The Cowboy Year

By Ethan D. Bryan

Mosey on over to the campfire, take a load off, and let me tell you about the adventures of J-Bar and me, Fret Maverick.

J-Bar is my dad, a multi-state cowboy action shooting champion.

To the best of my recollection, in nearly forty years, I had shot guns twice in my life.

Returning home from a family vacation, I suddenly felt compelled to take a risk and try something completely new. So, I joined my recently retired father in playing the cowboy action game. Competing under the alias Fret Maverick, I was introduced to a slice of Americana I would have never known otherwise. The Cowboy Year is a quirky and beautiful, Midwest-set, father-and-son memoir.

But ultimately, The Cowboy Year is a story about having the courage to tell new stories.

• Language: English
• Publisher: eLectio Publishing
• Release date: May 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781632131997

Ethan D. Bryan

Ethan D. Bryan is convinced that good stories bring people together. His baseball stories have landed him an invitation to the White House, an invitation to speak at the National Baseball Hall of Fame, and brief appearances in two documentaries. Ethan lives in Springfield, Missouri, with his wife, Jamie, and daughters, Kaylea and Sophie. He still dreams of playing baseball for his beloved Kansas City Royals. His writing can be found at ethanbryan.com or on Twitter at @Ethan_Bryan.

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Table of Contents

Title Page and Copyright Information

Also By Ethan D Bryan

Dedication

Introduction

One The Beginning

Two The Hat

Three The Guns

Four Therapy

Five The First Stage

Six Our New Hobby

Seven Fret’s First Match

Eight Learning to See—Again

Nine J-Bar’s Birthday Shoot

Ten Changing Lead Dogs

Eleven Still Learning

Twelve Oklahoma

Thirteen Cleaning Up

Fourteen Road Trip

Fifteen Prince of the Pistoleers, Part One

Sixteen Prince of the Pistoleers, Part Two

Seventeen Homeward Bound

Eighteen Surviving Mondays

Nineteen Home on the Range

Twenty Arkansas

Twenty-One The Pistol Project

Twenty-Two The Second Amendment

Twenty-Three If At First You Don’t Succeed

Twenty-Four The National Day of the American Cowboy Match

Twenty-Five The Detour

Twenty-Six A Clean Match

Twenty-Seven October is Coming

Twenty-Eight Show-Me Shootout

Twenty-Nine American League Championship Series

Thirty The 2014 Branson Triple Classic

Thirty-One End Notes

Photos

About the Author

The Cowboy Year

A Story of Dads and Guns

Ethan D. Bryan

eLectio Publishing

Little Elm, TX

www.eLectioPublishing.com

The Cowboy Year: A Story of Dads and Guns

By Ethan D. Bryan

Copyright 2015 by Ethan D. Bryan

Cover Design by Brett Kesinger

ISBN-13: 978-1-63213-199-7

Published by eLectio Publishing, LLC

Little Elm, Texas

http://www.eLectioPublishing.com

5 4 3 2 1 eLP 20 19 18 17 16 15

The eLectio Publishing editorial team consists of Christine LePorte, Lori Draft, Jim Eccles, and Sheldon James.

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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Publisher’s Note

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

Also By Ethan D. Bryan

Tales of the Taylor: Songs That Changed the World

Run Home & Take a Bow: Stories of Life, Faith, and a Season with the Kansas City Royals

Striking Out ALS: A Hero’s Tale

Catch and Release: Faith, Freedom, and Knuckleballs

This book is for Fingers McGee and Noz,

for The Ozarks Posse and the Southern Missouri Rangers,

for Katie Scarlett and Grave Maker Don,

and for all those who still strive to live by

the cowboy way.

But most of all, this book is for J-Bar.

Lord, I reckon I'm not much just by myself,

I fail to do a lot of things I ought to do.

But Lord, when trails are steep and passes high,

Help me ride it straight the whole way through.

And when in the falling dusk I get that final call,

I do not care how many flowers they send,

Above all else, the happiest trail would be,

For YOU to say to me, Let’s ride, My Friend.

—Roy Rogers’ prayer

Introduction

For the vast majority of my life, I have been afraid of guns.

