Annie Get Your Gun: Women, Performance and the Western Heroine

This chapter destabilizes the conventional narrative of smoking guns and masculine heroism in the construction of America’s frontier mythology to explore how western women seized the agency of firearms for themselves. More specifically, I look here at two prominent characters in the ‘winning of the West’ – Martha Canary (Calamity Jane) and Annie Oakley - to examine how two women came to take on the mantle of gun-toting heroines and how their stage presence added colour and contest to the frontier story. Both pointed, firstly, to a tradition of firearms use among pioneer women for whom skill with a rifle promised security and sustenance in remote climes. Moreover (and this is the principal focus here) the gun became a critical prop in the theatrical routines of Oakley and Canary as they developed their own cultures of celebrity in the latter years of the 1800s