Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Facts Are Cowboys Were Poor Shots

I bought ammo that way as a kid. 6 or 7 shotgun shells at a time. Missing was a crime. If you missed you tried like hell to let 2 play and get both in one shot.

I remember, as a kid, the men remarking about the boy who lived out at the Tolbert place taking 8 shells one day and missing with one shot. He still came home from Piney Creek bottom with 7 squirrels and a buck.

Bob Munden could fan ones ass.

How accurate were the guns back then. With black powder, the barrels were probably shot before long.

Pretty interesting article. Thanks for posting.
Just a couple random thoughts while reading...
Handguns require a fairly large amount of practice to be any good. Stands to reason a guy who doesn’t make much money and has little interest in guns, ain’t gonna put the effort into it.
Rifles are easier to use, and it seems to me defense (military style) are easier to use. Probably why a lot of folks in government would like to get them away from citizens!
Wyatt Earp
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on the contrary , a man running slip gun was more than likely a pistolero and not a common cowpuncher


Elmer Keith experimented extensively with slip guns

I doubt "fanning" was ever used in an old west gunfight.

Fanning was a figment of some Hollywood movie maker's imagination.

Just like buscadero tie down gun rigs were.

And fast drawing... especially as a contest. May have happened once. But even that is in doubt.


Lots of Hollywood misconception...

I think we are on the same page here Rock , but fanning is not the same as slip shooting a single action


Id agree that fanning is pretty crude for most folks, but Ed McGivern also experimented with that technique and I guess acheived some success

I knew of two fellows who mishandled a fast draw, one with a .22, the other with a .41 magnum. Both managed to shoot themselves in (and through) the thigh without hitting bone.

yup , a friend of mine shot himself in the leg when he was a kid practicing his fast draw out in the pasture

he came pretty close to bleeding out before he got back to the house

I read an article a long time ago about to poor marksmanship of the average Infantry soldier, and how, as the population gets more urbanized, and the average youngster spends less time around firearms, the more the marksmanship suffers.
Not that it takes a rocket scientist to figure it out, but the story was illustrated by the number of rounds fired per enemy dead, through American wars from the ACW to Vietnam.
During the War Between the States, ordinance officers estimated that “it takes a man’s weight in lead to kill one soldier”. It’s a guesstimate on my part, but figuring that a .58 rifled musket ball weighs about an ounce, and the average Civil War soldier weighed about #170, it comes out to over 2700 rounds to kill one enemy soldier, discounting artillery and blades.
The article went on to say that figuring the casualties in WW2, Korea, and Vietnam, versus the ammo expenditure, it’s getting progressively worse. Of course this would stand to reason as automatic weapons on the battlefield become more prevalent.
It was interesting reading, and I wish I could remember where it was that I read it.
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It wasn't just the cowboys....... A interesting discussion concerning some data from Vietnam.

https://www.thehighroad.org/index.php?threads/did-i-hear-this-correctly-on-mail-call.40370/

Each member of the Texas Rangers was given six rounds of ammo per month to practice with.

They practiced on Comanche and outlaws quite a bit though.

That was an interesting article. Herbert McBride in "A Rifleman Went To War" states that some of the old west lawmen he quizzed when he was young said that the most successful killers were cool shots that would take their time and aim their shots. He also said that lots of gunfights ended with no one being shot. I believe it. Those single six shooters aren't the easiest to hit with, for me at least. I'm sure there are those here that are good shots with them.

i know my family dates back to at least the 1890's in arizona, and were also active in the cattlebusiness. My father for sure knew a lot of the early cattlemen, other than family , and for that matter the lawmen.
He once told me you would have to be stupid to be matt dillon, in gunsmoke, on the main street.
His comment was the weapon of choice was a shotgun or rifle, from ambush.
now as to a handgun, i own his, it has quite a history including a killing on whiskey row, a colt saa bisley in 38wcf.
the interesting part is the scabbard, where leather has been removed around the trigger/trigger guard area for quicker access.
It' quite surprising how fast you can draw and fire a colt from a belly gun position.
having said that i doubt if most cattlemen had much use of them, where a rifle they did.
i am not a gunman, but it is not issue to draw and fire a colt and hit a pop can out to about 20yards or so.
only disatvantage is slow to reload.

200,000 per kill in Vietnam. Sounds about right. I’m pretty sure if you were to do the homework on WW2, it’s be somewhere in between.
Now, considering the survival rate of wounded continues to grow as more medical treatments become available, and the extra number of automatic rifles per platoon as weapons progress, the kill ratio is bound to change as well. The tactics have changed as increased firepower becomes available as well.
I would still think it’d ultimately be cheaper for the military to spend more on marksmanship training for soldiers, but they’re studying individual weapons that are easier to score hits with as well.
I went through basic training in 1985. Being a country boy, I was really surprised at the number of trainees who had never fired a weapon in their lives. Some of them had a rough time getting on to it, and as I said the AR platform is pretty easy to shoot well.
I didn’t mean to hi-Jack the thread, but I thought the information was pertinent to the original post.
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Years and years ago, I read an article that came up with a figure on what it cost to kill an enemy combatant in WWII. I no longer remember the figure, but at the time I thought that it would have made things a lot easier if they could have just bought off each of them for that amount.

I had always been told not only by by grandparents but by numerous old ranchers that I had known and some I worked for, that if you packed a six-gun you was either a law officer or up to no good. Handguns were just not a part of their raisin’.

Mom told me about an old drunkard cowboy in her home town that woke up one night and thought someone was looking at him from the foot of his bed. So he shot at ‘em. Blew off his big toe. Was his foot he saw. Another time he rode his horse into his house one evening and started shootin’ up thru the ceiling. Like in the movies. Ended up shootin’ and killin’ one of his own kids. This was in the early 30’s.

When I went through basic in '70, the game was to fire as many times as possible, accuracy be damned.

Most of us here are gun enthusiast, which usually means we’re decent shots, and we know how to use them effectively and safely. You can nearly always tell someone who hasn’t had sufficient training by the placement of their index finger when they’re handling a gun. Dead giveaway when that boogerhook is in the trigger guard. Saw this constantly in the service, still makes me shake my head. Even most of the NCOs let it slide.
I said in a previous post about the reason most cow towns and boom towns passed ordinances against carrying guns in town.
Cowboys and miners often would get a hooker and then get stinking drunk on payday. Drunken idiots and firearms are definitely a mixture to be avoided.
I’m no cowboy, but I could see a quite few incidents where a SAA or such would be a very handy thing to have around on open range. This is the first I e heard of trailbosses forbidding trail hands from carrying, but depending on situations I could understand it.
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