Spurred West. Ian Neligh
he’d like them to experience it—but he wouldn’t push their involvement in rodeos. He knows being a bullfighter is a profession that has an expiration date on it.
“Every former bullfighter that I know has said the same thing: the bulls will let you know when you need to quit,” Munsell tells me. “I don’t want to get to that point.”
His own father worked in the industry until he was forty-one. Munsell says he couldn’t see himself working much past that age.
“Being in the position I’m in, being one of the top guys in the game, I don’t want to do anything to prevent me not being seen in a positive way when I do retire,” Munsell says. “There’s a lot of great bullfighters that went out way too late, and they were very good when they were in their twenties and thirties—and could have had a better legacy if they had the foresight to retire sooner.”
The oldest bullfighter he’s aware of fought until he was fifty-five years old, something Munsell has no desire to do himself. He says he wants people to say he went out while he was at the top of his game. But that time is still years away. In the meantime, Munsell is back in the arena, in position and ready for whatever happens next.
CHAPTER 3
SHOOTISTS OF THE OLD (AND NEW) WEST
The man is half bent over backward, precariously balancing on the heels of his cowboy boots, the fingers on his right hand itching for the handle of his single-action revolver. His left hand hovers in the air in front of him, fingers trembling with anticipation. In this position, he waits for maybe five seconds. Then the light in the center of a metal target twenty-one feet away turns orange, and he and the five other Cowboy Fast Draw competitors pull out their pistols and fire. He misses his shot. There’s no doubt the man is as fast as an angry rattlesnake, especially when his holstered gun is horizontal with the target, but he can’t get the points if he doesn’t hit the target. There would be another chance. Again he assumes the half-bent position, thighs straining, left hand dangling in the air. His peers down the line take a somewhat more traditional vertical shooting position. The light turns orange and gunfire once again fills the air.
It is the Four Corners Territorial Fast Draw Championship in Pagosa Springs, Colorado, where the best in four states would see who is the fastest shootist of them all. They pull guns and fire in less than half a second, sending wax bullets into, or in some cases somewhat near, the target. All things considered, that was also the way it was when trying to shoot quickly back in the Old West. In a gunfight, speed was sometimes used at the fatal cost of accuracy. They often attribute the legendary Wyatt Earp as saying, “Fast is fine, but accuracy is final.” Wild West lawman Bat Masterson agreed during an interview that speed was important during a gunfight, but nerve was even more so: “I knew a man named Charlie Harrison in the old days. He was the most brilliant performer with a pistol of any man I have ever seen and he could shoot straighter and faster than many of the great fighters, yet when he got into a scrap with a man named Jim Levy he missed him with all six shots at close range before Levy could reach for his weapon. Levy coolly dropped him with a single shot. Harrison was brave, but he had no nerve, you see.”
Behind the target and a burlap-like curtain that stopped the errant wax bullets from harassing the town’s tourists, I sit at a table with David “Mongo” Miller and his wife Shirley, also known as “Wench.” “That’s like you see in a saloon—not like you find on a jeep,” David says of Shirley’s alias. The retired couple, both dressed in period-authentic clothing, have long participated in the fast draw sport since its earliest days in 2004—and are some of the quickest around. David has finished tenth overall in the world six times.
Big Ugly, Annie Moose Killer, Ben Quicker, Mad Dog Martin, Mr. Big Shot, Nitro—everyone involved in the sport of Cowboy Fast Draw has an alias, not unlike the original Old West personalities like Sundance Kid, Billy the Kid, Wild Bill, Curly Bill, and Buffalo Bill. “You just kind of pick them at random,” David admits, adding his own name Mongo was after the large, rather slow character played by Alex Karras in Mel Brooks’s 1974 comedy classic Blazing Saddles. David served in the Marine Corps from 1969 to 1975 before selling dialysis machines, where he met Shirley, then a nurse. David sold computers for years before retiring in the early 2000s. Like many from his generation, he grew up watching television’s classic black-and-white Westerns.
“We watched Bonanza, we watched Gunsmoke, we watched Have Gun – Will Travel, we watched all that stuff,” David says. “That’s what this is, it is all about the romance of the Old West. Being able to stand there dressed like Paladin or John Wayne and with a six-gun on your side and actually shoot in fast draw, even though we’re not shooting at somebody—it is just still kind of about the romance of the Old West.”
Gunfights in the Old West were rarely simple, clean, or for that matter particularly cinematic. In Thomas Dimsdale’s 1921 book The Vigilantes of Montana, he records a fight in the winter of 1862 or 1863 between George Carrhart and George Ives, who were walking down the street of Bannack, Montana (now a ghost town), when an altercation broke out. The dispute became increasingly heated between the two men until Ives said he’d shoot Carrhart. Without further delay, Ives ran off to the local grocery to fetch his gun where it was waiting for him.
Carrhart ran to his cabin to get his firearm and then waited outside with the six-shooter held down by his side. When Ives burst out of the grocery store, he was armed and ready—but looking in the wrong direction. Carrhart waited for Ives to turn and face him. When Ives finally saw him, he swore, raised his six-shooter, and fired at Carrhart. The bullet missed, striking the side of a house next to where Carrhart was standing. Carrhart answered in kind by raising his own firearm and pulled the trigger, but his weapon misfired. Ives hastily shot a second time, but this bullet hit the ground in front of Carrhart.
Carrhart then took his second shot and aimed for Ives’s face—but somehow the bullet missed. Possibly dismayed, Carrhart ran into a nearby house, stuck his six-gun out of the door, and fired again at Ives, who also shot back. The two blasted away at one another until Ives finally ran out of bullets. He turned to walk off when Carrhart came out of the house, with one shot left, and carefully aimed at Ives and fired. This time the bullet hit, striking Ives in the back and near one side. The bullet reportedly went straight through his body and hit the ground in front of Ives, kicking up dirt. Ives wasn’t even close to dead. He turned and swore at Carrhart for shooting him in the back, then stormed off again to fetch another loaded six-gun. No doubt deciding he’d had enough, Carrhart fled from the scene. Supposedly the men ended their dispute soon after and lived together on Carrhart’s ranch over the remainder of the winter.
Unusual stories like this show that two men even at close range sometimes had a difficult time hitting and killing the other. Misfires and misses were common. In my research I found an interesting story about two men who were playing cards when a gunfight broke out. One man got his gun out first, but because they were so close his opponent’s pocket watch chain kept his six-shooter’s hammer from falling and firing the bullet—which ultimately cost him his life.
The romance of the West is something largely concocted from nostalgia by people who didn’t actually have to live through it. The Wild West wasn’t full of men staring each other down the length of a dirty street, waiting for the clock to strike high noon before trying to gun each other down. Such fantasy is often the mortar of which most of the romance of the time is constructed. That’s not to say that it didn’t happen. There were men who unerringly hit what they were aiming at with predictably fatal results. One such man was given the nickname “Wild Bill” and may have been the greatest gunslinger who ever lived.
Tall Tales of Wild Bill Hickok
In all likelihood it was August 1865, several months after the Civil War, when Harper’s New Monthly Magazine journalist George Ward Nichols found himself in Springfield, Missouri. Sitting in the shade of an awning, he was both fighting the need to take a nap and looking on at the residents of the area with thinly veiled superiority and contempt. “Men and women dressed in queer costumes; men with coats and trousers made of skin, but so thickly covered with dirt and grease as to have defied the identity of the animal