Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters Col. Askins

I've hunted quail around the Mt. Riley area.

While the Col. was stationed at Ft. Bliss, the Major moved from OK to be near the family.

During those years, he did a lot of desert quail hunting in SE NM, near Bliss. Photos of him holding quail along with his 1933 Superposed are in several books, maybe also in Unrepentant Sinner.

DF

Thank you for that link, your acquisition of the Askins' Superposed is quite the find!

Charles wrote that he hunted blue quail on the Cox ranch. Which is by the Organ Mountains. To get to the ranch you had to drive over St. Augustines pass.



This is a pic of part of the Organ Mts,where the pole is pointing is St. Augustines pass (more or less),the other side of the Organ Mts. is the Cox ranch and White Sands Missile Range. White Sands is where he hunted blue quail before the military took it.

Ft.Bliss is on the other side of the Franklin Mts. El Paso starts at where the telephone pole with the transformer is and Juarez,Mx is at the right just outside the pic.

Thanks for that info and photos.

Interesting story coming up in Unrepentant Sinner about old man Cox and the Mexican cattle thieves. Evidently he was one tough SOB, Charlie's kinda man and close friend.

In that day and time, only the tough survived, must less prospered.

How far is this from your place?

DF

Supposedly one of the Cox family was involved in the Pat Garrett murder, which is still unsolved. Great stories and history.
Bob

Tough times, tougher people...

People today are weak and wormy compared to those guys.

I wonder how many would survive that life style.

DF

Not many would have the stomach to enter that lifestyle let alone survive it methinks. There may seem to be a sort of aberrated glamor to it but the reality of it would be grit and a continual, inner anxiety to my way of thinking.

As Thoreau commented, "the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation". Unless one was a totally disconnected sociopath, I cannot imagine any of these kinds of men having many minutes of peaceful introspection.

Rob Cox told me that he thought that one of his father's cowboys had probably killed Pat Garrett.

Garrett had alienated the Cox Ranch folks by hiding his buckboard in the brush nearby one morning until all of the men had gone out to work. He then entered the big house unannounced, with his gun in hand, in an attempt to arrest a teenager that was one of the household staff. The boy was well-liked and apparently no one had any idea that he was wanted. When the boy saw Garrett coming into the kitchen, he dove out of a window as Garrett fired several shots at him.

Old Man Cox was incensed that Garrett would barge into his house and discharge his weapon at an unarmed youth, severely frightening all of the women that had remained. Apparently, his anger (and that of his ranch hands) did not subside as time went on and only became more intense.

Ben,was Garrett,"Law" at the time, or just bounty hunting ?

As I understood it, he was the Sheriff.

It is very difficult and quite often, fallacious, to judge a peace officer as to his actions close to 90 years ago. The U.S./Mexico border when Askins was working it as a Border Patrol agent, was an extremely rough and dangerous place, from what I have read of those days. The "border" was not a place that would ensure an officer's survival, were he to be working under today's politically correct "rules of engagement."

Here is an exert from an article Askins wrote in the 1957 The Gun Digest, "A Man's Sixgun." He was writing about the "new" S&W .44 Magnum revolver.

"During one somewhat lively decade of an otherwise prosaic life, I worked the Rio Grande as a border patrolman. Every night of that half score years I wished for just such a shooting iron as this big bruiser, this fine new howitzer, the .44 Magnum. Sometimes we had as many as three separate and distinct gunfights during an 8 hour shift. Had this big Maggie sixgun been around, what a lulu of a pacifier it would have been on the border."

Three separate gunfights a night. That, boys and girls, is a lot of very dangerous action which would necessitate giving "no quarter" as the bandits, the outlaws, certainly would be returning the favor.

Today, political correctness demands that very little resistance by the U.S. Border Patrol agents is allowed. I can understand that 80/90 years ago, if a border patrolman encountered bandits and outlaws who had no compunction about shooting patrolmen, that it was wise to get in the first shot.

Askins was a man-of-his-times... and he survived.

Just my opinion.

L.W.

I was at White Sands Missile Range off and on for about 3 1/2 years when I worked for the Army Missile Command. Saw a lot of those blue quail and Gambel's quail, and always wanted to hunt them, but never got the chance.

Got to be friends with some of the locals around Las Cruces, near the Cox ranch, as well as over in Lincoln and Otero Counties on the East and North side of the Missile Range. To this day, Pat Garrett is not held in very high esteem by a lot of folks in that area.

Great story; thanks!
Bob

First and foremost I made a booboo,it's San Augustine Pass not St. Augustine Pass.

Mt. Riley is about 50 miles South and West from where I am right now. When I go out that way again I'll take a picture of the "mountain".

Ver interesting stuff guys and thanks for your comments and contributions here. Because life has been so compacted and exponentially so by the technology age, it's hard to imagine how different life was ninety years ago.

I can distinctly remember the 60's when I was a teen and how much different it was from now, and then go retro another forty or so, and there is no doubt in my mind that "they" were still walking the "rim" of the Old West and its ways.

Yup,Pat Garrett was Sheriff.

Great stuff guys!

Leanwolf - thank you very much.

That puts this subject in a proper perspective. I appreciate it very much.

Jerry