American sharpshooter, performer and folk hero Annie Oakley was BOTD in 1860. Born Phoebe Ann Mosey in a log cabin in Darke County, Ohio, the sixth of nine children, she grew up in poverty. At the age of 10, she was sold to a married couple who kept her as a slave, mentally and physically abusing her. She escaped two years later and made a living as a game hunter, earning enough to pay off the mortgage on her parents’ farm by her mid-teens. In 1876, she married travelling show marksman Frank Butler, and began performing and touring together in sharpshooting acts. In 1885, she joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, billed as “Miss Annie Oakley, the Peerless Lady Wing-Shot”. She became the Show’s star attraction for over 15 years, touring through Europe where she was presented to Britain’s Queen Victoria and Crown Prince Wilhelm of Germany. She also appeared in an 1894 Kinetoscope silent film by Thomas Edison. She is believed to have taught over 15,000 women how to use a gun, and lobbied for women to join active military service. In 1898, she wrote to US President McKinley, offering him the services of her private militia of female sharpshooters. She died in 1925, aged 66. Butler was reported so grieved by her death that he stopped eating and died three weeks later. Oakley’s story has been dramatised many times, most notably in the 1946 musical Annie Get Your Gun, and she has been played onscreen by Barbara Stanwyck, Betty Hutton, Geraldine Chaplin, Jamie Lee Curtis, Reba McEntire, and Sarah Strange. Historians and biographers have speculated that Oakley may have been gay or bisexual, and she is frequently referenced as a queer and feminist icon.