio,
and hey, guess what something exciting is going on? The
Voman and Butler Traveling Show was giving a show in Cincinnati,

(07:49):
and one of the performers, sharpshooter frank E. Butler, was
feeling mighty fine about his skills with a rifle, and
he did something that he often did when the show
rolled into town. To drum up a bit of buzz
for the show. He goes and, you know, find some
local person here, local hotel owner Jack Frost, which is

(08:11):
his real name as far as I can tell, and
he wagers. He says, okay, mister Frost, here's one hundred dollars.
It says, I can be any fancy shooter from roundabouts
you care to put him against me? That was one
hundred dollars. It went a lot farther in those days,
and this wager attracted a lot of attention. Mister Frost,

(08:32):
who's a he's a hotel owner. He says, okay, all righty,
mister Butler, you're on. So mister Frankie Butler shows up
at the arranged place in time, and he's probably expecting
to see me. You know, maybe some men from the
area who were good with a rifle, you know, good enough,
you know, so Butler could put up just the right
amount of competition, maybe pay them some well earned compliments

(08:54):
on their shooting, and then win graciously, and then maybe
see them later that day in the audience at the
Woman and Butler Traveling Show. So that's what Butler might
be expecting. He shows up and it's a fifteen year
old girl, one miss Annie Mosey, not one inch over

(09:15):
five feet And.

Speaker 1 (09:16):
You said her real name is it is Phoebe?

Speaker 2 (09:18):
Yeah, Phoebe, Yeah, Phoebe Mosey, Annie Oakley. The name we
know her by was her stage name, and I think
even it's a little hard to pin down exactly what
her original birth name was.

Speaker 1 (09:31):
So yeah, as with many things, Yeah, it seems it
seems like there's a different A stage persona is a
little different.

Speaker 2 (09:38):
Yeah. And also, you don't even have to be famous
to have like your official birth certificate name and then
have a nickname that people in your family call you
that might have nothing to do with anything.

Speaker 1 (09:47):
That's totally allowed.

Speaker 2 (09:48):
Yeah. Yeah, so here she is. Annie's standing there, And
Butler said later, I was a beaten man. The moment
she appeared for I was taken off guard. And they
have their rounds, and twenty five rounds later, Miss Annie
is a batting one thousand or.

Speaker 1 (10:05):
Whatever the expression is. He didn't miss.

Speaker 2 (10:09):
Well, I guess we're not actually playing baseball here, but yeah,
she did not miss. She did not miss. And on
his twenty fifth round, mister Frank Butler raises his gun,
he shoots, he misses, and loses the match, and he
kisses that one hundred dollars goodbye, but it may have
been the best hundred dollars he ever spent. Young Miss

(10:32):
Annie is very clearly the winner of the match, and
Butler has the presence of mind to offer Annie and
her family comp tickets to the night's show.

Speaker 1 (10:42):
So we now are going to change gears for a
second and talk about the other badass we want to
talk about on this show tonight. We're talking about Annie Oakley,
but we're going to talk about somebody who is similar
in a lot of ways but different in a lot
of ways, and that is a woman named stage coach Mary.

(11:04):
It's a few years after Annie Oakley defeats Frank Butler
in the shooting match. We're in Cascade, Montana in eighteen
eighty four, and a woman named Mary Fields has a
standing bet at the local saloon five bucks and a
glass of whiskey, says she can knock out any cowboy

(11:25):
in town with a single punch. It's kind of Frank
Butler's thing about I can outshoot anybody for one hundred bucks.
This is I can knock you out with a single punch,
and if I do, you give me five bucks and
a shot of whiskey. After the third or fourth time
somebody tried to take her up on it, nobody ever
had the guts to do it again. So much like

(11:45):
Annie Oakley stage coach, Mary Fields, we don't know a
lot about her before the time at which she becomes
famous and well known and local celebrity. She's almost too
badass for a BackStar. The best guesses say that she
was born probably around eighteen thirty two, although the actual

(12:05):
date of her birth is such a mystery. That all
of the schools in Cascade, Montana and businesses and things
would close every year on her birthday to celebrate it,
and they'd have a big party for Mary Fields. And
this happened twice a year, usually once around October and
once around May.

Speaker 2 (12:24):
Wait, so which one was her birthday?

Speaker 1 (12:26):
Oh, we don't know. Nobody knows. Nobody has an answer
to this. We don't know the year, We don't know
the day. But we do know that Mary Fields she
spent the first thirty years of her life as an
enslaved person in Hickman County, Tennessee. She spent some time
working on a Mississippi steamboat. And we know very little
more about her. She is about six feet tall, two

(12:49):
hundred pounds. She's kind of built like a bulldozer African
American woman, and she kind of rolls into the town
of Cascade, Montana, in eighteen eighty four with a six
a work apron and a Flaska whiskey, a ten gage
shotgun and a home rolled cigar clenched between her teeth,
just kind of daring anybody to say something about it.

Speaker 2 (13:09):
You're looking at me, kid like that kind of.

Speaker 1 (13:10):
Thing, exactly just what you do? You? What do you
got a problem? Do we have a problem here, No, ma'am,
we do not. We do not have a problem. Nobody
has a problem with stage coach Mary Well. A couple
people do, and they will regret it, and we'll get
to that in a second. She goes on to be
a United States Postal employee, and she's probably the toughest
mail carrier in history. She's a Montana legend, and she

(13:34):
is just kind of one of the more over the top,
larger than life figures from the history of the Old West,
much like Annie Oakley, but in a very different context
and in a very different way than Annie Oakley was.
Mary had come to Montana from Toledo, Ohio, which is
where Annie Oakley and the state where Annie Oakley was
living at the time, and she'd been working as a

(13:55):
carpenter at a Roman Catholic convent there. Apparently, like one
of her good friends from the convent, Sister Amadeus, which
I think is a cool name, Sister Amadeus had come
out to Cascade to open a school for girls of
the Blackfoot tribe, and then that was going okay, but
then Sister Amadeas got sick with pneumonia. So Mary came

(14:16):
out to Cascade, Montana to help out with the school,
help out with basically anything that needed doing. She made
nine dollars a week chopping wood, digging holes. She built
a schoolhouse with a chapel basically, you know, by herself
with a hammer and nails kind of thing. That's impressive,
totally impressive. She tended the chickens, she maintained the convent garden.