Every time I hear a story about a mass-shooting incident, my heart breaks for everyone involved. I obsessively devour the various news sites online, watch the reports on TV, and wonder what could have possibly happened in the life of the shooter to cause him to respond in such a violent disregard of the mystery and beauty of life. As I read and as I watch, I can feel fear filling my body. My natural response, then, has been to put as much distance as possible between me and any firearm.

Late one night, Jamie, my wife, and I were traveling across southern Missouri, driving through the winding hills of the Mark Twain Forest when the idea about playing cowboy with Dad attacked my brain. I mentioned something about the idea to Jamie while we were driving, mainly so I wouldn’t forget. She responded, Give it some more time and thought; it sounds pretty interesting. When we got home, I wrote down a couple of notes on a scrap piece of paper and tucked it away for future consideration.

A few weeks later I was preparing to talk at a local writers association when the idea again pounced on me. I felt convinced that I was supposed to play cowboy. Immediately, I broke out in a sweat, adrenaline surged through my body, and my stomach started doing flips. Mere minutes before I was supposed to speak about my love for the Kansas City Royals and how I started my career as a writer, I texted Jamie, I’ve decided to play cowboy with Dad.

Sounds like fun. Don’t shoot your eye out.

One

The Beginning

You’ll shoot your eye out, kid.¹

—Santa Claus

I am, for all practical purposes, gun-illiterate.

I have two distinct gun-related memories that span the first thirty-nine years of my life.

When I was little, I had a BB gun. Think Ralphie from A Christmas Story because it was exactly the same gun he wanted. To this day, it sits propped up next to the back door at my parents’ house, the stock warped from Dad holding it tight against his cheek when he was a kid. I remember setting up a few Coke cans in the backyard under Dad’s supervision and trying to hit them. Unfortunately for me, the gun simply couldn’t shoot straight. I didn’t know that all sights were adjustable; instead, I compensated in my aim. To hit my desired target, I had to aim significantly to the left, which makes the next story all the more incredible.

The spring I was in eighth grade my family moved across town. Being the house of a veterinarian, ours was always a house with pets—dogs, cats, and birds. One day after school, I was sitting in front of the TV doing my homework when I heard our cat making an incredible racket in the backyard. I walked to the door and watched as a blue jay swooped down from one tree, pecked at our cat, and sailed up into a tree in the neighbor’s backyard. As soon as it landed, it turned around, swooped down, and pecked at our cat again. The cat, as you can imagine, was not at all pleased and spent his time jumping and making ridiculous cat-sounds while trying to nab the blue jay. Our cat, however, did not have any claws. The blue jay was picking a fight with a defenseless creature. I felt compelled to act, to set the injustice to rights. I loaded a couple of BBs in the gun and started tracking and timing the flight of the cursed blue jay.

I took one shot and saw a small puff of feathers fly into the air. The bird could not pull up and flew into the ground, tumbling toward our wooden fence. I quickly ran out to survey my prize. Instead of a dead blue jay, however, I saw a bird with a few missing tail feathers. I thought about trying to finish it off and put it out of its misery, but I just couldn’t do it. In a few moments’ time, the bird hopped up, cocked its head, and flew off. I walked back inside the house with the cat close behind me. To my knowledge, the blue jay never returned to our backyard. That was my first and only experience hunting.

The next time I remember shooting a gun is also the last time I remember shooting a gun. I was with Craig, my college roommate, at his parents’ farm in southeast Missouri. Craig grabbed a couple of guns, a pocketful of cartridges, and a few targets and we walked out past the barn into the back pastures. He ran out about thirty or forty yards and propped the targets up on a small mound. This was not the first time he had done this.

I like to use the scope on the .22, Craig said. It’s fun to try and shoot the top off of the aerosol cans. He sat down, braced himself, and then did just that, popping off the lid off one of the aerosol cans and making it dance on the mound. He successfully hit everything he aimed at and then offered me a turn.

It took a few moments for the scope and my myopic eyes to cooperate. I gently squeezed the trigger and made a Coke can jump straight up. Craig laughed and encouraged me to try and shoot the top off the WD-40 can. I missed. Craig laughed again.

