Handguns

This magazine recently gave me the assignment of shooting with, studying and evaluating the techniques of a 20-vear-old shooting phenomenon named Thell Reed, Jr. I saw an eyeful! To establish my competence in judging the handgun work of others, it may not be amiss to first qualify myself—so, in all modesty, here goes.

In 1911 I was badly burned in a rooming house fire in Missoula, Montana. I recovered as one of the worst burn cases in U.S. medical history that still survived. My left hand was an inverted claw, drawn back on the outside of my wrist. With the help of Dad and Mother, as no local doctor would touch it, I literally made my hand over.

Mother made up bandages and soaked pads in melted deer tallow.  Father then made a paddle that would extend from my elbow out to where my fingers should be when straightened out. Dad sat down on my arm and  forced those terribly drawn fingers and  palm over and into a straight position  white Mother applied the warm tallow-saturated pads and lashed my hand to  the paddle.

I passed out from the pain  but had given my parents instructions  to go through with the operation regardless and they did. I walked the floor three days and nights before the pain let up. I was proud of that hand even though shrivelled. The girls no longer  cringed at sight of me in school. Later,  by wrapping the halter rope of bucking  horses around that hand and forcing myself to use it in the excitment of riding broncs, I gradually made a useful, even though not pretty, hand of it again.

Being crippled in one hand and no match for most men physically because of my size at that time, I determined to learn to shoot a sixgun as well as any man. That was my ambition.I had competent instructors, some of the best gunfighters of the old school alive at that time. Samuel H. Fletcher, now long dead and buried at Helena, served through the entire Civil War in the 2nd Illinois Cavalry and later in the Indian Wars. Waldo P. Abbott, also buried at Helena, who was a school teacher, buffalo hunter and later scout for the Indain Wars and carried the first news of Crooks defeat at the Rosebud through to Fort Laramie. Major R. E. Stratton who was with Lee in Virginia with the first Texas regiment through the Civil War and later served nine years as a Texas Ranger. Sam Russell, an old Faro dealer and gunfighter; Jesse Thompson, another old gunman and later, Chauncey Thomas and, still later, famed Ed McGivern, after I took up double action shooting.

Packer Jack Newman also taught me the use of the single action slip gun. He regularly made three hits on a can thrown up 20 feet before it hit the ground, using 260-grain .45 Colt slugs and 40 grains of black powder. Sometimes he even made four or five hits. He was a very deadly gunman.

While in my teens, Dad and Mother moved to town and I ran the ranch. Dad decided to get rich quick, so he sold all our beef cattle and bought a band of sheep and left me with them, surrounded by cow ranches. I had no sheep dog and my cow dog hated them as much as I did. I herded them bv running the legs off a lot of saddle broncs I was breaking out for neighbors and dropping 255 and 260-grain .45 Colt slugs in front of them. Dad would bring me Laflin & Rand, Orange Extra black powder in 25-pound kegs, lead in bars by the 200 pounds and ample primers.

I herded sheep by daylight and loaded ammo by kerosene lamp light at nights, to throw in front of those old black face ewes the next day. I never learned to love sheep but did learn long-range sixgun shooting. I also practiced quick draw and fast hip shooting at every opportunity.

By 1925 I was about as fast as anyone around with a single action Colt. Chauncey Thomas had J. H. Fitzgerald of Colt's and I on the stage at Camp Perry, Ohio, at the National Matches in the Y.M.C.A. tent to demonstrate quick draw to the entire assemblage. Fitz would not go up in open competition with me, as he told Thomas, "that damn cowpoke is a snake with a gun." Whether I was faster than Fitz or not, I seriously doubt as he used a pair of 2" .45 Colt New Service revolvers in cross draw holsters and shot from the side, double action. He was one of the fastest accurate sixgun shots I have ever seen. At any rate they put us on the stage separately while Chauncey Thomas got up in front of us and pretended to go for a gun at the signal. General Julian S. Hatcher, then a Major I believe, witnessed the action.