Accidental Cowboy
“She said if you’re from Texas, son,
Where’s your boots and where’s your gun?
I smiled and said ‘I got guns no one can see…”
— Joe Ely

“She Never Spoke Spanish to Me”

First, a story …
We’re sitting around a cool autumn campfire under the spectacular bowl of Montana big sky country, cowboy coffee with just a shot of rotgut mescal burning our hands through the blue tin cups. The man on my left, arguably one of the most recognizable figures in the world, quietly chords his guitar, then launches into a melody. The woman on my right leans over and whispers in my ear. “Do you know the words?” asks Dale Evans, Queen of the West.

“Everyone knows the words,” I whisper back, and I try to figure how profoundly unlikely it is to be under Montana skies, singing Happy Trails with Roy and Dale. Even more unlikely, we’d been on horseback for over a week, pushing a small herd of longhorns to a pasture just outside Yellowstone. The ride had started as a publicity stunt for a made-for-TV movie featuring my friend Randy Travis—get a bunch of city slickers, this being before the movie City Slickers, and have them ride for more than a week to get to the location. In a few days, as expected, most everyone had retreated to hot baths, motel beds, and air-conditioned vans … everyone except me and the real cowboys, the wranglers, who drove the little herd from dusk until dawn, ate late, slept on the ground, and did it again the next day.

“You’re media,” one of the cowgirls said after we all gagged down dust for 10 hours. “You don’t have to be here.”

“Too stupid to leave,” I said. “Dumber than the horse.”

“Horse ain’t dumb,” she said.

The “… till we meet again” refrain lingers in the cool air with a tinge of regret … we know the reality that Roy and Dale are past most of their campfires, and perhaps if we do meet again, it won’t be in Montana. One by one the city folks slip away, until it’s just us cowboys, telling lies, swapping stories about guns and horses and bars and mistakes we’d all managed to live through, laughing until there was nothing left but glowing red coals. On the way back to the bedrolls, Randy Travis and I are quiet. “We are lucky men,” he said finally, and I couldn’t help but agree.

I never wanted to be a cowboy. I didn’t grow up trying to shoot it out with Marshal Dillon or ride with Josh Randall or Paladin or hope my own dum…diddle diddle diddle…dum diddle dum…Bonanza! Ponderosa was just around the corner. For me it was always the guns. My heroes were Elmer Keith, Bill Jordan, Skeeter Skelton, Charlie Askins, and that firebrand, Col. Jeff Cooper, hunters and gunmen of the first order, and I resolved early on to follow in their footsteps. I suppose I’m as surprised as anyone that such a half-fast plan actually worked.

For me, it’s still all about the guns. I came to Cowboy Action Shooting™ as a veteran of several other shooting sports—some of which I helped to birth—drawn not by the hats or the boots or the aliases or the history, but by the blue steel and polished wood visions of Colt Single Action Armies, of Winchester ‘73s, of fat, hammered stagecoach guns. Of course, the history was in the guns themselves. The first gun I ever fired was a Ruger Bearcat; the second a Flattop Blackhawk … any sport that would give me the opportunity to shoot those guns a lot was muy bueno in my book!

I may have come because of the guns, but I stayed because of the people.

In an increasingly grey world, it’s good to know the Cowboy Way, a better way, is still alive and well. My television series COWBOYS, only on OUTDOOR CHANNEL, has been a labor of love, not just from me but from every single person participating in the show. Both our Producer, John Carter (“Pick E. Une” … for those of you poor pathetic non-Southerners, “picayune,” originally a small coin, is Southern for “trivial”) and our Director of Videography, Gene “Grizz” Moffett, are now regular Cowboy Action Shooters and doing great. Our host, Tupelo Flash, is … well … Tupelo With An Emphasis On Flash, but, darn, doesn’t he grow on you? Next year we’ll be adding frequent visitor, Evil Roy, to COWBOYS,as well as the coolest gunfight reenactments you’ve ever seen.

I’m also very excited about the explosive growth of Wild Bunch style shooting, and we’ll be talking about that a whole bunch in the next THE HOWLING. I shot the Wild Bunch match at END of TRAIL this year, and you would think the co-author of one of the landmark books on the 1911 (THE COMBAT .45 AUTO, with Bill Wilson) and a veteran USPSA and IDPA shooter could get a 1911 to run all the time. Trust me, at Winter Range next year, Wolf Bane will have this magazine thing sorted out!

Wild Bunch shooting is the doorway for many new accidental cowboys and cowgirls into our sport. It’s something new under the sun, a mix of the old and new (or more properly, a mix of the old and not quite as old) that meshes perfectly with traditional SASS competition. I’ve been privileged to handle a couple of the proto-1911 guns from the 1907 military trials—guns John Moses Browning personally tuned—and they resonate with the same strange energy of an old Peacemaker or a worn-out cowboy 1892 Winchester. I’d like to add that the big bore rifle requirement in the Wild Bunch rules really adds something special to the competition … it’s harder to run the big boys than the .38s many of us use in regular competition. I think that’s appealing to the crossover shooters coming into the sport, and, hey, it gives me an excuse to run my Nate Kiowa Jones-tuned .44 Magnum Legacy ‘92 clone, which is just too much fun!

So what else can you expect from THE HOWLING? Well, if you follow my blog or the DownRange.tv Forums, you know I’m not short of opinions.

We’ll be talking about guns, training, and events, plus being on the road with COWBOYS, my flagship series SHOOTNG GALLERY and our awardwinning personal defense show, THE BEST DEFENSE. Plus some surprises … always surprises!

So, as we like to say in television, stay tuned … ‘till we meet again!

*****************************

Wolf Bane, SASS #13557, is the alias for Michael Bane, veteran shooter, gunwriter, and producer of the OUTDOOR CHANNEL series, COWBOYS,SHOOTING GALLERY, and THE BEST DEFENSE. You can find an excerpt of his most recent book, TRAIL SAFE, at: http://www.flyingdragonltd.us/trail-safe.htm.

This column was published in the October 2009 edition of Cowboy Chronicle, a 104 pages monthly magazine for members of the Single Action Shooting Society. The magazine is part of their $55.00 annual membership package.

Related posts:

1. Rerun – The Wild Bunch Match on Shooting Gallery
2. Wild Bunch Match at EOT 2009
3. Cowboy Action Radio #14 – Wolf Bane’s Wild Bunch Challenge
4. New season of Cowboys starts July 1st
5. Wild Bunch Wrap Up