Lemondrop

Think that gossip glossies only plague modern-day celebs? Alas, Annie Oakley, famous lady sharpshooter, had her own battle with the early-20th-century equivalent of the tabs.

Apparently, people loved to make stuff up to sell newspapers in 1901, too. When a few William Randolph Hearst properties ginned up wild stories of Annie doing coke (so! PRE! LOHAN!) and committing robberies at the tender age of 28, the gunslinger (who had already retired from Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show at the time) made sure that her carefully cultivated cowgirl image would stay as clean as her shootin'.

She did what any good famous crack-shot would do: She hired a lawyer.

"She was one of the first American celebrities who was really branding herself, and she was very shrewd about her own marketing," says University of New Mexico history professor Virginia Scharff, in an awesome profile of Annie and her media-wrangling in Smithsonian Magazine.

When the Hearst papers refused to print a retraction, she didn't take the slander sitting down. She sued over 55 different newspapers that had printed the story or "facts" contained in it, winning or settling 54 of them for cold, hard cash. Blam.

Annie, despite the fact that you were weirdly anti-suffrage, we celebrate you and your contribution to cool-headed ladies who can shoot a hole through a playing card at 50 paces. Check out this fascinating profile celebrating this divisive folk heroine's 150th birthday.