Cathy and Her Shootin’ Irons
I Need to Learn to Handle a Peacemaker
It became obvious as I wrote Paint the Wind that I couldn’t write with honesty about a gunfighter like Ford Jameson without learning my way around a six shooter. So I betook myself nervously to a pistol range in Connecticut, the last true bastion of male supremacy, where I was greeted by a refrigerator-sized male personage with no neck, who said his name was Doc. You know how the old adage goes… “Never eat at a place called Mom’s, never play poker with a man named Doc…” Well, let me tell you about Doc.
“I’m a novelist writing about the Old West,” I said trepidatiously, looking around the range, filled only with serious-faced men, “and I need to learn how to shoot a gun.”
From his Mount Rushmore height Doc looked down and said, “First off, you got no business writing about the Old West if you’ve never packed a piece… second, you don’t look like you’re gonna to be good at this… third, fifty bucks cash, up front, and if I don’t like the way you handle yourself, you’re out of here.”
At Home on the Range
But then a strange thing happened… Doc placed a Colt .45/Single Action Army revolver in my hand – the famed Peacemaker that won the West – and I was transformed. I was once again dressed in black… the sagebrush was whistling down the windswept streets of yesteryear, and I was there with Wyatt and Virgil and Bat… there with Ford Jameson, the gunfighter in my story and with Jewel, the feisty madam who loves him.
I hit dead center of the bullseye with my first shot and Doc said portentously, “You’re either a natural or you’ve lied to me about your experience with guns and it better not be the latter!” After I shot a few more rounds I’m happy to say he took me on as a student! Both Doc and his wife Bobi were fountains of information about the weaponry of the West and shared their knowledge most genrously.
Doc was a veterinarian as well as an expert on the guns of the old West so he was an invaluable fountain of information about some of the wilder parts of the wild west lore, too. For example, he gave me chapter and verse about the choosing and schooling of cavalry horses, who were trained to lie still on the ground as living shields for their riders despite the fact that gunfire was zinging all around them.
Later, I learned to shoot from horseback with my Indian friends, but that’s a tale for another day.
