The Girl Who Shot the Kaiser

Annie Oakley was five feet tall, sewed her own ankle-length Quaker skirts, and could split a playing card held edge-on at thirty paces. At fifteen she out-shot a professional marksman named Frank Butler in a live-pigeon match in Cincinnati; she hit twenty-five of twenty-five, and he married her. For the next fifty years, her warm-up act was snuffing a lit cigarette from his lips.

The trick worked because she never flinched, and neither did he.

By 1889 she was performing it in Berlin, and one night she asked the audience for a volunteer. The newly crowned Kaiser Wilhelm II stepped out of his box. He put the cigarette between his lips. Annie, who had reportedly been drinking the night before, raised her rifle and shot the cigarette clean.

Twenty-five years later, the Kaiser invaded Belgium. Frank suggested, gently, that she write and ask for a second attempt. She did. There is no record he replied.

After the war began, asked about that afternoon in Berlin, she said only this: if she had shot the Kaiser, she might have saved the lives of several millions of soldiers.

She said it the way you note the weather.