Popularity growing for cowboy mounted shooting

ShareThis

By MAREK WARSZAWSKI
Fresno Bee
Friday, May 04, 2007

If this were the 1860s, the sight of a man on horseback wearing a Confederate Army uniform and brandishing a pistol would be sufficient cause for alarm.

Except it's 2007, and Greg Garcia isn't a Confederate soldier. He just dresses up like one while competing in a rapidly growing equestrian sport called cowboy mounted shooting.

"It's just an outfit, bro," said Garcia, who lives in Half Moon Bay, Calif. "But I am a rebel at heart."

As its name implies, cowboy mounted shooting combines both horsemanship skills and shooting ability. Riders fire blank rounds from .45-caliber single-action revolvers at a sequence of balloon targets arranged in a specific pattern.

In keeping with the Old West theme, competitors are required to use replicas or clones of 19th century revolvers and are encouraged to wear period clothing during matches.

Runs are scored on both time and shooting accuracy. Each cartridge is loaded with black powder. Burning embers expelled from the load rupture the balloons within 15 feet.

"Of course, you've got to do all this on a horse moving at 30 mph," Steve Tiller said. "It's not as easy as you might think."

Tiller is president of the Fresno Stage Robbers, one of more than a dozen cowboy mounted shooting clubs based in California. Recently the Fresno Stage Robbers hosted two single-day events that drew 30 competitors, ranging in age from 18 to 68.

Besides the replica guns and period clothing, participants further get in the spirit by giving themselves aliases.

Garcia, whose handlebar mustache and sideburns go well with his army uniform, is known as The Confederate Kid. Tiller goes by Dewey Demented. Other aliases in action over the weekend included Seamore Dust, Stoney Meadows, J.D. Cowgirl and Spaghetti Joe.

"What's funny is you don't know your friends by their real names," said Gail Rich-Stone of Latrobe, Calif., aka Miss Wylie P. Fox. "You know them only by their aliases."

Some of the costumes are as colorful as the fake names.

Constance Boyd of Livermore, Calif. (aka J.D. Cowgirl) competed in a full-length sage-green dress adorned with laces and ruffles, matching pantaloons, green eel-skin boots and a ponytail hair extension that matched her blonde locks.

"It's all about color coordination," Boyd said. "The froo-froo aspects are half the fun of this sport."

More and more people seem to be joining in.

According to the Cowboy Mounted Shooting Association, an organization that counts 6,000 members nationwide, cowboy mounted shooting is one of the fastest-growing equestrian sports. Most clubs, including the Fresno Stage Robbers, formed during the past decade.

Unlike barrel racing, in which the horse and rider navigate the same course over and over, there is no set pattern to cowboy mounted shooting. The CMSA handbook lists 50 "stages," each with a different arrangement of targets.

Each stage consists of 10 targets marked by five white and five colored balloons. The rider shoots all five white targets, then holsters his first gun while riding to the end of the arena. He then draws his second gun and fires at the five colored balloons, which are usually arranged in a straight line toward the finish line. (For safety reasons, each gun is loaded with only five rounds.)

A typical one-day match consists of four stages, drawn at random that morning.

"The horse has no idea where it's going," Tiller said. "It's a game of confidence between the rider and horse. ... You can practice stages ahead of time, but you never know which ones are going to be in a match."

Runs are timed by two infrared cameras to three decimal places, and one or two hundredths of a second can determine the difference between winning and losing. (Competitors get 5 seconds added to their time for each missed target.)

Participants rode thoroughbreds, quarter horses and Arabians. The breed of horse isn't important. What is important is training it not to get spooked at the sound of gunfire.

Some owners even fit their horses with earplugs.

"You've got to be completely relaxed and at ease while being totally focused on the balloons and completely trusting in the horse," Garcia said. "When everything comes together, it's a beautiful thing."

On the Web: Cowboy Mounted Shooting Association: www.cowboymountedshooting.com

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.shns.com.)