(14:40):
She famously swear to people all the time. She was very,
very famous for us.

Speaker 2 (14:45):
She swored people in a convent.

Speaker 1 (14:47):
Yes, this is yeah, this is a very stagecoach Mary thing.
We're gonna get into it a little more. But the
saying around the convent and the girls' school was God
help anyone who walks on the lawn after Mary has
cut it. So at this point, she's kind of in
her fifties, we think, and she was making these one

(15:09):
hundred plus mile supply runs out to Helena, Montana to
pick up food and medical equipment and all of this stuff.
And she's stage coach Mary. She's riding a stage coach
or she's riding on horseback. And this is the eighteen
eighties when things are dangerous. But she goes out and
she does it, and she kind of this girl's school
and this convent are running because basically off the elbow

(15:31):
grease of stage coach Mary Fields.

Speaker 2 (15:33):
Yeah, and so she's taking all this bad ass y
and using it to help people.

Speaker 1 (15:38):
Yeah, yeah, she like legitimately does good works and charitable
works and helps people. But at the same time she's
also swearing like a sailor and drinking whiskey and punching
people on the head. So you know, that's kind of
a kind of person you want on your side, I think.
So she was doing these big long runs to Helena

(15:58):
to pick up supplies and stuff and bring it out
to Cascade. One of the more famous stories of her
making these runs out to Helena, Montana. And like we said,
like you mentioned, she's picking up you know, food for nuns, right,
but she's riding out it's nighttime, and this pack of
like desperate wolves come running out and attack the horses
that she's driving. This is just a thing that happened

(16:23):
when you were in the middle of nowhere in Montana
in eighteen eighty five. When you drive through Montana now
in the middle of the night and there's no street lights,
you're scared. But like in the old days when you're
these wolves just would attack your horses and maul them.
And that's what happened. These wolves come out and they
maul the horses and it flips the cart over on
its side.

Speaker 2 (16:41):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (16:42):
Yeah, And so now she's it's late. She's got a lamp,
which is the only way she could see anything. It's
just like a hooded like oil lamp. And she's got
her Smith and Wesson like breaktop thirty eight caliber five shooter,
and she's got to like back up against the flipped
over cart. And these wolves are crazy. These are like
you know, Nissan wolves from the Gray right, They're still

(17:03):
coming at her. They're fighting the horses, they're eating the horses.
They're coming after her. She's got like a double barrel
shotgun and she's got this five shooter and she has
to just start fighting these things and basically has to
fight off several attacks from this package wolves. She kills
a bunch of them, wow, and survives the night Like

(17:23):
this isn't like a one off attack like this is. Yeah,
she's got to survive the entire night pinned down against
this cart with these wolves out there in the darkness somewhere.
She's reloading when she can and.

Speaker 2 (17:34):
Yeah, and she's got ammo, but it's got to be
a finite amount of ammo. So maybe she's going to run.

Speaker 1 (17:39):
Out, presumably, But you had to carry ammunition because this
is the days when there was just like bandits that
lived out in the wilderness and wild predators and things
like that that you had to be prepared to fight.
She makes it through the night, and then in the
morning she flips the stagecoach back up right with her
bare hand. She just picks it up and lifts it
and puts it back in to place.

Speaker 2 (18:00):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (18:01):
She has to go find the horses because some of
them have run away. A couple of them are pretty wounded,
but a couple of them ran off, and she has
to go get them hitch them back up to the wagon,
and then she makes the rest of the trip back.
And she didn't lose a single piece of cargo except
for a keg of molasses that had cracked during the gunfight.
Oh no, Yeah, and the freaking bishop made her pay
for it out of pocket. Yeah. No, I was a

(18:24):
total bastard. And this will come up again.

Speaker 2 (18:27):
What did he think did he Did he think she
like stole it and sold it on the side? Did
he think she ate it?

Speaker 1 (18:34):
I mean, I don't know.

Speaker 2 (18:38):
So you say, well, we'll hear more about this bishop later.

Speaker 1 (18:40):
We're you going to hear more about this whole convent
situation is a little we'll get to it, okay. So
you know, when Stagecoach Mary isn't cracking wolves in the
face with the stock of her ten gauge, which is
actually a little bigger than a twelve gage, or building
schoolhouses for Native American girls, she was drinking it everybody

(19:00):
under the table in the saloons of Cascade, Montana.

Speaker 2 (19:02):
Being a good role model for these students.

Speaker 1 (19:05):
Sure, right, Well, the students weren't allowed in there, right, Yeah.
Women at this time in eighteen eighties, Montana, women were
not allowed into saloons unless they were working girls, and
you could have prostitutes in there, but women, normal, well
reputable women did not go into saloons. It wasn't allowed.

(19:26):
And African American people were not allowed in saloons either.
So you'd think that maybe stage Coach Mary would get
some flak trying to walk in there and drink and
hang out and smoke her cigars. Yeah, she received special
permission from the mayor that she should be served at
any bar in the city anytime she wanted for life, wow,

(19:47):
anytime somebody tried to yeah, it's great, right, and anytime
somebody tried to step on that, right, that she had,
she would phasically pummel him repeatedly with her fists or
rocks or whatever until somebody the stranger and you had
talked about Annie Oakley outshooting Frank Butler and any other
man in Ohio. Well, the Great Falls Examiner, the newspaper

(20:10):
servicing Cascade, Montana, once described that stagecoach Mary had quote
broken more noses than any other person in Montana end quote.

Speaker 2 (20:19):
Well that's quite a reputation.

Speaker 1 (20:21):
Yeah, And while she's out here doing this, she's making
a name for herself in Cascade, Montana, somebody else is
making a name for herself on a much bigger and
much more national scale. And we're going to get into
Annie Oakley, famous Buffalo Bill Wild West sharpshooter right after this.

