Wild West Shootout Re-Enactment Hospitalizes Three Spectators

Tourists watching the Old West show in Hill City, South Dakota last Friday got a real taste of the mayhem associated with that time period when live ammo began spraying into the crowd.

Investigators  aren’t sure if real bullets somehow got into the actor’s guns, or if it was  shrapnel from blanks that wounded three spectators seriously enough to be taken to the hospital in  ambulances.

One of the spectators remains hospitalized, listed in fair condition.

The Dakota Wild Bunch Reinactors, who stage gunfights in Hill City a few times a week during tourist season, aren’t talking to the press at this point, but announced on their Facebook page they would be suspending their re-enactments in light of the incident.

[Rapid City Journal]

From My Perspective:

I have witnessed this event and it is amazing.  I would hate to think that they would suspend this entirely.  Hill City and Deadwood, Sturgis and Keystone all have great wild west history and reenactments all the time during tourist season.  They are fun to watch.  My husband David and I try to make it to these places when we are in Rapid City visiting family.  We enjoy these "tourist traps" very much.  I guess we are tourists after all.  (The bermuda shorts and fanny packs probably give us away.) -- Nancy Mace