“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.

I fought it at first by trying to convince this friend how much time I spend maintaining two web sites and a section of a third one coming up in October.

I also added details about the fixed time I set aside every week to promote three TV shows. And I did not leave out all the consultant work for the firearms industry who is so heavily involved in all we’re doing….

On top of all this, I have to spend time on the telephone.   There is no time left!

Sigh…  There were no sign of understanding on the other end of the phone line. Instead, he continued…. “Marshal, if I stop calling you once a week to hear the latest about all the “stuff” you’re involved in, you will have the time. Just spend that free time and write it down instead! I’ll read about it on your site!”

I agreed, but of course, in a way that wouldn’t make him think I thought he was a pain in the…. oh, well…..

Anyhow, he convinced me. Now, before Michael Bane and I joined forces, I wrote pretty much regularly about current events and happenings. Not that I blame Michael for ruining my writing career, it just became a lower priority when we decided to build the logistics around what we are involved in. Well, maybe now is the time to get back into the “writing game”.

I will promise you at least one weekly column where I simply wrap it up before the weekend.

Most people know me as a cowboy action shooter and dedicated to this sport only. As a competitive shooter, that is my priority. My professional focus is a whole lot broader than CAS. Believe me, cowboy action shooters in general also represent the average gun owner out there and they are also involved in other shooting sports, hunting and Second Amendment issues like every body else. So don’t worry… this column will be about a lot more than folks wearing cowboy hats and single action revolvers.

To Henry…

This week’s main topic is indirectly related to cowboy action shooting, but is in fact more about people, dedication and what I call the backbone of the shooting sport.

A few times a year, I grab my guns and gear to go visit a local shooting range. Between 5-10 shooters show up at this range twice a month to shoot 6 stages with their cowboy guns. It is not really an official shooting club, just a group of people who meet to compete with a low key attitude.

I love going there, because it reminds me of the times before I got involved in national and local organizations and all the politics that comes with it. It also reminds me that what we are doing is about camaraderie and the fact that shooting sports is mostly about the average folks, not the elite and the top shooters. Most of all, it reminds me that if it wasn’t for the local dedication, we would not have a shooting sport to organize on a national level.

And this also brings me to a man answering to the alias Henry Logan….

Henry is not the person you’ll find traveling to all the neighboring clubs, competing in state or national championships. He is depended on a wheel chair. His disability limits his speed, but his strength and determination are the keys to accuracy and dedication. He is also the ramrod, the organizer, the person who makes it all happen. Twice a month, he sets it all up on paper. The stage descriptions and the results are all taken care of. All we have to do is to show up, set up the targets, shoot the match and take the targets down. Henry never complains, his 44-40 rounds are packed with heat and they are far away from the gamer loads many of us send down range.

Henry competes with himself, but at the same time, he makes it possible for us to compete on whatever level we want to compete in.

Henry does not take things for granted the same way as we do. While we in other settings might complain about stupidities, how things can be organized better, how rules should be changed to level the playing field, he just don’t care about these things. His goal is to participate in the game on his level and without any concerns about his limitations. On top of that, he wants to share the game with the rest of us.

Henry is a good example of the unselfish attitude we so desperately need to keep the machine running. With or without wheelchairs, there are many people like him out there who do a lot more than what can be expected. Henry represents the backbone of the shooting sport.

Without people like him, we would not have a platform to keep the local clubs running. Without people like him, the national organizations would simply vanish, the top shooters would no longer be able to receive their awards.

The next time you watch a fast shooter, the next time you hear about a firearms company sponsoring a new talent, don’t forget the Henrys out there, who makes it possible for the rest of us…..

Henry, thanks for all you do and for reminding me what the shooting sport is all about.

It’s been a few years since I launched into a single action revolver project, and I got that ole urge again (Farmer Frank James would recognize the feeling in a heartbeat!). The photo above is one of the classic old Texas Longhorn Border Pistols created by the late Bill Grover… I cribbed the picture from my friend Lee Martin’s great Singleaction.com site, the place for single action fans. You can read a lot more on the Texas Longhorn guns in John Taffin’s classic masterwork SINGLE ACTION SIXGUNS.