This view of Cincinnati and the train yards along the Mill Creek was taken from a little-known park in Fairmount called St. Clair Heights Park. The park was named for General Arthur St. Clair, who was the governor of the Northwest Territory from 1788 to 1802 and suffered the worst defeat ever recorded against Native Americans in 1791. Years later, the small park was named for him. It is located on Iroquois Street (ironically) at the end of Fairmount Avenue.
But General St. Clair is not the park’s most famous connection. Although few people know about it, the park has quite a claim to fame:Annie Oakley and her husband Frank Butler (probably) staged a shooting match on the heights in the early 1880s.
It’s hard to find any concrete evidence, but Frank Butler came to Cincinnati in the spring of 1881 with his shooting act, Baughman & Butler. Butler bet a Cincinnati hotelier named Jack Frost that he could beat any local marksman. Frost arranged for Butler to travel north to North Star, Ohio, to compete against a young woman named Phoebe Anne Mosey. Butler lost the match and the bet, but he began courting Miss Mosey and married her about a year later.
The Butlers lived in Cincinnati for a few years after their marriage, and Frank Butler, ever the showman, arranged several exhibitions of fancy shooting in the city while they were here. While they were in Cincinnati, they lived in the neighborhood of Oakley, and that may be how Phoebe Anne Mosey came to take the stage name Annie Oakley.
One exhibition may have taken place near Mt. Echo Park in Price Hill; at least my great-grandfather claimed that he saw Annie Oakley win a shotgun in a shooting match there when he was a young boy. Since Oakley usually used a rifle, she presented the shotgun to my great-grandfather, and my father has it still.
But the match on St. Clair Heights has been better documented, and probably took place at the famous Schuetzenbuckel Park, the home of a German gun club near where the park is now. The gun club was housed in an elaborate building that had been a Baptist seminary built in 1850. As it was the scene of regularly scheduled shooting matches between the club’s members (and it also had a large and popular beer garden for spectators), it makes sense to think Frank Butler would have arranged an exhibition of fancy shooting by him and his wife there. In fact, the Fairmount community celebrated “Annie Oakley Days” with a festival in late summer at St. Clair Park for many years.
Annie Oakley and Frank Butler only lived in Cincinnati for a few years; they joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show in 1885, where Chief Sitting Bull gave her the nickname “Little Miss Sure Shot” and she went on to international fame. The Schuetzenverein (literally, “shooting association”) building burned in 1888, but the view from the site is still spectacular.