(20:50):
All right, welcome back to the show. And now we're
going to transition back to Anny Oakley. She is part
of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show in eighteen eighty five.
She's the first woman to be incorporated in any kind
of traveling act. Maybe it was first just like, hey,
here's this girl that can shoot, and then it ended

(21:11):
up being where she was out earning most of the
men on the show and Pat let's talk about Annie
Oakley being basically an international celebrity here.

Speaker 2 (21:21):
She's an international celebrity. Yeah, she's wowing audiences all over
the world with her feets. The Wild West Show is
obviously an American phenomenon, but they travel. And what Annie
does is she is not only a really good sharpshooter,
but she's also really, really really good at show business

(21:42):
and maintaining her persona. And so she's simultaneously like practicing
every day for the physical parts of her act, for
the athletic parts of her act. And she's also not
just a sharpshooter, but she's also good with horses, so
she can do like some horse tricks or something stunts,
you know. And she's one of those performers. She's one

(22:04):
of those sharp shooters who on stage can make it
look so easy, and she had to have worked hard,
and you think of, I don't know, Marilyn Monroe, who
you know, worked out and everything and just looked effortless.

Speaker 1 (22:16):
Yeah, my wife always says that when they do the Olympics,
they should just have like a regular person in the
competition with all of the professional athletes, just so that
you can see, like what a normal idiot looks like
trying to do this stuff because it looks so easy
when you watch it on the Olympics and you watch
five people do the thing. But if you attempted to
do this, it would just look so ridiculous. Right, what

(22:40):
Annie Oakley is doing with the shooting is mind blowing
and looks so easy. But if you were to pick
up a revolver, you would have no chance of people
can do what she's doing.

Speaker 2 (22:49):
Yeah, like Simone Biles makes all of her twists and
flips look just so easy and you think you can
do it. Oh but no, but no, no. Yeah, so
that's a that's a great idea. I would totally watch that.

Speaker 1 (23:05):
Yeah. Yeah, he just gets you get picked. It doesn't
matter like you just somebody.

Speaker 2 (23:09):
Cause your name out of a hat or something.

Speaker 1 (23:11):
Yeah, and you've got to compete in Any athlete that
loses to you, they don't get to come back in
four years to the next deal, to the next Olympics
because it's too embarrassing.

Speaker 2 (23:19):
Well, I don't think any Olympian level athlete needs to
feel threatened by me if my name were drawn out
of the hat.

Speaker 1 (23:24):
Exactly.

Speaker 2 (23:27):
Well, when Annie Oakley tries her best it's quite impressive,
and she's just impressing people left and right. Part of
the wild West Troope at this time was the Hunk
Papa Lakota Leader, Chief Sitting Bowl, the sitting ball, the
sitting Bowl, Yes, the sitting Bowl.

Speaker 1 (23:44):
The Custer's Last dand sitting Bull.

Speaker 2 (23:46):
Yeah. And he, you know, he pivots in his career
and he's in show business now, and he was impressed
by Annie, and he symbolically adopted her as his daughter
and conferred on her and named Watanya Cecilia or little
shore Shot. And she kept that nickname throughout her career. Wow. Yeah.

(24:09):
And was this genuine affection on sitting balls part? Possibly?
Was it also good for publicity for the show? Also? Yes?
Why not? Both? Why not?

Speaker 1 (24:19):
Both?

Speaker 2 (24:19):
Yeah? And Annie got to travel and remember she started
off as a you know, humble farm child in rural Ohio.
And with Buffalo Bill's troop, she's touring Europe. She performs
for I mean, this is like a crash course in
European history. She performed for Queen Victoria of England, King

(24:40):
Umberto the First of Italy, President Melie Fonsos Sault of France,
and apparently even Crown Prince Villhelm of Bavaria, and this
is the guy whom you might know better as kaiser
Villehelm of World War One fame.

Speaker 1 (24:52):
Yeah, so that's a That's the crazy thing with this
time period is that she met Sitting Bull, who was
the Sue commander at the Battle of Little Bighorn, and
she met kaiser Wille.

Speaker 2 (25:04):
Because she's Annie friggin Oakley.

Speaker 1 (25:06):
Why not, right, It's amazing to think that those people
lived at the same time.

Speaker 2 (25:10):
Yeah, yeah, And apparently the story goes that when she
was meeting Crown Princevillehelm at his request, you know, she
you know, would do a little performance show off her skills,
and her husband, Frank Butler is there with her. He's
often part of the act. Probably helped she married Frank Butler.

(25:31):
She married for Oh yeah, sorry, I forgot to mention
that she married Frank Butler.

Speaker 1 (25:34):
Oh she outshot him. And it's like adelantsa right, Like
the man who defeats me in the race is the
only person I can marry.

Speaker 2 (25:40):
Yes, yeah, And in this case it turns out to
be a good business proposition. There are business partners as
well as life partners.

Speaker 1 (25:46):
And yeah, if you can't beat him, join him.

Speaker 2 (25:48):
Yeah. Yeah. People have written stuff about the role that
Frank Butler plays in her skits and as her manager,
and how having a husband visibly part of the act
actually probably helped the fact that Annie was a female
performer because she was a female performer, but her husband's around,

(26:09):
so it's not like racy or sensational. It's just like, okay, hey, yeah,
this is a thing.

Speaker 1 (26:14):
Then that's an interesting thing with Annie that comes up
a lot, which is that, like, you know, when we
think of Annie Oakley without knowing too much about her,
You've talked about her cultivating her stage persona. But one
thing about Annie Oakley, we picture, Oh, she wore pigtails,
and she was only five feet tall, and she wore
these dresses, and you think of kind of like very
girlish shooting a gun, blah blah blah. You know, it

(26:36):
seems almost kind of like wild West, Barbie, Wild West Barbie.
I was literally about to say something along. I was
literally about to say Barbie. Oh no. But there's so
much more to it than that. And this was what
you said. She's cultivating this public persona, and she's operating
at a time in which, like girl with a gun
is threatening to a lot of people, especially people who

(26:59):
like might be super down with watching Wild Bills Buffalo
Bill's Wild West Show. And you know, this is really
kind of genius on her part because she's breaking a
lot of barriers that stood for women, but she's doing
it in a way that didn't rattle people or upset
the status quo that much. Yes, she's a woman with

(27:20):
a gun, which is kind of a scary thing, but
she's not aggressive. She's cultivating this girl next door mentality.
Her husband's there, he's part of the show. I think
this was all I would imagine that a lot of
this was if not like totally calculated, Like she gave
a lot of thought to how she presented herself.

