Rustedfables means "Old Stories". It was originally setup by me, Ron Collins about seven years ago to showcase online comics and 3d art that I had produced. I am a graphic artist by trade and have worked as an art director for several advertising agencies, a senior technical illustrator for DOE and for the last 15 years as a 3d artist and animator in the game industry. A few years ago I stumbled into the whole sport of Cowboy Action Shooting and turned my artistic talents toward making gun leather. I had what I like to call a "Tombstone" Conversion.
In the eighties and nineties, Hollywood started making westerns again. Movies like Young Guns, Silverado, Wild Bill, Wyatt Earp, and Tombstone to name a few. Dances With Wolves as all the rage and there was a national resurgence in the interest in the old west again. New television shows and mini series were all over the tube. I missed every one of programs when they where aired. For some reason, I was either too busy or just a bit too cynical that Hollywood could still make a good western. I saw Val Kilmer in Top Secret and also had the misfortune of seeing part of Captain Ron staring Kurt Russell. So when Tombstone hit the big screen, I couldn't bring myself to see how Kurt and Val would portray Wyatt Earp and Doc Holiday.
I picked up books like Casey Tefertiller's Wyatt Earp, and Karen Holliday Tanner's Doc Holiday-A Family Portrait along with a dozen more related to the topic. Found websites with more historical accounts including stories told from the Clanton's perspective. I kept searching, refining my keywords and finding that the word re-enactor and the phrase cowboy action shooting kept coming up in the search engines. Then I stumbled into something I didn't expect. I found online stores that sold authentic cowboy clothing, leather goods, hats and even six shooters. What the hell was all this about? One site leads to another, and then I found the Single Action Shooting Society. I had found the mother lode. There were people out there, guys and gals, kids with horses and mules (for all I knew full wagon trains making there way across the plains) all shooting guns and rifles at little steel targets and competing dressed as cowboys, and gunslingers. Holy Smokes! Within a few minutes I was signed up as new SASS Member sporting the alias IronGrizzly (The name will be explained later). I found out that my area had several clubs that all met on the weekends to slap leather and fire hot lead. With my freshly printed receipt for membership from SASS in-hand I drove on Sunday morning up into the mountains to visit one of the clubs and watch a dozen men and their wives, all dressed in cowboy gear, blast away at targets. I was impressed. Here were various people from different walks of life and ages, firing over two dozen rounds and very rarely missing. Lead was splashing off the targets and flying through the air. The smell of gun smoke filled my nostrils. When it was over, I walked away, climbed back in my Jeep and drove home, excited. I was going to get to dress up like an old west gunfighter and shoot rifles, shotguns and a pair of single action revolvers. I could be a gunslinger.
In Tombstone, my friend and I roamed the streets, watching the various activities, shopped in the stores and carefully examined all that could be seen inside the Birdcage Theater. I bought more cowboy gear in what used to be the Oriental Saloon and in the clothing shop beneath Big Nose Kate's next to an old mine tunnel. Since then, I have bought all the modern westerns that I could lay my hands on. Will Bill, Wyatt Earp, Silverado, and the rest. I even started collecting the Old Time Radio shows like Gunsmoke, Have Gun Will Travel, Fort Laramie and Luke Slaughter. I have all the gear now and after buying a few holsters and gun belts realized that I could probably design and build my own. And that is just what I did. Now you can own one of my handcrafted gun rigs. You may run into me at one of you events. Stop and say hello. I will be the big guy in the black Stetson or maybe a bowler going by the name of IronGrizzly. I try to do all my killin' before breakfast. As for the alias, it comes from my Jeep. The other expensive hobby I have been messing with for the last several years is off-roading in my 2000 Jeep TJ. It is all fixed up and one day I got the bright idea to name it. It became the IronGrizzly and it seemed like a good handle for me as well.
About the Author |
||
       
|
I would watch John Wayne movies, the Lone Ranger and the Wild Wild West along with a variety of other shows on my families black and white television while I was growing up. I played "Cowboy and Indians" like every other kid in the country, running around screaming bang, bang, you're dead. Then time caught up and the cowboys were replaced with aliens and spaceship in search of the final frontier. I grew up some more and had a career, a wife and kids to keep me busy. If I was lucky I would catch the occasional western on TV, but it didn't hold my interest like it used too.
A decade passed and I was thumbing my way through the assorted mindless nonsense of cooking shows, news, home improvement programs and sitcoms, and stumbled across Encore Westerns. Much to my surprise there was a modern western on the tube that had a Marshall played by Sam Elliot nailing up a freshly printed poster stating that it was no longer lawful to carry guns on the streets. A few seconds later Kurt Russell wearing a Stetson rode up on a horse through an angry mob. Was this Tombstone? Russell jumps down from the horse and started arguing with his brothers Morgan and Virgil. It was Tombstone. I watched it to the end and enjoyed every minute of it. At that point I wondered why I had missed it in the first place.
The next day I went to the local Blockbuster and bought a copy of Tombstone, the special edition, jammed into the DVD player and watched it a couple more times. I was hooked. I knew the story wasn't historically accurate, but it was a great movie none the less. I got on the internet and started searching for information. Ordered a couple of books about the Earps, Wyatt in particular and started reading about what really went on in Tombstone.
Now I just had to find all the stuff and start buying it. The first thing I bought was a hat. It was a Stetson like the one Kurt Russell wore in Tombstone. Then a friend from work and I made a trip to Tombstone, Arizona for "Wyatt Earp Days" on Memorial weekend. We did the tour of Arizona, traveling through Earp, CA, then the Grand Canyon, Sedona, Prescott and finally Tombstone. We stayed at the Vendome in Prescott, the place Tom Mix used to live once in a while. We went to the Palace on whisky row and looked around the cemetery where "Big Nose Kate" is supposed to be buried. I also found an old west mercantile along the main highway coming into town and bought a period outfit consisting of a pair of canvas pants, a shirt, vest, and braces. The shop also had a full line of firearms, so I bought my first 1892 Carbine Riffle. I was rolling.
