Shooting the Silhouette

The story goes that Buckskin Frank Leslie used to stand his wife May against a wall and shoot bullets in an outline around her body—something that writer Walter Noble Burns called “The Silhouette Girl” in his book Tombstone: An Iliad of the Southwest.

It sounds pretty crazy, even for a noted marksman like Leslie.  But the fact of the matter is, there’s no evidence that the couple—who were married in the mid 1880s—tried any such trick.  It likely was a concoction of Burns’ creative mind.