Guns of the Old West Spring 2023

The Single Action Shooting Society was founded in 1987. Although the members of SASS compete in Cowboy Action Shooting (CAS), about the closest most get to a horse is one made out of an old barrel with a saddle cinched tight atop it. CAS match stages are all generally shot with the cow folks’ feet planted firmly on terra firma. However, some cowboys and cowgirls who actually owned and rode horses decided to see what it would be like to shoot their six-guns from atop a moving equine. In the mid-1990s, cowboy-mounted shooting competitions started being held. Basically, it was like mounted barrel racing at a rodeo, but while galloping around barrels on your horse, you also shot at balloons using blank cartridges to pop them. In the Saddle In 2000, an…

Before delving into the subject of this article, I wish to unequivocally state that I have the highest regard for the indigenous peoples of North America. I became fascinated with Native Americans during my youth and remain a student of their cultures and history. Though the outcome of the westward tide of pioneers and settlers was inevitable, it has been so throughout history, across all continents and cultures. The story of invasion, of conquering another culture to gain power, wealth or real estate is not a new one, nor one limited to this country’s growth. So, let’s abstain from the political rhetoric and take a closer look at the tools of the trade of some of the greatest warfighters in history. Timeless Tacticians In publications such as this, much has been written…

In the last “Cowboy Stuff ” column, we saw how the 2022 Cowboy Fast Draw Association (CFDA) National Championship set a new attendance record for the entire history of Fast Draw with 266 shooters. Well, records are made to be broken. The 2022 CFDA World Championship, the Fastest Gun Alive shoot, broke that record with an attendance of 178 men, 82 women and 11 youth shooters for a total of 271 contestants! Unfortunately for me, the long trip from Illinois to Nevada proved not to be the best for the exceptional hand-eye coordination required, and I was eliminated in the eighth round of competition, placing 65th out of the 178 men with a fast shot in my last round of .426 seconds. Looking at the bright side, that means that I…

The introduction to the 1992 film Unforgiven shows a tatterdemalion Clint Eastwood, armed with a Model 1858 Starr revolver, struggling, without success, to hit a tin set atop a fence post about 25 feet away. On the surface, you could say that scene was a fairly embarrassing cameo for a pistol that rarely appears in the movies. As the film unfolds, we realize that it wasn’t the gun (it rarely is), just that the shooter was long out of practice. I’m not bragging, but at 25 feet, I could hit that target almost every time shooting double-action with my Pietta replica Model 1858 Starr. The Starr is more than just a decent gun. Operational procedures aside, the 1858 Starr revolver was very advanced for its day. In it, I see the…

FOR SEVERAL YEARS NOW, Western Action Shooters have been living in uncertain times as far as ammunition availability is concerned. Many of the cartridges we shoot, like .38 Special, .44-40 WCF and .45 Colt, for example, have been hard to find and expensive, to boot. I know lots of us handload, but even reloading components are difficult to locate. Try finding small pistol primers at your LGS. Again, when you do find primers, gunpowder or lead bullets, all-to-often the prices have been jacked up. With the difficulty in finding cowboy loads, one cartridge, however, seems to be fairly plentiful and reasonably priced. We’re talking about the ubiquitous 9mm Luger. Checking several sources online, you can easily find 50-round boxes starting at $15 to $20. GUN DETAILS Like many of us, Taylor’s &…

THERE IS AND WILL ALWAYS BE A GREAT DEBATE AS TO WHICH OF SAMUEL COLT’S HANDGUNS WAS HIS GREATEST DESIGN. If you look at sales as a measure of success, it is clearly the Model 1849 Pocket Revolver, which attained the largest sales unit volume in all of Colt’s percussion-era history, totaling more than 331,000 guns sold between 1849 and 1873. But sales alone do not make it the greatest example of Sam Colt’s design genius. The 1849 was essentially a smaller version of a design that would become his second best-selling percussion revolver, the Model 1851 Navy, which, coincidentally, also remained in production until 1873, totaling more than 215,000 sales. Arguably, the 1851 Navy has become the most celebrated of Colt’s percussion models with the 1860 Army sitting firmly in second…