FOLLOWING THE TRAIL OF THE LEGENDARY ANNIE OAKLEY.

Byline: William A. Ferguson Toledo Blade

They called her ``Little Sure Shot,'' a circus sharpshooter and star of Buffalo Bill's ``Wild West Show.''

Yet Darke County memorials to Annie Oakley, one of its brightest stars, are modest and tasteful, perhaps in keeping with the personality of the 5-footer who sewed her own clothes and spent part of her life as an impoverished servant.

Phoebe Ann Moses (later she would spell it Mozee) was born Aug. 13, 1860, in a weatherboarded log cabin not far from the Darke County town of Woodland (now known as Willowdell), where her parents, Jacob and Susan Moses, had moved from Pennsylvania. She was the third daughter, and the first to be born in Ohio. Her sisters quickly nicknamed her ``Annie.''

Annie's log cabin birthplace is gone, but a plaque marked by cedar trees has been placed along Spencer Road in Patterson Township noting that the cabin had been in what is now a corn or soybean field about 1,000 feet directly behind the monument.

The area was mostly wooded when Annie learned to shoot and to hunt game there. Annie's first shot, as she recalled later, was at a squirrel eating a hickory nut atop a front-yard fence. She said she ran for the forbidden Kentucky rifle her father hung above the fireplace, lugged it outside, and shot the squirrel through the head. Her mother was horrified, Kasper records.

No one was particularly happy about an 8-year-old learning to shoot, but she persisted, often following her father and brother when they went hunting and persuading them to let her shoot.

Annie's father died in 1866, after being trapped in a blizzard, and the destitute family moved to a rental farm. Mary Jane, her oldest sister, caught tuberculosis and died. About 1870, when Annie was 10, her mother sent her to live at the Infirmary, the county poor farm near Greenville, a not-uncommon practice.

Not long afterward, a farmer came looking for a girl to serve as companion for his wife and new baby, and Annie went with him. She would later describe him as a ``wolf in sheep's clothing'' and said he made a slave of her, even refusing to let her go when her mother wrote and told her to come home.

Annie was about 15 when she returned to her mother, who had remarried and was building a new house near North Star. (The house survived through the 1950s, but has since been torn down. A historical marker remains at the site just below the North Star crossroads on U.S. 127.)

Before going home, Annie stopped at the Katzenberger brothers' grocery store on Main Street at the Greenville public square, where hunters and trappers traded game for flour, wheat and ammunition. The Katzenbergers agreed to buy any small game she shipped to town.

For the rest of her life, she earned her living with a gun, said Shirl Kasper, Oakley's biographer.

The late 1800s was an era when guns were part of American life and marksmanship was admired. Fancy shooters of the day traveled with circuses, performed on stage, or had their own shows. One of them was Frank Butler, who performed with the Sells Brothers Circus, operated by four Ohio brothers.

A man approached Butler at a Cincinnati hotel and said he had an unknown who would shoot against him for $100. Butler saw it as a sucker bet, and jumped at it.

``I was a beaten man the moment she appeared, for I was taken off guard,'' the New York Sun later quoted Butler. ``Never did a person make more impossible shots than did that little girl. She killed 23 and I killed 21. It was her first big match - my first defeat.''

Annie eventually joined Butler on the tour, first as a helper, then as a partner and finally as the star. He became her agent and business manager, developing a successful relationship - and a romance - that lasted for the rest of their lives.

Toni Seiler, director of the Garst Museum in Greenville, which has a collection of Annie Oakley memorabilia, says Annie was for 17 years the star of Buffalo Bill's ``Wild West,'' overshadowing the legendary William F. Cody himself.

Annie Oakley died Nov. 26, 1926, and Frank Butler died just 18 days later. Annie was buried in the Brock Cemetery, just north of Greenville on U.S. 127, with a simple tombstone that reads: Annie Oakley, At Rest, 1926. Frank Butler is buried beside her.

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Photo: Tourists can trace Annie Oakley's early days via markers near Greenville, Ohio.