Annie Oakley: Adopted DelMarVan by A.M. Foley
Among shoppers on Cambridge’s busy Race Street in 1920, the Butlers were easily overlooked: a middle-aged couple going about their business, the wife a diminutive silver-haired lady. Actually, aside from Queen Victoria, this small woman was the most famous in the world. The queen had come to see her. Victoria’s son, the Prince of Wales, invited the couple to shoot at “dear old Sandringham,” the 20,000-acre estate where he indulged his love of genteel blood sport. “Annie Oakley,” Mrs. Frank Butler, enjoyed visiting royalty, but she never forgot her roots. Growing up, Phoebe Ann Mozee suffered grinding poverty. She was born in western Ohio in 1860, then known as “the wilds.” The Mozees were Quakers, subsistence farmers. At five, Annie lost her father, who left her mother with seven children, aged fifteen to two. Mother lost the farm, then lost her eldest, Mary, to tuberculosis. She sold their cow, Pink, to pay for Mary’s doctor and burial. At nine, Annie went to the Edington family, supervisors of the county poorhouse. From there she was hired away, supposedly to help
tend a baby, but her assigned chores grew and grew. One evening, when Annie dozed off over the mending basket, the wife struck her and locked her outside in the snow. Fearful upon hearing her husband returning, she brought Annie in by the fire. After two years of differing abuses by the couple Annie named “the wolves,” she escaped, reaching the train station hungry and shivering. A stranger, seeing the pre-teen child’s obvious distress, bought her food and a ticket 97
