Wheelgun Wednesday: Annie Oakley's Smoothbore Special

Thanks to social media and YouTube, expert shooters can be well-known stars today, even if the mainstream media isn’t so keen on them. But once upon a time, trick shooters and expert marksmen were as famous and media-dominating as pro stick-and-ball athletes are today. Annie Oakley was one of the most famous of them all; if you’ve got the green, you can show what a big fan you are of her legacy by buying her six-shooter through Rock Island Auction this August.

Trick shooting @ TFB:

• Trick Shotgun Shell Reload
• Dude Perfect's Marksman Trick Shots
• Over Under Shotgun Trick Shots With The Gould Brothers
• Cody Firearms Museum's Launches Museum Renovation Funding Portal

Little Sure Shot

Annie Oakley was the best-known female shooter of her time, but she did not come from a Wild West background. Her parents were Quakers in western Ohio. In the 1860s, when she was growing up, that region was certainly more wild and woolly than it is today, but Oakley did not develop her shooting skills as a means of fending off bandits and tribal guerrillas. She learned to shoot at a very young age because her family was hungry, and they needed food for the pot and cash money. By age 8, Oakley was hunting for her family’s needs, not just for their own food, but selling wild game to shopkeepers, who then sold it onwards to hotel restaurants. Supposedly, she was their preferred source of meat because she killed game with a headshot instead of filling the meat with pellets.

Oakley might have just remained a local legend in the Midwest but for a piece of great luck. In 1875 (some researchers believe it was 1881), the Baughman & Butler trick shooting team was doing a show at the Coliseum Opera House (which shows you just how much public interest there was in exhibition shooting in that era). Frank Butler offered $50 if any local could beat him in a shooting contest (worth roughly $1,500 in today’s money). In a contest shooting live pigeons, Oakley beat the famous performer. They were married a year later, and with Butler’s showbiz savvy, Oakley went on to become an international star.

At first, Oakley and Butler toured together with the Sells Brothers Circus, but their greatest fame came when they joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show in 1885. It is hard to emphasize what a cultural centerpiece Buffalo Bill Cody’s traveling Western-themed circus was in that era. The public in eastern North America and Europe was fascinated with frontier adventures, and here at the Wild West performances, they could see the very characters they had read about. Famous frontier scout and hunter Buffalo Bill led the show; real-life cowboys and natives from the West put their shooting, riding and roping skills on display, with occasional cameos from personalities like Metis leader Gabriel Dumont, famous Lakota war chief Sitting Bull, and many other famous fighters and frontiersmen.

And there, in the middle of it all, five-foot-tall Little Sure Shot (as she was billed, supposedly from a nickname given her by Sitting Bull) was showing her shooting skills, as the highest-paid entertainer in the show, except for Buffalo Bill himself. Rock Island Auction describes her performance this way: “She could hit the thin edge of a playing card at 30 paces, hit dimes and marbles thrown into the air, cigars from her husband's lips, and famously shot distant targets while looking down the sights of rifles and revolvers over her shoulder using a mirror.”

This was real-deal stuff, but there were a few tricks of the trade. One of them was the usage of smoothbore rifles and revolvers, loaded with shot instead of solid bullets. Buffalo Bill didn’t want the top of his tent shot to pieces with .44-caliber holes, and besides, there were certainly some safety concerns shooting horse-pistol loads into the sky, performance after performance; eventually, the odds would catch up and someone would end up hurt. So the performers often used guns custom-built to shoot shotshells.

It made sense for Oakley to buy the Smith & Wesson, as it was the fastest-reloading American revolver of its era, and that would have been very important to someone in the trick-shooting business. This model was favored by badmen and lawmen alike, and no doubt Oakley had heard stories about its usage in the real world from her fellow performers at the circus.

This revolver will go up for auction on August 15 in Bedford, Texas. If you think you might be interested, or you just want to check out more details, you can see Rock Island Auction’s listing here.