Annie got her gun but sadly she didn’t get the Kaiser...

Unfortunately Longford man Frank Butler’s stunt didn’t go wrong!

He was husband and manager of famous sharpshooter Annie Oakley - immortalised in ‘Annie Get Your Gun’. They toured the world with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

In the summer of 1889 Annie was demonstrating her marksmanship at an outdoor show in Berlin. As always, she announced that she would shoot a cigarette out of the mouth of a volunteer from the audience.

She had done this hundreds of times, with Frank volunteering, incognito. But in a ploy to generate extra publicity from the Berlin performance, Frank prearranged for a VIP guest to volunteer. This was none other than Kaiser Wilhelm II, the newly crowned German emperor, who stepped forward, lit up, and Annie shot his cigarette in half.

Twenty-five years later the Kaiser’s territorial ambitions led, in part, to WWI and the loss of millions of lives. “There’s a story that Annie said later that if she’d missed on that occasion, there might never have been a Great War,” an official at the Annie Oakley museum in Greenville, Ohio - Annie’s home town - told Mitchell Smyth when he was researching the story.

Smyth, from Ballycastle, visited Greenville for the Toronto Star, of which he was travel editor. He also discovered that publicity-hungry Butler had another nibble at the Kaiser’s cake.

When WWI started he got Annie to write to Wilhelm asking for a second chance at splitting his cigarette. She never got a reply but Frank fed the story to an appreciative press anyway. Butler’s parents, Michael and Catherine, left Longford for America in 1855, leaving Frank, aged eight, with an aunt. He joined them in 1860 aged 13.

He had a number of odd-jobs, but as a craze for marksmanship swept America in the late 1860s he practised hard and became a touring sharpshooter. In 1875 he appeared in Cincinnati, Ohio, where one of his stunts was offering $100 dollars to anyone who could beat him in a competition. Enter little Phoebe Ann Mozez, aged 15.

She had been shooting game since she was nine, to put food on her impoverished family’s table and to make money by selling game to hotels in the area. She heard about Butler’s challenge and borrowed the train fare to Cincinnati, 70 miles away, to take him up on it. Phoebe Ann, known as Annie, scored 25 hits with 25 shots; Butler missed the last target.

He persuaded her to team up, and the couple went on the road as Butler and Oakley. (Annie took the name Oakley from a Mr. Oakley of Greenville who had lent her the train fare to Cincinnati.) She and Butler married in 1877; Frank was 30, Annie was 17. He gradually withdrew from the act and became her full-time manager and tireless publicist.

In 1885 they joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West.

This was a circus-like extravaganza, headed by William F. Cody (‘Buffalo Bill’) that recreated a semi-fictional version of the opening of the western frontier, with hundreds of cowboys, Native Americans, staged shootouts, feats of horse-riding and sharpshooters, of whom Annie was now the star.

Coached by Frank, she perfected one of her trademark acts for the show - sighting in a mirror and shooting over her shoulder, she would put a bullet through a glass ball that Frank was whirling on a string. She succeeded every time.

This and her many other feats dumbfounded audiences all around the world. Also on tour with Buffalo Bill was Sitting Bull, the great warrior whose braves had defeated George Armstrong Custer’s 7th Cavalry at the battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876.

Sitting Bull was entranced with the little sharpshooter (she stood just five feet); he ‘adopted’ her and renamed her ‘Watanya Cicilla’, which translated as ‘Little Sure Shot’.

And Butler, as always, distributed the story around the press. Annie and Frank remained with Buffalo Bill Cody until 1902. They continued to make guest appearances until they retired in 1912 and returned to Ohio.

Annie Oakley died in Greenville on 3 November 1926. It was reported that the grieving Frank ceased eating when she died. He died of malnutrition 18 days later.

They are buried in Brock Cemetery, 12 miles north of Greenville and two miles from where Annie was born.

They had no children.