Speaker 2 (27:40):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, she's this total badass sharpshooter who
can outshoot the men, and she's very domestic. She sews
her own costumes. There is a photograph of her sitting
in front of a tent, like one of the tents
as part of the show, offering tea to visitors.

Speaker 1 (27:57):
Right, And it's easy to look at this now when
current text and be like, oh, you know, and maybe
give her a hard time about this, but like, this
was genius at the time, this was pushing boundaries in
a way that they had never been pushed before. And
you know, everybody kind of thought. Everybody was kind of
happy about it. You know, it didn't rattle any cages

(28:19):
or rattle any feathers. But at the same time, you're
kind of normalizing the idea of a woman with a gun.
And she really promoted women learning to shoot and carrying
guns and defending themselves. And I think that that is
an aspect of Vannie Oakley that is really can't be
can't be undersoid.

Speaker 2 (28:37):
Exactly when she was in Europe, this little girl from
Ohio grown up and going to Europe, when she was
performing for Crown Princevillehelm, he requested that she do kind
of one of her trademark things, which was, hey, could
you do that thing where you shoot the ash of

(28:57):
a cigarette that I'm smoking?

Speaker 1 (29:00):
So he could have ended World War One before it started.

Speaker 2 (29:04):
You know, she made that joke afterwards.

Speaker 1 (29:08):
Oh really she did. Yes, yeah, if only she could miss.

Speaker 2 (29:13):
But she has a reputation to uphold now and yeah, yeah,
And at one point Annie Oakley did not, according to
her nephew, But then later as World War One started
breaking out, they kind of started embracing the story for publicity,
and according to the story, originally Crown Prince Philhelm was

(29:37):
going to have the cigarette in his mouth, which was
the way they did it when Annie and her husband
Frank Butler did this shtick, and it was decided, no,
she's a crown prince. Let's why don't you just hold
the cigarette in your hand, your honor, And it's a
you know, it's it's the attention to details like this.

(29:57):
And I'm okay, i am sure Annie is not the
only person to whom this detail occurred, but yeah, and
then later later on, Annie Oakley did quip that if
she had missed, she might have prevented World War One. Anyway,
she's she makes it to England, where you know, we
were talking about her image or reputation. She's got this

(30:18):
kind of charming, you know, kind of you know, feminine
look to her that she cultivates even while holding a gun.
And the newspaper's there said she had a charming night
of Atay and they tell the story that when she
was introduced to the then Prince of Wales, the guy
who would later become King Edward the Seventh, Annie, oh, well,

(30:40):
you know what she doesn't understand protocol. She shook the
hand of Edward's wife, Princess Alexandra before shaking Edward's hand.
Now that's not how you do it, that's not how
you're supposed to do it. Well, Annie had caught wind
of Edward's flirtatiousness and she didn't want any problems at all,

(31:01):
so she very strategically acknowledged Princess Alexandra and shook her
hand first and then went on to Edward.

Speaker 1 (31:09):
That's it, right, Oh, it's the I mean, that's kind
of how she has been, right, And that's I think
the thing that we don't give her enough credit for
is that maybe there was Maybe she wasn't naive, right,
Maybe she was just wanting you to think.

Speaker 2 (31:24):
I think she cultivated an image.

Speaker 1 (31:26):
I think she knew what she was doing. Yeah, seems likely.
You don't go from you know, shooting squirrels in the
backyard to the most famous woman in America without you know,
having a little bit of guile.

Speaker 2 (31:41):
Right, yeah, goble or tacked. I mean, oh yeah, okay,
maybe both maybe, Kyle. Yeah, so that's Annie, and that's
her way of promoting herself, taking the initiative. So yeah,
So you don't have to be Kaiser Wilhelm to see
Annie Oakley perform. We actually have believe it or not

(32:03):
video of her. In eighteen ninety four, Thomas Edison, inventor
of the kinetoscope, which is a movie camera, has a
film twenty four to twenty five seconds. And guess who
it features.

Speaker 1 (32:18):
Ah, so she met Edison too?

Speaker 2 (32:19):
She met Edison. Yeah. And the video, which you can
find online. We're in a studio. Set is black and
on the left of the screen there's a woman in
a cowboy hat and fringed western dress and she stands.
She's holding a rifle. Now, this is all perfectly silent,
because this is a silent movie. This is a silent film.
She's holding a rifle. She's eyeing a display at the

(32:41):
right of the screen. It's got an array of six
circular objects. They're glass balls, because that was something that
you used for target shooting, and they break when you
hit them with a bullet. And our girl Annie fires one, two, three, four, five, six,
and then her partner, man dressed in late nineteenth century garb.

(33:03):
He's wearing a vest, he's got a bowler hat. He
runs over next to the display, goes down on one
knee and throws up a succession of more glass balls
into the air, and Annie takes aim and bam, bam bam.
Of course she hits these glass balls. She's Annie Oakley

(33:23):
and her act is what Thomas Edison is using to
show off his new fangled Kinetoscope movie camera. And of course,
these days, you know, you can just see this twenty
second clip on Wikipedia, no big deal. But back in
the day this was cutting edge technology. He made several
clips of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, including clips of

(33:44):
Sitting Bull and some of the other Native Americans who
return with him.

Speaker 1 (33:47):
So this is like maybe like literally one of the
first movies. She might be the first female movie star
in American history.

Speaker 2 (33:54):
Among the first. Yeah, okay, I may I don't want
to say the first without doing actual homework on it,
but I'm certainly among the first. I mean, this is yeah,
but it's this is cutting out.

Speaker 1 (34:06):
Edison invent thetoscope, and I don't know, it's entirely possible.

Speaker 2 (34:11):
Yeah, And what do you do? You call Annie Oakle
and say, hey, can I film you doing something cool?
To show off my things?

