Gerry (Lonesome Butte) Barrett stands alone, a six-shooter on each hip, his hat brim pulled low to ward off the sun’s glare.
He rubs his thumb along his mustache, pushing his grey whiskers off his lips, adjusts the bandana around his neck and puts a hand on each of his guns.
“The cure for a philistine is hot lead,” he announces and draws both guns firing down range at the offending targets.
(Butte) wasn’t alone in his attack on all manner of tin targets on Saturday, July 29. The Rope Burn City Bounty Collectors posse showed up at the Quesnel Shooting Range with chips on their shoulder and lead in their guns. And when the smoke cleared and the target hits counted, the posse rode into the sunset with victory tied to their gun belts.
This win came courtesy of single action revolvers, carbines and shotguns. The same guns you might remember from a youth spent with John Wayne, Clint Eastwood and Sergio Leonne. These are the guns your heroes shot with their right hand, while fanning the hammer with their left, the kind that spit fire and black smoke with the theatricality of a dragon.These are the guns of Hollywood’s, and by extension that of childhood, dreams.
With these guns of modern myth, the shooters challenged feral fowl, philistines with no knowledge of poetry and warded off an unknown threat on the way to the outhouse.
Part theatre and part shooting competition, the annual cowboy action shoot spread over three days of ‘scenarios’ that had competitors reciting poetry – saying their lines before bringing the fire.
After the lines were said and the targets were stared down with flinty eye, the shooters let loose in a timed shoot out that had them emptying both pistols, a fully loaded carbine and shooting off six rounds in a double barrel shotgun.
Both time and aim were taken into account to score the shooter, as everyone knows a cowboy with a slow hand and bad aim won’t live long on the wide-open prairies. Spotters counted misses, while an electronic timing device kept track of how long it took to skin their iron and unload their guns.
But the day was as much about the milieu surrounding the actual shooting as it was about getting the best time.
The theatricality of the day was not simply in the recitation and scenarios set up for the participants. The day called for complete immersion into the wild, wild west.
Eastwood could never have been blondie, John Wayne could never have been The Duke wearing a hoodie and jeans, likewise this posse, knowing what they were doing, showed up ready to put the fear into each target. Replete in vests, hats, cowboy boots and .45s slung low on their hips, the posse wouldn’t have been out of place drifting along high plains with only tumbleweed for company.
Like those heroes, each shooter went not by his own name, but by a pseudonym registered with the single action shooter society, of which they are a part.
Thus, when the participants made their way to the shooting range it was (PJ Hardtack), (Inky Fingers), (Dead Man’s Hand) and others with equally sinister names who stood shoulder to shoulder to gun down the offending targets and chow down on that cowboy staple, chili and biscuits, at high noon.
The competition is part of a worldwide association that sets up shoots across the globe for aficionados of the American west.
For more information email cas@quesnelrodandgun.ca.