SASS Classic Cowboy World Champion, Duelist Shooting & the Cimarron 1878

Estimated reading time: 4 min

A Classic Cowboy Win at End of Trail

[00:00]

The news came out sideways, as it tends to on this show. One of the hosts took the Classic Cowboy category at End of Trail, the SASS World Championship held in Phoenix. Twenty-nine years into cowboy-action competition, the win came with one of the larger buckles in the sport, described on air as roughly the size of a ham, or more precisely a small shield. The Arizona Rangers co-sponsored the awards, and by the room’s general agreement, the hardware was something special.

The match itself had been rebuilt in response to competitor feedback from the previous year. Rather than dig in against the criticism, the organizers used it. The result, by the crew’s assessment, was probably the best End of Trail in recent memory, well-staged and designed to work for both shooters and spectators. The weather cooperated in its own way: temperatures ran into the 80s and 90s in Phoenix, which put a quick end to any notion of “winter” in what the event used to be called.

One strategic note that came up: shooting position within a posse matters more than it might seem. Some competitors prefer to go last, watching every shooter ahead of them for anything they might have missed. Others go early to avoid overthinking the stage. The argument for going early is straightforward: the more time spent running a stage through the mind, the more ways there are to run it wrong. Getting it done and getting off the line beats standing around letting the head take over.

Classic Cowboy Rules, Duelist Style, and the One-Handed Problem

[03:19]

Classic Cowboy is not simply cowboy-action shooting with a costume requirement. It is one of the two or three most technically demanding categories in SASS competition, and the rules make clear why. Five pieces of period flare are required: spurs, chaps, a vest, wrist cuffs, a neckerchief, and a pocket watch are among the qualifying items. Match officials check them daily. The caliber floor sits at .38-40, which pushes most competitors into .45 Colt territory for the practical reason that it is the simplest cartridge to load and already in the guns.

The shooting style is duelist, meaning one hand only on the revolver. With a single-action, that means the thumb cocks the hammer and the same hand fires, unsupported. The technique most competitors use at this level is called slip hammering: hold the trigger depressed, work the hammer repeatedly with the thumb, and let the cylinder index and fire in a single fluid motion. It is the fastest legal way to run a single-action revolver and is nearly universal among top-tier shooters. One-handed, it requires precise thumb control and builds serious fatigue across back-to-back stages in summer heat.

Stage times in the teens were described as reasonable for this category given the one-handed constraints and target spacing. The hardest part of duelist shooting, as one host put it, is watching everybody else smoke through a stage and trying to do the same. The ego has to stay on the trailer. Watching a competitor finish a 10-second stage and thinking you can match it is the first step toward a very long day.

Cross-draw came up as a technique that suits some competitors making the transition from two-handed shooting. It lets a shooter lead with the stronger hand without breaking stage flow, and for anyone whose dominant and non-dominant hands are not evenly developed, it is often the more practical choice over double duelist, which requires finishing the first revolver with one hand and then drawing the second with the other.

The Cimarron 1878 and the Exposed-Hammer Double Barrel

[04:16]

Classic Cowboy adds one more restriction that separates it from most other categories: the shotgun must be a double barrel with external hammers. No internal-hammer side-by-side, no pump. Both hammers must be manually cocked for every pair of shots, the same way a single-action revolver requires a thumb-cock before each pull. Running this one-handed while loading from a belt carrier, under match pressure, is a real mechanical challenge.

One of the hosts shoots a custom-built Rossi configured specifically for this category by Shotgun Boogie. It is legal under SASS rules but unlike anything else on the range. The hammers are the critical variable. Sweeping back over both with a single thumb requires a profile wide enough to catch cleanly but not so narrow or sharp that it digs in under speed.

That hammer geometry problem is exactly what led to the Cimarron 1878. The gun originated with a company called TTN, whose owner wanted to enter the cowboy-action market and asked one of the hosts what the category needed. Three suggestions came back. One was a stainless Winchester Model 1897 pump, which TTN attempted and could not execute. A second was a 16-gauge Model 1897 with a 20-gauge barrel threaded in, a modification that had already been run in practice, but which the Wild Bunch ruling board of the time declined to approve. The third was a well-built exposed-hammer double barrel suited to Classic Cowboy.

The first prototype came back with hammers that were too sharp and narrow to run reliably with one thumb in competition. After working out the correct geometry and sourcing a suitable set of hammers, the revised design was sent back to TTN and became the gun now sold by Cimarron Firearms as the 1878. The original prototype is still in the host’s possession. The royalty arrangement that was supposed to follow that contribution has, as of this broadcast, yet to produce benefit one.