“You walk out on the front porch of the ranch house and there is Bessie dragging your little brother through the freshly-planted garden because it’s been scared by that old bear, Ephraim. You holler at your little brother, ‘Hold her Newt, she’s headed for the rhubarb.’”
That’s Mark Murray setting the stage for a gun-slinging cowboy adventure. Contrary to Frederick Jackson Turner, on this June day, the Wild West is anything but a thing of the past. Murray, known among his fellow sharpshooters as Sparky Mark, is part of the Cache Valley Vaqueros, a group of Old West enthusiasts who meet once a month to take part in cowboy action shooting. The sport combines marksmanship, storytelling, and historical reenactment. Sid Henderson introduced me to some of the other Vaqueros.
“Sid Henderson—known as Sid Chelen—this is Sparky Mark, and behind you is M.T. Pockets,” Henderson said. “We’re part of the Single Action Shooting Society, which is a reenactment group for cowboy action shooting.”
In this event, a contestant is given a series of targets to aim at based on a prewritten storyline. Participants are expected to be clad in a costume faithful to the Old West and compete under an alias. Even the guns that are used must be models from no later than 1897. Sparky Mark said that cowboy shooters often refer to each other solely by the aliases.
“We also shoot under an alias. Every one of us have our own alias back like they did in the 1800’s,” he said. “So, people will tell me all the time, ‘I know Fred,’ or ‘I know Larry that shoots single action,’ and I’m going, ‘Well, I don’t know Fred or Larry.’ I know M.T. Pockets, I know Sid Chelen. They know Sparky Mark. 90 percent of these people I don’t know by their real names.”
The inspiration for an alias can come from a variety of sources but must be appropriate for an Old West character. Brett Evans, known as 7-E Wrangler, said that his nickname is part of a family tradition.
“The family brand is a 7-E. When we first started playing this game, we all had to come up with names,” Evans said. “My father is 7-E Ramrod, I’m 7-E Wrangler, my oldest son is 7-E Sidekick, my daughter is 7-E Sassy, and Morgan is 7-E Sharpshooter. So, when we go around the state, everyone knows the 7-E bunch.”
If you thought playing cowboy and being good at action shooting was easy, you’d be wrong. Sparky Mark said that, for him, it took weeks of doing something that wasn’t always possible in the Old West—practice.
“To get to the point that I am right now, last summer, I came down here once a week and shot at least 600 rounds that I timed and worked on my transitions, my shot count, my speed, my accuracy,” he said. “They couldn’t do that in the Old West. Nobody had enough money to do that.”
After learning the ins and outs of cowboy action shooting, the Vaqueros let me give it a try. Many of the good cowboy shooters can complete a single stage of the course in under half a minute. With a completion time of 84 seconds, I’ve still got a lot to learn about being an Old West gunslinger.
