Voice of the Mid-Columbia | Kennewick, Pasco and Richland, Wash. |
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closeSunday, Nov. 02, 2008
Slick shots: Cowboy Action Shooting contest draws hundreds to Mid-Columbia
By Joe Chapman, Herald staff writer
BENTON CITY -- The ammo was live, and so was the Old West as fall arrived on Rattlesnake Mountain.
"You had to bring up Amarillo!" hollered Seth "Shifty Jack" Smith, 21, of Kennewick. The young, slim gunslinger fired his pistols and rifle through a saloon window before picking up his shotgun and barging through the door for a final blast.
The scene was repeated hundreds of times the last weekend in September as about 200 members of the Single Action Shooting Society converged for a regional championship in the sport of Cowboy Action Shooting.
The annual competition and monthly matches at the Rattlesnake Mountain shooting range two miles north of Benton City on Highway 225 lure enthusiasts from around the Northwest who like to dress 'em up and shoot 'em up like gunfighters of old.
The shooting society, called SASS for short, has been around for 27 years. Its website, www.sassnet.com, claims Cowboy Action Shooting is the fastest growing outdoor shooting sport, with more than 75,000 members worldwide.
Participants dress like the cowboys who belted on Colt revolvers and slipped Winchester rifles into saddle scabbards. And they shoot in competitions using originals and replicas of revolvers, rifles and shotguns made before 1900. They blast away at steel targets shaped like cowboys, Indians, buffalo and lawyers, and at each stage, they follow a story and shout out a line before blazing away:
"Not in here you don't!" Bang. Bang. Bang. "Mister, you just killed yourself!" Bang. Bang. Bang.
The public is invited to watch, and those who do will see just how much variety there is to Old West tradition. And how well modern cowpokes can shoot, their marksmanship a match for any real or reel hero or desperado of history and cinema.
Participants can choose from a Derby and suspenders look, the bright colors and piping of a B movie cowboy, the bandana and chaps of a working cowboy or the long coat and cross-draw holsters of a gunslinger, to conjure just a few of the images.
Women can adopt those looks, too, or go with the long flowing calico dress of a frontier lady. Some of the women just watch and dress up for the fun of it, but many are shooters.
"A lady had to know how to defend herself back in those days, too," said Debi Smith, 49, of Colville. She wore a fringed red leather skirt and shot .38-caliber Rugers with custom grips.
But clothing and weapons aren't the only part of the sport that participants tweak to their liking. To be a member of SASS, a competitor has to choose a unique alias, and finding one that no one else has picked can be a challenge.
Debi Smith's alias, for instance, is Diamondback Dottie. Another used the nickname Snortin Nort -- which he got when he was a kid because his last name was Nordskog, he explained. And in fact, it still is, said contestant Ken Nordskog, 72, of Cathlamet.
Bryan Mead, 26, of Banks, Ore. -- who placed second in the modern category at the regional championship -- participates under the name Buffalo Wings.
And Wyatt Galbreath of Moses Lake, who won the 13-and-younger Buckaroo category, chose the alias Zee Steele -- not that he needed a more western sounding name than the one he was born with.
Attention to detail notwithstanding, Cowboy Action Shooting is a contemporary sport and has several innovations over the old days.
For one, the contestants protect their sight and hearing by wearing protective eyewear and earplugs.
And modifications to their guns give them a modern-day advantage over what actual gunfighters used. For instance, participants "short stroke" the levers on rifles and hammers on pistols so they can shoot faster.
The number of guns a shooter uses would stagger an Old West cowboy. But the participants are in the sport because they like to shoot.
"We shoot more ammunition in a weekend than a cowboy shot in his life," said Ron Davidson, operations officer for the Tri-Cities Shooting Association, which manages Rattlesnake Mountain Shooting Facility for Benton County and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.
Though the western flair is part of the enjoyment of the sport, the shooting range is all about gun safety and responsibility, Davidson said. Toward that end, Davidson envisions developing a hunter safety education range for youths at the facility.
For more information about Rattlesnake Mountain Shooting Facility, visit www.tcsa.info.
Or go out there on the fourth Saturday of any month to watch a Cowboy Action Shooting match.
Just don't mention Amarillo.
* Joe Chapman: 582-1512; jchapman@tricityherald.com
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