August 13 · This Day in America
Phoebe Ann Moses is born into hard poverty on a farm in Darke County, Ohio. Her father dies when she is small; she is hired out, half-starved, treated cruelly by a family she would only ever call "the wolves." She picks up a rifle to feed her brothers and sisters, and finds she almost never misses. At fifteen she out-shoots a touring marksman named Frank Butler. She marries him, takes the stage name Annie Oakley, and joins Buffalo Bill's Wild West, where for sixteen seasons she splits playing cards edgewise and shoots cigarettes from her husband's lips before stunned crowds across America and Europe. Queen Victoria called her "a very clever little girl." From a starving child in an Ohio cabin to the most famous sharpshooter on Earth — and proof, in front of millions, that a woman's steady hand could beat any man in the arena.
Source: centerofthewest.org
Also on this day · 1818
On a Massachusetts farm, Lucy Stone is born. She becomes the first woman from the state to earn a college degree, a fearless abolitionist and suffragist, and famously keeps her own name when she marries — a quiet revolution. She organized the first national women's rights convention and lectured through hostile crowds for decades. She died before the vote was won. Her last words: "Make the world better."
Source: www.nps.gov
“Make the world better.”Lucy Stone, 1893