After a few minutes, Craig’s dad joined us and the two of them took turns picking out targets, each new target a little further away and a little smaller than the one that preceded it. I think the last target was a pencil eraser about a hundred yards away. They both hit it. We then went inside to play ping-pong, where both Craig and his dad continued my education in essential life skills.

And those are all of my experiences shooting guns I can remember.

Which is why the idea to play cowboy with Dad caught me completely by surprise.

When I was a boy, I always dreamed of being a cowboy, Dad told me.

Dad’s cousin and childhood best friend, Bruce, really is a cowboy. He has a ranch with cows and horses in Colorado and does cowboy-stuff which is so far off my radar that I honestly don’t know how to describe what Bruce actually does. I imagine it involves rodeos and feed stores and lassoing things, shooting guns at unwelcome predators as well as for the fun of it, and spending late nights assisting in the delivery of a newborn calf which will most likely be named Norman. And he probably walks funny, too.

When I was in high school, my family went on vacation to visit Bruce and his family in Colorado. It was on that trip that I rode a horse for the first time, which is the closest I ever came to playing cowboy in my childhood. On a mountain trail in the middle of nowhere a couple of guides who gave horseback riding tours for a living took us on a scenic tour of the Rocky Mountains. Dad and Mom rode near the front, closely followed by my sister, Katy, and me. I have three distinct memories from that experience. First, my sister’s horse had horrible gas and I seriously thought I was going to pass out on multiple occasions. Secondly, my horse slipped three times, which scared me half to death, and for which the trail guide complimented me when we returned to the trail head, Some people would’ve just fallen off. Good job not falling off. Thirdly, when I woke up the next morning, I had a newfound compassion and complete understanding of why cowboys walk the way they do—they don’t have a choice.

I have heard some of Dad’s cowboy stories growing up, stories about killing rattlesnakes, watching spaghetti westerns at the movie theater on the weekends, and playing the accordion.² Dad also competed on his high school rifle team which once helped him win a competition at Silver Dollar City.

In 1982 my family moved to Springfield, Missouri after spending a year in Grand Junction, Colorado. On a hot and sticky summer afternoon, we visited the Branson theme-park once known for giving change in silver dollars. In those days, there was a gun shop close to the entrance that held a daily muzzle-loading black-powder shooting competition. Dad had no prior experience with black-powder guns, but entered the competition anyway, along with three other men. The target was a square piece of paper about two inches on a side with a V notch cut into the top edge. At a distance of fifteen paces, the four men shot with hopes of getting closest to the point of the V. Dad nailed the target perfectly and, a few hours later, walked out with an impressive belt buckle for first place. Silver Dollar City no longer hosts shooting competitions because of new developments. Today, if people were to shoot and miss the target, they might hit the roller coaster riders.

Thanks to years of unprotected shooting growing up, Dad’s hearing isn’t as good as it could be. I usually mutter my cynical and sarcastic comments under my breath, which is just loud enough for Dad to know I said something. If I mutter enough of them in a row, Dad, understandably, gets frustrated. Thankfully, when I do repeat them in a louder voice, he appreciates most of my dry attempts at humor.

For the last sixteen years, Dad has chased his childhood dream of being a cowboy through participation in the Single Action Shooting Society.³ The Single Action Shooting Society (SASS) is an international network created to preserve and promote the sport of Cowboy Action Shooting (CAS). SASS works in partnership with regional clubs to sponsor matches, state championship competitions, and the End of the Trail Cowboy Action Shooting World Championship. SASS members share a common interest in preserving the history of the Old West as well as a love for competitive shooting.

An important part of SASS and Cowboy Action Shooting is the brilliant and creative costuming. Each participant registers under a shooting alias appropriate to a character or profession of the late 19th century. Some aliases are old Hollywood movie star knock-offs; others are references to family members or historical fiction. According to their alias, the shooters then develop a costume, or in Dad’s case, a multitude of costumes.

Dad’s alias is J-Bar, named for the ranch and brand of his grandfather, Brady Bryan. Dad has a closet full of cowboy costumes depending on J-Bar’s mood for the competition of the day along with dozens of hats to boot.⁴

The actual SASS competitions involve sport shooting in which the members compete with firearms typical of those used in the Old West: single-action revolvers, pistol-caliber lever-action rifles, and old-time shotguns. Shooting stages and scenarios are developed, many based on famous historical incidents or movie scenes. Shooters test their skills against steel targets with scores based on the time it takes to complete a stage and the number of misses they accrue.