Speaker 1 (34:17):
Yeah, and to just like to catch her shooting glass
balls out of the air. So Frank Butler's throwing them
up in the air and she's shooting them before they
hit the ground.

Speaker 2 (34:26):
Yeah. Yeah, with a rifle, or it was with a rifle.
She's got this big long thing. She's shooting these balls.

Speaker 1 (34:33):
Out in the air.

Speaker 2 (34:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (34:35):
So, Pat, I don't know, do you have any experience
shooting guns at all.

Speaker 2 (34:40):
Aside from some little plastic water pistols back when I
was a kid. No, I'm afraid I don't.

Speaker 1 (34:45):
Plastic water pistols don't count. Video games don't count. You
fired like a real firearm at target.

Speaker 2 (34:51):
I'm assuming very very casual first person shooter. Video games
don't count.

Speaker 1 (34:55):
Does not count. No domunt where you can use the
arrow keys.

Speaker 2 (35:00):
Yeah, no, I think the closest I've gotten was shooting
a bow and arrow in gym class a few times
in middle school. That's I'm sorry, I'm real, I'm really trying.

Speaker 1 (35:12):
I'm not Did it have like a did it have
a suction cup tip at the end of.

Speaker 2 (35:16):
The arrow, or actually it actually had a point and
we were shooting at strawfield targets.

Speaker 1 (35:21):
So but okay, yeah that counts. That counts as a firearm,
but it counts as target shooting.

Speaker 2 (35:27):
Yeah, that could potentially do damage.

Speaker 1 (35:29):
Yeah, I mean it's historically killed lots of people. Bone
arrows famously very good at killing human beings. So I
enjoy target shooting. I don't do it as much as
I would like to, but I you know, I enjoy
target shooting, and I'm friends with a lot of people
who do it. And it is not like the movies.

(35:52):
You know, we are kind of desensitized to accurate shooting
because in the movies, if the guy has a human
hostage and they's and they're resisting and he's like, all
blow it off or whatever, and then some guy just
like quick draws a gun and shoots him. And we
see this all the time in movies and things. Somebody
jumps in the air and shoots seventeen bullets and lands
on his feet, does a commando roll. Five guys die, Right,

(36:15):
But that's not That's not how real life works, and
it is.

Speaker 2 (36:18):
The stuff she's doing is And you're saying Hollywood does
not reflect real life.

Speaker 1 (36:22):
I'm saying Hollywood does not reflect real life, except that
Adie Oakley is doing this in real life, right, Yes, yes,
because she's on film doing this thing for real and
what she's doing is incredibly difficult. You were talking about
shooting the six glass balls on the on a target
and is not easy because you know, I've seen the
video and she shoots them so fast, and it is

(36:45):
so hard to like recover from the recoil and find
the next target. And like, it is very very difficult.
You have to be extremely skilled to do what she's doing.
It's kind of what we were talking about earlier with the
with the making it look easy. But you know, we're
kind of desensitized to this having played video games with
auto aim or whatever, or just navigating with a mouse

(37:06):
and keyboard to the next target. It is really really
hard to do what she is doing.

Speaker 2 (37:11):
Yeah, and she makes it look so easy. And she
even has a characteristic little kind of skip that she
does when she hits a target successfully, and that's just
part of her image. Hey, look at me, Look at me.
I'm just a pretty little lady doing my.

Speaker 1 (37:25):
Thing, which is also like an athletic move that she's doing.
But she just looks like she's skipping like a schoolgirl,
and that makes it harder to like reacquire a target,
you know.

Speaker 2 (37:35):
Yeah, she has perfected a very complex skill set.

Speaker 1 (37:40):
Here, yes, and so in eighteen ninety four, Annie Oakley,
who has now traveled Europe because the Europeans love this
Wild West stuff. They're crazy about it. They don't have
the Wild West out there, but they they're into this stuff.
And all of the kings and stuff love watching her.
And she's being recorded by Thomas Edison, and she's possibly
the first movie star in American history, in all of history.

Speaker 2 (38:02):
Actually, yes, But while Annie Oakley is an international celebrity
and opportunities are just coming to her quite possibly being
the first woman on film, how are things going with
stage coach Mary So.

Speaker 1 (38:17):
In eighteen ninety four, a little bit of a different story,
transitioning back to our friends stage coach Mary Fields in Cascade, Montana.
She's still kind of managing the convent, fighting wolves as
you do the normal Montana living kind of thing. In
eighteen ninety four, while Annie Oakley is being filmed by

(38:37):
Thomas Edison stage Coach Mary Fields, she gets fired. Oh no, yeah,
and so I kind of mentioned that the bishop was
kind of a bastard and oh that guy, yeah, and
also like you know, as you kind of mentioned like
being kind of like a hard drinking foul mouth convent
employee who swears at people who walk on the grass

(38:58):
after you've cut it. That sometimes rubbed some people the
wrong way. But that's not why she gets fired. She
gets fired because of her unquenchable thirst for vengeance. And
this is the thing that Mary will come across a
couple more times with Stagecoach and Mary, she really doesn't
like it if she feels like you're disrespecting her.

Speaker 2 (39:21):
Did someone disrespect her?

Speaker 1 (39:23):
Someone disrespected her, And as we said earlier, they will
live to regret it. So Mary is working as kind
of managing things on the convent. She's building things, she's
working the grounds. She's doing anything that needs to be done.
You need me to run back to you need to
me to run one hundred and twenty miles to go
pick up some supplies, I'll go do it. You need

(39:43):
me to build this thing, I'll do it. She's doing
anything that needs to be done whenever it needs to
be done. But she's not the only person on staff
at the convent and school. So there's this other guy.
He's a handyman and he works there as well, and
he's grumbling around behind Mary's back. He's grumbling to everybody
about how it's dumb that a black woman makes more

(40:04):
money than him and he doesn't like it. That shouldn't
be how things go? Oh, come on, Well, eventually somebody
mentions to Mary that this guy's doing this thing. So
what do you do in eighteen ninety four Montana when
you got a problem with somebody, you have freaking challenge
him to a gunfight? And that's what she does. Just
just not the Aaron Burr pistols at dawn. This is

(40:27):
like the gunslinger, like, you know, draw high noon yep,
And she pulls out that thirty eight that she's literally
used to kill rabid wolves or wild wolves or whatever.
So we don't know the full details of what happened
in this gunfight. But Mary shows up with her thirty
eight and this guy shows up with whatever he brought

(40:49):
with him. We don't know because he never fired it.
And the end result of this duel is that the
handyman got shot in the ass, and presumably while running away,
she gets fired for having a gunfight on convent property,
which probably is okay, okay, yeah, probably understandable, but this

(41:14):
guy shouldn't have been talking shit. Ian didn't want to
find out what happened.

