The Lost Diary of Annie Oakley’s Wild West Stagehand
The twelfth Lost Diary about this famous entertainer. Set from 1885 the year in which Annie joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show to 1893 when Annie reached the high point of her career at the Chicago World’s Fair.Annie Oakley ‘s rags-to-riches story is engaging and exciting. She began shooting to provide for the family pot and was soon selling her surplus game to hotels in Cincinnati. Within two years she had made enough money to repay the family mortage! Her name is closely linked with other celebrities of the Old West most notably Buffalo Bill and the great leader of the Sioux nation, Chief Sitting Bull who addopted her as his daughter into the Sioux nation and gave her the nickname Little Sureshot. She was the star attraction in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Circus in 1885. A role-model for young women in the American West she was also widely admired by boys and young men for her shooting skills.
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THE LOST DIARY OF
ANNIE OAKLEY’S
WILD WEST STAGEHAND
LASSOED BY CLIVE DICKINSON
Illustrated by George Hollingworth
CONTENTS
24 April 1885 – Louisville, Kentucky
25 April 1885 – Louisville, Kentucky
16 May 1885 – On the Train to Chicago
12 June 1885 – Buffalo, New York State
11 October 1885 – St Louis, Missouri
29 May 1886 – On the Train to Washington D.G.
18 April 1887 – London, England
20 June 1887 – Windsor Castle, England
31 October 1887 – London (For the Last Time this Year)
22 February 1888 – Easton, Pennsylvania
2 July 1888 – Gloucester Beach, New Jersey
8 August 1888 – Troy, New York
31 December 1888 – Philadelphia
31 January 1889 – Chambersburg, Pennsylvania
23 April 1890 – Munich, Germany
23 August 1890 – Berlin, Germany
23 September 1890 – On the Train in Germany (Don’t Rightly Know Where)
What do you do when you unexpectedly find a previously unknown document about a famous person? Sell it to a newspaper? Sell it to a television company? Put it back where you found it? Tear it up as bedding for your gerbils?
This was exactly the difficulty faced by Clive Dickinson during a visit to Germany. While he was unwrapping a cuckoo clock he had bought, he discovered what looked like a very thick exercise book lining the bottom of the box. Inside were pages and pages of writing, not in German, as he might have expected, but in English.
To make sure he wasn’t going cuckoo himself, Mr Dickinson flicked through the pages and found dates from the 1880s, which suggested that the book was a kind of journal. All the way through, he spotted the name of Annie Oakley, who was one of the most famous American women in the world one hundred years ago.
Before going public, Mr Dickinson asked for professional help. In exchange for return flights to Europe, all expenses paid, two experts on the American West, Professor Joe King of Larfinstock College and Dr Rusty Brayne of Imina State University, confirmed that he had made a unique find. In their experience, nothing quite like it had ever been discovered before.
After careful study, lasting two weeks in an expensive hotel, they agreed that the book lining the box of the cuckoo clock was the personal diary of one Phil McCartridge. He seems to have worked as Annie Oakley’s stagehand during the years in which she became world famous for her amazing shooting act in the show called Buffalo Bill’s Wild West.
Working closely with Annie Oakley, Phil McCartridge was able to record day-to-day details about her and her friends: the cowboys, Native American Indians, animal-handlers, stable-hands and riders, who helped recreate life in the Wild West for spectators on both sides of the Atlantic.
Now this remarkable document can be published for the first time, bringing alive the thrills and skills, dangers and excitements which Buffalo Bill’s Wild West brought to millions of people in America and Europe a century and more ago.
Well, I’ll be…!
I thought I’d seen just about all there was to see about guns and shooting and the Wild West. But not after today. No, sir.
Colt, Remington, Lancaster, Winchester, Double Gloucester – there ain’t a gun this side of the Rocky Mountains that I don’t know. And there ain’t a champion sharp-shooter I ain’t seen – leastways, not till this afternoon.
Now, I may not be that quick at book learning, but I know a sure bet when I see one. I reckon I could be on to a good thing if I start writing down what goes on around here. I can see my name in print already on one of those fancy book covers and in the newspapers.
Things ain’t going to be the same – that’s for sure. And about time, too. Last winter was the worst this show has ever known. First the steamship carrying everything down the river ran into another steamship and sank. We lost animals, wagons and camp gear, not to mention my precious guns and ammunition. That meant the show opened late in New Orleans, which ain’t good for business, especially at Christmas.
Then it started raining. It rained and it rained until I thought the old man river>* was flowing right through the camp. Only a handful of people came to watch the show. Business was so bad that Captain Bogardus, the top trick shooter on the bill, upped sticks last month and left the show for good, taking his four shooting sons with him. With our top gun gone, we didn’t have many shots left in the locker.
