Until a few months ago when I moved to Texas, I worked part-time at the Otero County shooting range in La Luz, New Mexico. We had a cowboy action shoot once a month, and there had to be a "quorum" of at least five shooters for the match to go on. Many times, there were just the bare minimum there for the match, all aging Baby Boomers like myself. And if one of the five was sick, no match. This handful of shooters constituted the distilled residue of two once very active clubs, one up in the historic resort town of Ruidoso, and one made up primarily of folks from the Alamogordo area.
Inside the clubs' locked storage compound, I would step carefully amongst all the great old steel targets, now disused and likely harboring at least one rattlesnake: Evil Roys, hearts/clubs/spades/diamonds, knockdowns for the shotgunners that could toss a clay pigeon when hit, props for the stages, etc. It was like walking in a graveyard. And this was in the very heart of the country we all think of as the real Old West. Pat Garrett once lost a three-day card game in my great-great uncle's saloon in Tularosa to Oliver Lee, the rancher he believed helped murder Col. Albert Fountain and his young son after they left La Luz to cross the White Sands to Las Cruces. Just up the road in Mescalero are the ruins of Blazer's Mill, where Dick Brewer and his group of Regulators -- including Billy the Kid -- shot it out with Buckshot Roberts in April of 1878, mortally wounding him, but not before he used a Trapdoor Springfield to shoot Brewer in the head. The two enemies are buried next to each other in the mostly forgotten Blazer's Cemetery just up the hill from the mill. I've been there and paid my respects.
Seen in this light, it makes me sadder still to think about those last five CAS stalwarts trying to keep the corpse alive, God bless them.
