The Lost Diary of Annie Oakley’s Wild West Stagehand. Clive Dickinson
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Название: The Lost Diary of Annie Oakley’s Wild West Stagehand
Автор: Clive Dickinson
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Книги для детей: прочее
isbn: 9780007502578
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That’s what folks who ain’t seen Buffalo Bill’s Wild West don’t understand. This ain’t no circus, with sideshows and clowns and animals doing dumb things they’ve been taught to do.
Everything in the Wild West show comes straight from the real Wild West. It’s just like the posters say!
It seems to me that that’s why Annie and Frank wanted to join the show. They’ve worked in the circus and in theatres doing trick shooting, but so have too many other so-called sharp-shooters.
Annie’s been there, shot that. Now she wants folks to see how good her shooting really is. If you ask me, she couldn’t have come at a better time.
Goodbye Louisville, it’s been nice seeing you – but it’s even nicer having time for a real good talk with Annie and Frank, seeing as how I’m going to be looking after Annie and her guns from now on.
She’s so excited, you’d think she was a little girl on her first trip away from home. Come to think of it, that’s just what she looks like.
Frank’s kind of quiet. He stays in the background and lets Annie do the talking, but they’re a good team. Folks say he’s a crack shot too. In fact he and Annie met at a shooting match. Frank was an unbeaten champion then, and Annie was just Annie Moses from a small town called Greenville, in Darke County, Ohio. But folks there reckoned Annie “could shoot a little”, and she won that match fair and square.
Frank Butler was a beaten man in more ways than one that day. It wasn’t long before they were married and started appearing in a shooting act called Butler and Oakley.
Why Oakley? Annie says she liked the name and it sounded good. You can’t argue with that, and I’ve a hunch that some day the name Annie Oakley’s going to be famous everywhere.
Annie ain’t had an easy life, that’s for sure. She started shooting when she was just a little girl, so the family could have enough to eat. Soon she was selling the game she shot and earning good money.
Owners of fancy hotels liked her game, because there was never any gunshot in the meat. Annie was so accurate, she always killed the birds stone dead with a shot clean through the head.
Before long, she’d earned enough money to repay the loan on the family farm. Since she was a little girl, Annie ain’t never had a dollar she ain’t earned herself.
She’s had to work for those dollars, mind. Travelling from town to town with Frank, performing in music halls or circuses, staying in cheap hotels. That’s a hard way to make a living.
It’s hard too, when there are so many shooting acts around these days. Annie’s always been different. I guess that’s what makes her stand out. Other lady sharp-shooters dress up all fancy, but Annie dresses real neat and simple. She does all her own sewing, making her clothes, and decorating her dresses and blouses with coloured ribbon and pretty stitching. She ain’t nothing like folks imagine when they think of the Wild West – not till she picks up her guns, that is.
Other shooters, men and women, don’t always shoot fair either. They cheat and, because folks know they cheat, some think Annie cheats too, which ain’t right at all.
Frank told me the story of a faker he knew. This son-of-a-gun played a tune on a piano by shooting disks hanging from each piano key. That looked and sounded pretty smart until, halfway through the act, his gun jammed and he couldn’t shoot any more. The trouble was, the piano tune kept on playing! Down in the orchestra pit, his accomplice hadn’t seen what had happened and kept on thumping out the notes.
16 MAY 1885 – ON THE TRAIN TO CHICAGO
I ain’t never been to Chicago, so I can’t wait till the train pulls in tomorrow! Chicago has a special place in the story of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, because that’s where Buffalo Bill got his first taste of stardom, back in December 1872.
At that time he wasn’t called Buffalo Bill. He was plain William F. Cody, buffalo hunter, army scout, hero of the Indian wars and soon-to-be actor. He’d never acted in a theatre before and everyone could tell the only stage he’d ever been on was the overland stage out west.
But I guess the truth is, he didn’t need to be an actor. He was the real thing from the time he started working as a rider, carrying mail for the Pony Express, when he was just fourteen years old. Then the Kansas Pacific Railroad offered him $500 a month to supply twelve buffalo a day, to feed the 1,200 men laying the new railroad track across the Kansas prairie. In eight months, Cody killed 4,280 buffalo and got the name Buffalo Bill.
It wasn’t just buffalo he killed. In July 1876, when he was an army scout, he fought an Indian warrior called Yellow Hair single-handed, shot him dead and took his scalp. On top of all this, Buffalo Bill could shoot anything that moved. No wonder he was a showbiz hit from day one.
Buffalo Bill’s Wild West has been going since July 1883, and this summer, folks can’t get enough of it. Here’s hoping they like it as much in Chicago.
Yep – Chicago loves Buffalo Bill’s Wild West! And Chicago loves Annie Oakley.
The papers say that 40,000 people came to the show yesterday. That’s one person in twenty in the whole of Chicago. Good business in anyone’s book.
They cheer right from the start as the big canvas curtain at the far end opens and a band of real Indians in full warpaint gallop into the open-air arena, yelling war cries. After them come the cowboys, whooping and waving their Stetson hats, then the Mexican cowhands waving their sombreros.
Buffalo Bill gallops in on a big grey horse to the sound of trumpets from the Cowboy Band. He stops and salutes the audience packed into the horseshoe-shaped stands. Then he calls “Are you ready? СКАЧАТЬ