Speaker 2 (41:19):
Well, she got fired.

Speaker 1 (41:21):
Yeah, she gets fired, and she's looking for a job.
So a year later, in eighteen ninety five, she applies
for a job with the United States Postal Service to
deliver mail through the Montana territory. She shows up in
the job interview at the time for the USPS in Montana.
And remember this is kind of a new ish system here,

(41:44):
we're kind of talking Pony Express time period. The job
interview was that you had to hitch a team of
six horses to a stage coach as quickly as possible.
And Mary shows up, and a bunch of twenty year
old wild West cowboy looking dudes up. Mary's sixty ish,
Like I said, we don't know her age, but she

(42:05):
hitches the horses in half the time as any of
the other guys there. She's basically got time to like
smoke a cigar while the rest of them are doing
their thing.

Speaker 2 (42:13):
And go Maryfield.

Speaker 1 (42:15):
Yes, and she becomes the second woman and the first
black person of any gender to work for the US
Postal Service. She gets the job. Hey yeah, and okay,
I can hear you thinking, Okay, whatever I get Amazon
delivered to my house like three times a day now,
like being a postal employee is not that interesting. It
doesn't trigger images of like gunslinging, bad attitude. But running

(42:38):
a postal route in eighteen eighties Montana was not easy.

Speaker 2 (42:42):
And I'm thinking, there's the postal service creed. Neither snow
nor rain, nor heat nor gloom of night stays these
couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds. And
that's from nineteen fourteen, so it's well after this.

Speaker 1 (42:56):
But these rules apply to eighteen ninety five Montana. The
mail has to get through. And we're talking about riding
on a stage coach by yourself, and the stage coach
is packed with packages to be delivered. You have problems
with porch pirates. In the eighteen ninety five they had

(43:16):
problems with bandits who would attack these stage coaches and
kill the drivers and loot the stage coach. You're carrying money,
You're carrying you know, anything that needs to be shipped,
You've got it in the back of your stage coach.
You're riding these horses through rural Montana and there's people
gunning for you everywhere. Right, forget about the random wolves

(43:39):
that can pop out as we've seen and attack your horses.
There's people hiding in the hills with guns. There's people
riding up on you on horses with guns. There's blizzards,
heat waves, driving rain, screaming winds, there is all manner
of weather and physical danger. And stage coach Mary runs
this route and she never misses a day of work

(44:02):
in her career.

Speaker 2 (44:03):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (44:04):
Yeah, she never failed to deliver a single letter, was
never late once. Like I'm late to everything. I'm late
to every meeting we've ever had for the Zoom time.
I'm late to every meeting I've ever been invited to.
I'm late to every like every job I've ever had,
I've shown up but late like three times a week.

Speaker 2 (44:22):
Basically, no judgment, no judgment. It's fine, I blame the subway,
but I mean when I'm late, I blame the subway.

Speaker 1 (44:29):
But yeah, that's a great about having a kid, is
that I can be late to anything. Now I'm equally
late to everything, But now I can just blame the kid.
My brother always says that I could you can just
kind of plan on me being fifteen minutes later than
whatever I say I'm going to be, which is accurate
for me, but it was not accurate for stage Coach Mary.
She was steering a horse drawn carriage up a mountain

(44:50):
cliff to deliver a thank you card to Grandma. She
got it right. You want to go through the snow.
It's so high you've got to like the horses can't
get get through the snow. Like this is common in
my Montana. She got out and climbed over on foot
with the mail bag on her shoulder, walking ten miles
through wate deep snow, uphill both ways in the headwinds.
You know that kind of thing, to deliver some letter

(45:11):
to a guy on a farm in the middle of nowhere, Montana.

Speaker 2 (45:13):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (45:14):
And yeah, And like I said, there's there's bad guys
out there looking to rob you. And she's carrying that
ten gage shotgun and that thirty eight and she is
not afraid to use them. She said that according to
her own personal experience, that ten gauge was quote more
than capable of cutting a man in half a closer range.

Speaker 2 (45:33):
Okay, so between the bandits and the wolves, she's she's prepared.

Speaker 1 (45:37):
Yeah, this is where she gets the nickname stage coach
Mary is from anytime that you needed something delivered, she
was the person that you wanted to have delivering it.
She eventually like tamed an eagle, as you do in
Montana in the middle of nowhere in the eighteen eighties.
So she had a pet.

Speaker 2 (45:55):
You can do that.

Speaker 1 (45:55):
You can do that, apparently if your stage coach Mary,
you can do that. You and maybe not. She teamed
an eagle. So she had a pet eagle. She had
a pet mule named Moses, and she had her stage coach,
her ten gauge, and her in her six shooter it
was a five shooter. The thirty eight was a five shooter.
But she managed to do that job for seven years.
She finally retired in nineteen oh one as like one

(46:18):
of the you know, the pioneering heroes of the United
States Postal Service.

Speaker 2 (46:23):
That's stage coach Mary. Yeah, and so stage coach Mary
Mary Fields is retiring in nineteen oh one. Meanwhile, in
nineteen oh one, what's Annie Oakley up to? Well, she's
got some changes to her career. You know, life happens.
Annie gets into a train accident. She's temporarily paralyzed. That's
going to put a damper on things. She has five

(46:45):
five countum operations on her spine.

Speaker 1 (46:47):
Ah in eighteen ninety nineteen oh one Operations on your spine.

