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OPENING OF THE WILD WEST SHOW AT ASTON.

On Saturday afternoon Buffalo Bill's famous "Wild West Show" was given at the Aston Lower Grounds for the first time out of London. The great show-fresh from a London success unique in the history of entertainments is expected to be located at Aston for the greater part of the present month, and all due preparations have been made for its reception. The meadow forms an admirable arena for the display. It is even larger than the famous amphitheatre at Earl's Court, and the change from the circus-like floor at Earl's Court to the green turf at Aston pleasantly heightens the illusion. The bicycle-track, too comes in admirably for the racing, which forms a considerable part of the programme, though the track itself suffers terribly under the reckless heels of the fiery mustangs of the prairie. The accommodation for spectators is of course not so good as at Earl's Court, but a grand stand has been erected along the Trinity Road side of the meadow capable of holding at least three thousand persons. All the way round the side of the ground has been banked, so that an enormous number of visitors can obtain an admirable view of the display. On Saturday, as we were sorry to observe, the accommodation was by no means soverely taxed. There was, of course, a great crowd, numbering three or four thousand; but the attendance was by no means commencurate with the extraordinary interest and merit of the exhibition. Of course the show has many disadvantages with which to contend. Of these, the weather is the chief. Saturday was as bright a day as could be looked for at this season of the year- the forenoon quite a blaze of glorious sunshine- but it was nevertheless, a November day, and before the performance closed in the fierce turnult of an Indian attack upon a settler's house November had assorted itself, as the number feet and reddened noses of the spectators grimly attested.The show, too, comes at a time when the Birmingham public is in the first and worst stage of its football fever, and on Saturday two of the chief local clubs were pitted against each other under circumstances of unusual excitement. However, the cold and damp notwithstanding, Buffalo Bill's audience remained attracted and excited to the very last.

"Buffalo Bill's" Wild West is a really great show. The one unique merit of the exhibition is also, from one point of view, its only weakness. We refer to the fact that it is utterly destitute from first to last of the tricks and graces of the popular entertainer. We have no doubt that the astute managers of the enterprise could, if they chose, make the exhibition more showy, give it more variety and excitement, ad so to a certain class of pleasure-seekers endow it with superior attraction. But to those who are a little satiated of the shallow arts and tawdry frippery of the popluar entertainer, the Wild West Show comes with the brisk freshness of the breezes that blow over those boundless prairies whose wild life it is the object of the show to mirror. The "Wild West" is not only realisitic, it is real. It is an honest effort carried out with an enterprise and completeness, which in the whole history of shows have never been equalled, to bring to English audiences some real notion of the wild life of a few years back on the confines of civilisation in North America, when a little army of pioneers, holding their lives in their hands, were piercing the savage haunts of the redskins, and paving the way for the steady march westward of civilisation; and, too, of the wild life of to-day, the life of the cowboys and vaqueros, on the cattle ranches of Kansas and Mexico. It is an American exhibition, but there is nothing American - as the word is sometimes used here - about it but the enterprise with which the advertisement department is conducted. There is no buncombe about it; in every detail it is genuinely, and with studious unpretentionsness, what it protests itself to be. There is no trace of tinsel or of the make-up box. As a result, a visit to the exhibition is like spending a couple of hours in the land of travels of Fennimoro Copper and of Bret Harte alternately. Instead of the "man in the ring" of the circus, in evening dress and with a debilitated smile, there is a stalwart "orator" perched on a timber stage, and clad in somrero and deerskin gaiters. He is a brazen-throated son of thunder, and declaims to far and near - we had almost written to quick and dead - the few words necessary to explain each item of the programme, and introduces the various departments of the company at the review which opens the programme, Buffalo Bill, as he rode his grand old white horse round the ring on Saturday, raising his broad hat in acknoledgment of welcoming cheers, was not in the least "got-up." His six-foot odd of sturdy frame was clad in deerskin coat and gaiters, a suit long and roughly worn, looking just as he must have looked a hundred times when riding his cautious way over the praries as the foromost scout of expeditions against the Souix or the Cheyennes. One of the most attractive items in the programme is the delineation of an attack by Indians upon the "Deadwood Coach" carrying the United States mails, and its rescue by scouts and cowboys headed by Buffalo Bill. The coach used is itself a scarred and battered beteran of the Cheyenna and Deadwood route. The adventerous journey in teh mimic representation of which is it now used it has performed in stern reallity many a score of times. The driver who holds the reins, and who looks as sententiously saturnine as Yuba Bill, has often on that very box run the gauntlet of Indians and bandits. The passenger who smokes his pipe on the roof would have been a likely passenger on a real trip, since he has grown grey in adventerous pioneering. It may be - the coach used to pass through the Sioux country - that the very Indians who swoop down upon the coach with the half barking yell which is the Indian's war-whoop, have in their time attacked the coach in deadly earnest. That is the character of the show all through. It is not stage-acting; it is the fighting over again of their battles by old warriors. The Indians - of whom there is quite an army - are almost painfully real. They belong to the Souix, the tribe which was the very last to make its submission to the United States Government. They, riding bare-backed on fiery little steeds, take part in all the exciting episodes of the programme - in the attack upon the coach, in a fierce conflict with an emigrant train and its resuers, and in a night raid on a settler's lonely cabin. In one part there is depicted an internooine affray between two bodies of Indians, followed by the war dance of the victors. This is realistic with a vengrance. The Indians, for the most part, wear only a girdle and a dlowing sash over the right shoulder. From head to foot they are rudely painted in bright colours, and it is only on close examination that one discovers how perfunotory and infrequent is their clothing. This is the marvel of the show! On the fifth of November, in the dull cold of a wintry evening, these naked and barefooted savages - they had not even a coating of varnish - wore to the sound of a very elementary band - the Souix cannot have been great at musical festivals - performing a war dance on the turf, and looking as if they liked it. It was the most impressive guarantee of genuineness it has ever been our lot to behold. Presiding in stolid majesty over the dance, sitting like a statue on his motionless horse, with the odd streamer, like a giant cockatoo's comb, which he and his brother chief only wear, reaching from his scalp-lock down to the hindquarters of his steed, was Red Shirt, the famous chief of the Sioux. And then there are the cowboys, a knot of sinewy and strapping lads in the early prime of vigorous manhood. Their contribution to the exhibition is to defeat the Indians - the managers ought in common d

