ANNIE OAKLEY

Greymouth Evening Star, 28 September 1928, Page 4

ANNIE OAKLEY

HEROINE OF PAST GENERATION

Those for whom “Buffalo Bill” and his Wild West show are still a living memory will recall also one of the great features of that show —the performance of Annie Oakley —“Litle Miss Sure-Shot,” as she was called —- the greatest woman rifle shot in the world, says “Public Opinion.” There who do so will read with peculiar pleasure the romantic story of her life --“Annie Oakley: Woman at Arms, by Courtney Riley Cooper. Besides being a great rifle shot she was a- great and kindly character, and the story of her life is most enjoyable reading. Mr Cooper tel® it with a fine appreciation of its romance, as the quotation we give shows- Referring to her death, he writes :— “The mention of rifles and Buffalo Bill and other romantic ...things caused more than one boy to read carefully that notice of Annie Oakley’s death.

Il caused, too, a question which would novu|r have been thought of thirty years ago But today : 'Pop; who was Annie Oakley came the query in many a house when the short dispatch made know the fact that the ‘Litlte

Missy’ was gone. And in many a home an interrogated father halted in his reading. The room had faded. In its place a great amphitheatre stretched in a vastness of distance, of flying forms, or scenery, of throng-packed tiers of seats. At one side there waved and nodded the eagle-plumed head dresses of the representatives of the Sioux, the Kiowa, th Comanche, and th Cheyenne. Yonder, a stalwart man in flowing hair and straightbrushed. goatee, his buckskin coat fitting snug over massive shoulders, rode like a god upon his prancing horse. Farther away the old Deadwood stage-coach awaited the cue for the daily encounter with the ‘deadly aborigine of mountain and plain.’ And right out there—less than a score of feet away, shooting against Johnny Baker for the ‘championship’ of the Wild West. ‘Who was Annie Oakley?’ asked many a father that night. ‘She was my first sweetheart, son.’”