The Weekend Gunfighter
Cowboy action shooting was started by Harper Creigh, who holed up one rainy Saturday in 1981 with a bunch of Western movies. He regularly shot in International Practical Shooting Confederation matches, and when he finally turned off the TV, he decided to enter his next match using Western-style guns. Soon some friends joined him, and he began dressing like a cowboy as well, adopting the alias of Judge Roy Bean. The SASS was founded in 1987 and now oversees one of the fastest-growing sports in the industry. The fact that you need four firearms just to get started-and that they are not the kind most people already own-has not gone unnoticed by manufacturers. Ruger, Colt, Beretta, Marlin, Winchester, and many other companies have tents and reps here at End of Trail. Cabela's now sells the guns, ammo, and clothing. Like the others, it has discovered that single-action shooters, mostly empty-nest baby boomers with disposable income, are willing to pay for what they want. Hatters' tents are loaded with authentic 50X beaver cowboy hats for $400 and up. A nice custom leather double pistol belt will run you $600 or so. And only a dude wears the same outfit twice over the four-day event. The advertisers know who their audience is. "Little cowboys never disappear," reads an ad by the Henry Repeating Arms Co. that displays a black-and-white photo of a young buckaroo from the 1950s absorbing an imaginary bullet in his parents' living room. "They grow up and buy Henrys to relive the unforgettable joys of childhood."

On my second day at the 480-acre Founders Ranch, I make my way over to the riding ring, where the mounted shooting takes place. Ten balloons are staked out in a random pattern and riders, shooting .45-caliber blackpowder blanks, cross a timing beam at full gallop. The blanks will pop a balloon up to 20 feet away, and the competition requires horsemanship, marksmanship, and the ability to find your holster at a full gallop-and a horse that won't go nuts when you fire a revolver next to its head. Some competitors are deadly serious. Others are just having fun. You'd have to include the Hug and Kiss sisters in the second group, three buxom ladies in lace dresses from Cortez, Wash. There is Aneeda Hug and Kiss, Lenda Hug and Kiss, and Helda Hug and Kiss. A fourth sister, Amanda, couldn't make it. "Aw, hell, it's just a hoot to be here," Aneeda tells me. She shoots her balloons out at a trot and high-fives her "sisters" as she exits the ring.

Back at the regular shooting stages, I fall in with Billy Boots, from Bogota, Texas, who operates what may be the world's only combination pharmacy and single-action gun store. Doing its best to give folks more chances to win (since first prize is a belt buckle), SASS has established 27 categories to compete in, based on sex, age, caliber, type of propellant used, one- or two-handed grip, and probably your astrological sign. And there are random prize drawings for those who don't place well. Billy Boots is shooting "frontier cartridge duelist": a .32-caliber or larger percussion-style cartridge of a pre-1896 type, double-barreled shotgun only, and revolvers cocked and held with a single hand. "Last year I was 116th out of 800 or so overall," he says. "Then I realized I was eighth in my category."

This year he has been doing well but missed two targets this morning. "Sun was rising right over the berm and there wasn't any wind, so the smoke just sorta piled up," he says, shaking his head. His wife died of cancer a little while ago. "She came last year, sick as she was. They gave her the True Grit award for how hard she fought. I got her home and she died." Dozens of his friends from SASS attended the funeral. They'd come without telling him and stood there, all dressed in costume.