OPENING OF THE WILD WEST SHOW AT ASTON.

On Saturday afternoon Buffalo Bill's famous "Wild West Show" was given at the Aston Lower Grounds for the first time out of London. The great show-fresh from a London success unique in the history of entertainments is expected to be located at Aston for the greater part of the present month, and all due preparations have been made for its reception. The meadow forms an admirable arena for the display. It is even larger than the famous amphitheatre at Earl's Court, and the change from the circus-like floor at Earl's Court to the green turf at Aston pleasantly heightens the illusion. The bicycle-track, too comes in admirably for the racing, which forms a considerable part of the programme, though the track itself suffers terribly under the reckless heels of the fiery mustangs of the prairie. The accommodation for spectators is of course not so good as at Earl's Court, but a grand stand has been erected along the Trinity Road side of the meadow capable of holding at least three thousand persons. All the way round the side of the ground has been banked, so that an enormous number of visitors can obtain an admirable view of the display. On Saturday, as we were sorry to observe, the accommodation was by no means soverely taxed. There was, of course, a great crowd, numbering three or four thousand; but the attendance was by no means commencurate with the extraordinary interest and merit of the exhibition. Of course the show has many disadvantages with which to contend. Of these, the weather is the chief. Saturday was as bright a day as could be looked for at this season of the year- the forenoon quite a blaze of glorious sunshine- but it was nevertheless, a November day, and before the performance closed in the fierce turnult of an Indian attack upon a settler's house November had assorted itself, as the number feet and reddened noses of the spectators grimly attested.The show, too, comes at a time when the Birmingham public is in the first and worst stage of its football fever, and on Saturday two of the chief local clubs were pitted against each other under circumstances of unusual excitement. However, the cold and damp notwithstanding, Buffalo Bill's audience remained attracted and excited to the very last.

"Buffalo Bill's" Wild West is a really great show. The one unique merit of the exhibition is also, from one point of view, its only weakness. We refer to the fact that it is utterly destitute from first to last of the tricks and graces of the popular entertainer. We have no doubt that the astute managers of the enterprise could, if they chose, make the exhibition more showy, give it more variety and excitement, ad so to a certain class of pleasure-seekers endow it with superior attraction. But to those who are a little satiated of the shallow arts and tawdry frippery of the popluar entertainer, the Wild West Show comes with the brisk freshness of the breezes that blow over those boundless prairies whose wild life it is the object of the show to mirror. The "Wild West" is not only realisitic, it is real. It is an honest effort carried out with an enterprise and completeness, which in the whole history of shows have never been equalled, to bring to English audiences some real notion of the wild life of a few years back on the confines of civilisation in North America, when a little army of pioneers, holding their lives in their hands, were piercing the savage haunts of the redskins, and paving the way for the steady march westward of civilisation; and, too, of the wild life of to-day, the life of the cowboys and vaqueros, on the cattle ranches of Kansas and Mexico. It is an American exhibition, but there is nothing American - as the word is sometimes used here - about it but the enterprise with which the advertisement department is conducted. There is no buncombe about it; in every detail it is genuinely, and with studious unpretentionsness, what it protests itself to be.
"Buffalo Bill's" Wild West is a really great show. The one unique merit of the exhibition is also, from one point of view, its only weakness. We refer to the fact that