On a Thanksgiving Day in Cincinnati, a professional marksman named Frank Butler put up a $100 bet and lost it to a 15-year-old, five-foot-tall girl in a handmade dress. This episode traces Annie Oakley from a childhood of extreme poverty in Ohio, including two years of abuse with a family she only ever called the wolves, to paying off her mother's mortgage through precision market hunting, marrying the man she defeated, and joining Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show in 1885.

Drawing on her autobiography, court transcripts and period newspapers, we examine the physics of her trick shots, her adoption by Sitting Bull as Little Sure Shot, her insecurity over teenage rival Lillian Smith, the 1901 train wreck that required five spinal operations, and her war against William Randolph Hearst after a fabricated 1904 story about a cocaine arrest. She won ...