Читать книгу The Lost Diary of Annie Oakley’s Wild West Stagehand - Clive Dickinson - Страница 9

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? Go!”, which sends all the riders galloping round and round the arena, whooping and firing guns in the air. That gets the crowds going every time.

Annie comes on midway through the show, after the riding of the Pony Express and Buffalo Bill’s re-enacted fight with Yellow Hair. She don’t just walk into the arena – she skips in from the grandstand gangway, waving, bowing and blowing kisses. After the rough men of the Wild West, she sure is a change.

Out in the centre of the arena, Frank has all her rifles, shotguns and revolvers loaded and laid out on a wooden table covered with a silk cloth. He loads and fires the clay pigeons from spring traps and reloads Annie’s guns during the act.

Annie don’t miss too often. In fact, she tells me that sometimes she misses on purpose, to prove that the targets don’t just explode on their own. One day I counted fifty-five hits out of the fifty-six glass balls Frank tossed in the air for her, and she only missed one because she tripped as she pulled the trigger.

She’s shoots so fast too – and with both hands. I’ve seen her hitting targets holding the gun over her head and lying on her back across a chair. She can hit glass balls tied to the end of a rope Frank spins round his head. She can even toss two glass balls high in the air herself, then pick up a rifle, shoot the first ball, spin round and shoot the second before it hits the ground.

The audience’s favourite stunt is Annie’s mirror trick. In this, she turns her back on the target, takes aim with the rifle over her shoulder using a polished knife blade as a mirror, and still manages to hit the target. Sometimes she’ll even jump the table after Frank has let fly a clay pigeon, run ten yards to pick up her gun and still hit the target before it lands. That’s pretty snappy shooting, seeing that from start to finish the clay’s only in the air for four or five seconds!