this is your life. . . 

bushi

When most little girls were playing with dolls, Bushi was cleaning her rifle.

She didn't play jacks, she stacked shotgun shells.  Instead of writing her boyfriends' names in her diary, she shot them into the side of the barn.  Her father was angry, her mother distraught, but all Bushi wanted to do was shoot.

 

As she got into her teens, however she discovered that most boys didn't want a girl who could pick off a quail at 500 yards.

Bushi's

Graduation picture

(They made her put the gun down)

Bushi's first job:  warming up rifle barrels for the cavalry's winter maneuvers

But even surrounded by all those lonely soldiers, Bushi couldn't get a second glance.  She was clean, and pretty, but that habit of always wearing a sidearm on dates seemed to turn the guys off . . .

 

One day however, a handsome stranger rode into town.

He owned a small Wild West show.

His beard had been half shot off by a cross-eyed marksman,

so he was looking for someone to take the sharpshooter's place.

It was love at first draw.  Bushi had never known a man of his caliber before.

"I know he has a hair-trigger temper," she told her mom, "but he never gets loaded."

So Bushi joined the Wild West show, and became a star. But she still wasn't happy.  The handsome man who tripped her trigger, seemed to think of her only as the main attraction, not as a woman.

Fame and fortune  meant little when the man she loved kept shooting her down.

Bushi finally threatened to take the stage out of town if he didn't sharpen up.  Since he needed the stage for the show, he agreed.  They were married the next day--a real shotgun wedding.

Bushi's wedding day

 

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**Midi:  "Salty Dog"