✰ ✰ ✰ ✰

Speed is the name of the game these days, Dad said as he finally finished up his latest gun project. Just like you told me about how fast you felt when you switched from a 33-pound bicycle to a 20-pound bike, one of the secrets to faster times for shooters is shaving weight. And one way to shave weight on a gun is to replace the factory installed hammer springs with lighter hammer springs.

Dad had replaced the hammer springs in a pair of old cap and ball 1851 Colt Navy revolvers. He handed me a different pair of pistols so I could compare and contrast the two, getting a feel for what he was doing.

Cowboy action shooters try to get the lightest hammer spring that will still make the gun fire. The lighter the spring, the easier it is to cock the hammer. For most of us, lightening the springs really will not make any difference in our final placement in a match. It becomes just another thing to brag about! And really, all this tinkering and playing around just makes for an excellent excuse for heading out to the range and making some noise.

I continued dry-firing the Ruger Vaqueros Dad had handed me while he tried to teach me a little more about hammer springs.

"Okay, now that you’ve got a decent feel for the heavier springs, try these. Cock the hammer and squeeze the trigger slowly, but be sure to catch the hammer with your thumb. Don’t let the hammer strike the nipples. Even though the spring is lighter, if the hammer falls on an uncapped nipple enough times, the nipple gets peened—a fancy amateur gunsmith term for pounded out of shape. Peened nipples can cause misfires."

I cocked the hammer and slowly started pulling the trigger. However, the ease with which the trigger released the hammer completely caught me off guard; my thumb never touched the hammer. It hit the nipple on the cylinder before I could even react.

Dad grimaced and muttered something under his breath.

"Ok, try it again, but don’t do that this time. Cock the hammer, squeeze the trigger slowly, and be sure to catch the hammer with your thumb before it hits the pins. This wasn’t the first time that Dad’s best advice had been, Don’t do that."

When I was a senior in high school and knew everything, I borrowed Dad’s car to drive my sister Katy and me to church. It was a wintery day, the side streets were covered in ice, and Dad cautioned me to drive carefully. Katy and I made it to church safely and on the way home she asked about driving on ice as she was currently taking Driver’s Education.

The book says to turn into the skid, but I just don’t know what that means.

Since I had driven on ice for three whole seasons, I decided to be a good big brother, intentionally putting the car into a skid and then explaining how to drive through it. And the plan would have been brilliant had my front tire not hit a dry patch of asphalt, jerking the car toward the curb, bringing it to a slamming stop. As I tried to pull away from the curb, the car refused to cooperate. It felt like the car was fighting me. Even though I have no mechanical tendencies, I stepped out in hopes of diagnosing the problem. Immediately, I noticed that both front tires were riding on their outer edges.

Broken frame? No way.

This was Dad’s work car. The one he drove hundreds of miles daily to make veterinary house calls. The one he used to provide an income to meet the needs of my family. I felt sick to my stomach. We were less than a half mile from home and I, somehow, limped the car around the corner and into the driveway.

Dad was watching TV; I walked in and immediately confessed my stupidity. He walked outside and closely examined the damage. I remained inside anxiously waiting, prepared to be grounded for a significant period of time.

Dad came back in, muttering under his breath and shaking his head. Glaring he said, Don’t do that again.

Lesson learned.

I looked to Dad for confirmation, Ok. Got it. Catch the hammer. Don’t do that again.

I cocked the hammer a second time and ever so slowly pulled the trigger, balancing my thumb precariously just above the hammer. And, for a second time, the hammer fell and struck the nipples. My thumb, again, didn’t move.

Dad winced like he had just stubbed his toe and motioned for me to hand the gun back to him.

I gently handed over the Civil War-era revolver and quietly apologized.

There’s a steep learning curve to playing cowboy.

Two

The Hat

Oughta understand—you don't ever touch another man's hat.⁵

—James Butler Wild Bill Hickok

I have never worn a cowboy hat.

I have worn dozens of Royals baseball hats, some flat caps for