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.
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.
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?
