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Helium Quality Targets

with text by Grayson Scott

One of the most successful ranchers of the twentieth century was Jack Simplot, a man who made his fortune supplying frozen french fries to McDonald’s. His company now controls nearly half a million acres of land and is one of the largest producers of beef in the West, turning out four hundred thousand-plus head for slaughter every year; his family’s private holdings alone make them one of the five largest ranchers in the country. In 2022, fourteen years after Jack died, a judge found the Simplots were unlawfully cheating federal grazing permits using a subsidiary called Dickshooter Cattle Company.

 

A photograph of a man riding a brown and white horse is pointing a gun at a red balloon on a stick behind him.

 

A photograph of a man wearing a cowboy hat, vest, and double gun sling, standing before a table next to a horse, eating from a plastic trough.

 

The Simplots have many challengers for the cowboy’s legacy, although it can be tough to figure out exactly how it became so attractive. “To most people, until lately, the cowboy was a ‘bold bad man.’” So wrote Eleanor Marx, Karl’s daughter, when she visited America in 1886. Wallace Stegner thought the cowboy’s “fabled independence” was “chiefly the privilege of quitting his job in order to go looking for another just as bad.” Americans collectively renovated this figure—of whom there were perhaps forty thousand originals at their nineteenth-century peak—into the avatar of our national consciousness.

 

A photograph of the back of a dark-haired woman wearing a cowboy hat and leather chaps while riding a brown horse, and a woman in a maroon collared shirt, sitting on top of a horse, while she holds a gun in her right hand and handing over a second gun with her left.

 

A photograph of a black trailer with a large graphic of an X-rayed gun on the side.

 

A photograph of a man riding a tan horse with red socks shoots at a red balloon on a stick.

 

A photograph of two people placing balloons on sticks in the ground.

 

In 1994, Jim Rodgers tried for this inheritance by founding the Cowboy Mounted Shooting Association (CMSA), formalizing a cowboy-themed activity he invented that combined firearms and dress-up. Mounted shooters, who are both men and women, dress in period or contemporary “traditional Western” clothes and gallop their horses through an arena course of ten balloons (“helium quality targets”) on poles, popping them with single-action revolvers. The pistols are loaded with five blank cartridges each; the heat and pressure of the thirty-grain black powder charge will pop balloons at ten to fifteen feet, no projectile necessary. The horses wear earplugs, pieces of foam the size of shot glasses.

The first five targets are arranged in a specified pattern called the “random course.” Rounding a barrel, the rider returns to a full gallop and dispatches the next five balloons, arranged in a straight line called the “rundown.” The fastest time wins, with penalties for infractions like missing a target (five seconds added), dropping your gun (five seconds), or losing your hat before starting the course (ten seconds). The best shooters can finish a course in ten seconds.

Shooting from horseback has verifiably nothing to do with a cowboy’s work: it is more in line with monster truck derbies than cattle roping. It is unlikely many of its participants are working ranchers. But with twenty thousand claimed participants, cowboy mounted shooting is gaining on more familiar LARP-based sports: the serious end of the foam-sword-and-turkey-leg crowd, the Society for Creative Anachronism, has over thirty thousand members on the rolls. (In an interview with a YouTuber, one male contestant remarks of the CMSA, “There is no other sport in which women talk about guns and men talk about their clothes.”) Perhaps the most interesting part of the sport is the kids’ competition: they navigate the course on horseback but hold toy cap pistols instead of real ones, making a pantomime of their parents’ already figurative gesture. Who really wants to be a cowboy?

 

A photo of a child on a horse shooting a balloon with a gun.

 

A photo of a child in blue jeans with a cowboy hat stands with one foot on a GOTRAX scooter and the other on the ground, outside a rusty-piped fence. Behind him stands a brown horse, camping chairs, and a few fellow onlookers.

 

A photo of three kids, with their backs faced to the camera, sit on the bars of a rusty-piped fence, with one adult watching alongside them.

 

A photo of two people on horses; one, inside a fenced area, shoots a gun at a red balloon on a stick while the other, outside the fenced area, takes a photo with a red-cased smartphone.

 

A photo portrait of a man wearing a cream-colored cowboy hat that’s tilted down, obscuring his face. He’s wearing an iridescent purple button-down, blue jeans, and an ornate belt while holding boxes of similarly ornate belt buckles.

 

A photo of two tables with banners that read “Christian Hunters of America.” The first table has a sign that reads “Free Raffles, $500 Gift Card Kid’s Funs,” and on the table are animal antlers. The second table also holds animal antlers, and posted above them is an animal head and a women’s plastic display bust without any clothing.