Speaker 2 (46:53):
Yeah, well, she's one tough cookie and she she adapts,
she's resilient. She pivots to acting for while. She stars
in a play called The Western Girl, which was, as
you might imagine, written for her. Her character named Nancy Barry,
uses Annie Oakley like skills to foil a gang of outlaws,
and Ben and I talked about how she's very conscious

(47:15):
about how to manage her image and what an image
it is. And there's this incident in nineteen oh four
when people reading the papers in America might see the
headline that Annie Oakley had been arrested for stealing to
support her cocaine hat.

Speaker 1 (47:36):
Oh no, maybe she was the first movie star.

Speaker 2 (47:42):
Our Annie was very clean cut and her style of
badass rey did not include stealing or cocaine. So what
gives where did this headline come from? Is it just
pure tabloid? Turns out that some other woman and this
is actually someone who used to perform in wild West shows,

(48:04):
doing some combination of sharp shooting and her lesque performances,
and who sometimes used as her stage name. Various creative
misspellings of the name Any Oakley or Annie Oaklay or
what have you, And.

Speaker 1 (48:17):
So she's just like the poor and parody actress of
Annie Oakley's like stage stage performance something like that.

Speaker 2 (48:25):
Yeah yeah. And so this woman whose name, well she
had she used various stage names. I think her original
name was Maude Fontainello. And she had actually been arrested
for such things for stealing, actually stealing someone's pants to

(48:46):
pay for cocaine.

Speaker 1 (48:48):
And when stealing pants, yeah.

Speaker 2 (48:51):
Yeah, yes, how'd she get I don't know, I don't know.
And when the police asked her name, she rattled off
the name of one of the most famous women in
America at the time, Annie Oakly. And in the trial
she said that the pressure of being America's most famous

(49:12):
sharp shuitter is too much to handle. So oh, I
turned to drugs to cope. And so that's how that
fake news got started. Now, how does the real Annie
Oakley feel about this? Well, as you can imagine, she's
not happy. She wants to clear her good name because
that's worth a lot to her, and so she got
in touch with as many newspapers as she could explain

(49:34):
the situation, often in conjunction with traveling to the newspaper's
town and suing because apparently if you want to sue
a newspaper in a lot of these cases, you have
to go there in person to sue. To do this,
and most of the papers, fifty four out of fifty
five papers said eventually one way or another, oh whoa sorry,

(49:54):
miss Oakley, and they retracted the story with an apology.
But the originator of the story, the report that all
these other papers had relied upon, was William Randolph Hurst's news.

Speaker 1 (50:06):
Service, speaking of like famous assholes from history.

Speaker 2 (50:09):
Okay, yeah, you know, we've got a lot of big
names showing up in these stories, right, and yeah, so
William Randolph Hurst. So even though all of the other papers,
the other fifty four out of fifty five papers retracted
when asked nicely, more or less, Hurst dug in his heels.
He thought he could avoid paying the court fees. But

(50:32):
Annie persists, and she wins what is one of the
biggest anti libel campaigns that the country has ever seen.

Speaker 1 (50:40):
So she wins, she takes him to court and she
beats him.

Speaker 2 (50:42):
Yeah, yeah, and that's.

Speaker 1 (50:44):
Amazing, right, And that kind of digs in what we're
saying about her being kind of more than what more
than meets the eye with this, right, she was not.
She's freaking Taylor Swift here right, like going to the
taking him to court for a dollar. I love this.
I think that's amazing.

Speaker 2 (51:01):
Yeah, she's on top of everything. She stays on top
of everything she needs to stay on top of. She
is a very, very skilled businesswoman.

Speaker 1 (51:11):
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, So.

Speaker 2 (51:12):
That's Annie Oakley. And so stage Coach Mary. She's retired
by now do we know what she's up to in retirement.

Speaker 1 (51:20):
Yeah, So stage Coach Mary opens a laundry service. And
after she's retired from being a postal worker, she opens
a laundry service in Cascade, Montana, and it's probably the
most badass laundry service in all of the history of Montana.
I can't say this for sure, but I'm gonna assume possibly.

(51:41):
Here's a good example of this. There was one time
that Mary was sitting at the saloon playing poker and
drinking whiskey when she heard a voice outside the saloon
that caught her attention with some guy who had gotten
his laundry done by Mary, but he hadn't paid his bill.
Uh oh, so Mary's bad news. Yeah, you shouldn't. You
shouldn't try to double cross Sage Coach Mary. She's in

(52:01):
her seventies at this point. She calmly excuses herself from
the card table, walks outside, grabs this stude by the shoulder,
spins him around, and completely flattens him unconscious with one punch. Then,
as he's like laying there, crumpled up in the middle
of the street, she kind of leans over and is like, look,
punching you in the face was way more enjoyable to
me than the two bucks that you owe me, So

(52:23):
we're just gonna call it even. Thanks your business, have
a nice day. And she goes back inside and finishes
a DRINKO. Yeah, I mean fantastic.

Speaker 2 (52:33):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (52:34):
So when Mary's not doing this, she of course is
doing the other thing you expect that she would do,
which is babysitting children. Anytime the parents need to get away,
she old babysit your kids for a couple bucks. She
became friends with Gary Cooper, who was the AFI's eleventh
Greatest Male Film Legend of All Time. He played Sergeant York.

(52:55):
Gary Cooper once called her quote the freest soul to
ever draw a break or thirty eight.

Speaker 2 (53:01):
That's a great line.

Speaker 1 (53:02):
Yeah, she never had to pay for food or drink
anywhere she went in town, and she got free tickets
to every home game of the Cascade, Montana baseball team. Yeah.
According to local sources, she would give flowers from her
garden to any player who hit a home run and
very like viciously swear at any umpire who made calls

(53:23):
she disagreed.

Speaker 2 (53:23):
With This sounds consistent with what we've been hearing of her. Yes, yeah,
swears like a sailor.

Speaker 1 (53:29):
Yeah, yeah, just you really want them to be on
your team. You know, you love them when they're on
your side. And here's a great example of that. In
nineteen twelve, there's a fire in Cascade and Mary's home
burns down. She's you know, in her eighties now, and
the entire city gets together and builds her a new house,
which I think is really cool and it says a
lot about her, right, that's nice. Yeah, she has this

(53:51):
reputation of being like, you know, this six foot tall,
like kick your ass, like hard drinking, hard fighting, hard
swear and badass old West woman. But everybody loved her
and she was taking care of kids and she's building
you know, convents and stuff like that, and when she
needs help, which is not often, everybody is like falling

(54:11):
all over themselves to help because they love her. Yeah,
and that's really nice. She lives to be eighty two.
She passes away of liver failure, of course, in nineteen fourteen,
And that's not so bad, considering that she had like
fist fought wolves and traveled through freezing rain and drank hard,
fought anybody who wanted a fight, and basically overthrew any

(54:34):
cultural stereotype that anybody might have had to offer her.
And generally that involved punching a bunch of cowboys unconscious,
even though they were half her age. And that's pretty great.

Speaker 2 (54:45):
A life lived to the fullest, exactly.

Speaker 1 (54:49):
And so how did things end up for Annie Oakley?
We're looking at nineteen fourteen here when stage coach Mary
passes away, and I think Annie survives her by a
little bit.

Speaker 2 (54:59):
Yeah. Yeah, Annie passes away in nineteen twenty six, and
that means that she's seeing World War One happen. She
uses her celebrity to advocate for women being represented in
media as more than just fragile or over sexualized. She

(55:23):
says that women should demand professionalism in the workplace, which
was not far for the course in eighteen eighty five,
she was against women's suffrage and people are complex.

Speaker 1 (55:36):
Yeah, I've come across that as well, because when we
were starting to do some research for this episode, I
was thinking, oh, well, Annie Oakley, she's born before the
Civil War and she dies during like the jazz Age,
and women gained a lot of rights during that time period,
and I would have we were thinking maybe we could
tie that into some kind of suffrage thing, because she

(55:57):
dies after women are allowed to vote. She publicly never
really talked about it, and when really pressed on it,
she said, no, I don't think I don't support this,
but at the time, I think this plays in more
to her persona and maybe this is me putting words
in her mouth. Maybe not. It was a very divisive

(56:18):
topic at the time, and I think that she was
kind of there's a chance she was kind of playing
it safe, right. It was enough that she was putting
guns into women's hands. She didn't need to come out
and publicly support something even more radical than that. It
might alienate some of her fans and some of her
audience and undo some of the work that she was

(56:40):
already doing. I don't know if that's true or not,
but it is something to consider. When you think about it.

Speaker 2 (56:45):
Yeah, and whatever her intent, the effect is there were
some boats she just wasn't rocking.

Speaker 1 (56:51):
Okay, So what's Annie Oakley's legacy?

Speaker 2 (56:53):
Will her fame lives on after her death? There's a
movie about her, fictionalized version of her life or her story,
starring Barbara Stanwick as Annie Oakley. There's a musical Annie
Get Your Gun that came out in nineteen forty six
starring ethel Merman as Annie Oakley. And these productions tend

(57:15):
to fictionalize her story and play up and I don't
know soap opera eyes the romance between her and Frank Butler.
So they're not documentaries by any means. And you know,
her fame continued for quite some time. For what it's worth.

(57:38):
Comp tickets and theater were called Annie Oakley's because they
would be punched in the middle. And obviously when you
see a card with a hole in the middle, you
think of Annie Oakley shooting a bullet through that ace
of spades or whatever.

Speaker 1 (57:51):
Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah. I came across the story that
the first women prison guards in the United States were
at Newcastle County work House in green Bank, Delaware. I
was in nineteen forty three and most of the guards
of the prison had gone off to fight in World
War Two, so the prison hired eleven women to work
as machine gunners in the prison towers, and they were

(58:14):
known as the Annie Oakleys, which I love because of.

Speaker 2 (58:16):
Course they were.

Speaker 1 (58:17):
Yes.

Speaker 2 (58:18):
Yeah, How about our friend's stage coach Mary. What's her
fame like?

Speaker 1 (58:23):
Well, I mean it's she's very famous in the town
of Cascade, Montana. And I think more people are picking
up on her story and telling it. But it's kind
of the interesting compare and contrast between Annie Oakley and
stage coach Mary. Annie Oakley she met President McKinley. She
told Teddy Roosevelt that we needed to get more women

(58:45):
into sport hunting. She met Kaiser Wilhelm and Thomas Edison
and I'm sitting bull and all of these famous people
from all around the world, and it was this world
renowned person, international celebrity on a level that compares today
to like the biggest movie stars and music stars. And
stagecoach Mary was famous in her town, but not too

(59:08):
well known outside of that. These are two women who
are very interesting because they broke barriers in very different ways.
They were operating in the same part of the world
at roughly the same time, yet they were very different
and they went about it in different ways. And I
think it's really interesting to kind of compare and contrast

(59:31):
the careers of Mary Fields in Anioakley.

Speaker 2 (59:34):
Two different ways to be a wild West woman.

Speaker 1 (59:36):
Yes, and to kind of crush all opposition in different ways,
sometimes literally right, sometimes literally, and sometimes in a way
that you might not expect, or by having to take
a different tack around it, which is also badass. I
would say, yes, well, that is our story for today,
and I think that's all we really have to say

(59:57):
about it. Yeah, we just want to say thank you,
Thank you guys so much for listening as always, and
we really look forward to seeing you on the next one.

Speaker 2 (01:00:10):
Badass of the Week is an iHeartRadio podcast produced by
High five Content. Executive producers are Andrew Jacobs, Me, Pat Larish,
and my co host Ben Thompson. Writing is by Me
and Ben. Story editing is by Ian Jacobs Brandon Phibbs.
Mixing and music and sound design is by Jude Brewer.

(01:00:31):
Special thanks to Noel Brown at iHeart. Badass of the
Week is based on the website Badass of Theweek dot com,
where you can read all sorts of stories about other badasses.
If you want to reach out with questions ideas, you
can email us at Badass podcast at badassoftheweek dot com.

(01:00:52):
If you like the podcast, subscribe, follow, listen, and tell
your friends and your enemies if you want as We'll
be back next week with another one. For more podcasts
from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you get your podcasts