OREGON FAST DRAW, LLC

The history of the Orygun Gunfighters began as many fast draw clubs have begun over the years. The club started because I was too impatient to wait for someone else to begin one. I didn’t intend to start Oregon’s first Cowboy Fast Draw club. It just turned out that way, because I wanted a local place to shoot. There’s no doubt that Oregon has had a rich history of fast draw. Shooters like “Gentleman Jim” Vonfeldt, who for a time had an Oregon Fast Draw team. Ed and Ray Thielke, legendary shooters once at the epicenter of a literal wagon-load of fast draw shooters in Vernonia, Oregon. And Ted Blocker and others who made a name for the fast draw shooting sports in Oregon.

But fast draw contests in the area were tough to find, and active clubs in the Portland area nonexistent. So I did what anyone else would have done who wanted to shoot, I started one. And I told everyone what I was doing. “I’m shooting cowboy fast draw, isn’t that crazy?” I said to people I hardly knew in local restaurants and businesses. “How about shooting fast draw with me?” I asked friends in the church where I was serving on the interim pastoral staff. And I did the same in my martial arts studios in Sherwood and Hillsboro, not forsaking the Internet forums where I was known as well. Before long, I had people who wanted to shoot with me. Where I come from, “where two or three are gathered together,” as the saying goes, you have a club.

We began organizing in January of 2008, holding meetings in two small restaurants in Forest Grove, Oregon, and “sanctioned” as it was then called, or affiliated as it is now termed with the Cowboy Fast Draw Association (CFDA) in October the same year, at the World Championships in Fallon, Nevada. Seventeen individuals lent their support the first year as “Founding Life Members,” enabling the club to buy its first two targets and timing equipment. Keeping with the CFDA habit of using a shooting alias, I want to recognize the following:

• Gregg “the Rev. W. W. Ronin” Townsley
• Nancy “Generous Kate” Townsley
• Don “the Coho Kid” Brown
• Dan “Orie Gunn” Esteban
• Jon “Doug Graves” Larson
• Tom “Tatonka” Epler
• Lori “Tatonka Rose” Epler
• Jason “the Amity Kid” Waibel
• John “Old West” West
• Richard “Theramore” Epler
• Craig “Kid Kreggar” Pittenger
• Diane “Diana Might” Pittenger
• Dan “Bad Eye Lefty” Arends

As is often the case in the Cowboy Fast Draw Association, members of other CFDA clubs contributed. For instance, two members of the Maine CFDA club also joined as Founding Life Members: William “Last Will” Cotton and his wife Patricia “Polly Esther” Gillway, of the Waldo County Rangers. Additionally, Forest Grove residents Alan and Anne Niven lent financial support to the endeavor despite not being active members of the Cowboy Fast Draw Association nor the club.

A generous loan by two of the club’s members allowed the Orygun Gunfighters to purchase a thirty-foot archery net when a mechanic at the L Bar T Bison Ranch let us know that the side of the barn wasn’t nearly as appropriate as a shooting backstop as everyone originally thought. Ted Blocker Holsters, the L Bar T Bison Ranch, and my own organization—Oregon Fast Draw, LLC—were three of our original corporate sponsors, contributing leather goods for our Townsfolk Alleys, computers, tables and chairs and so on.

Our first town scene was constructed and painted by “the Amity Kid,” who in return received a beautiful Taurus Gaucho revolver and a free Founding Life Membership. We’ve appreciated his efforts in constructing these important pieces of the club’s equipment and look forward to his continued participation in making our range, in time, one of the most attractive ranges in the Cowboy Fast Draw Association.

The Orygun Gunfighters maintain separate summer and winter ranges, shooting at Ted Blocker Holsters in Tigard, Oregon during the cold winter months—amidst leather goods, sewing machines and carving tables—and the L Bar T Bison Ranch in Forest Grove, Oregon during the warmer summer months, with split rail fences and real bison looking on. It’s a unique opportunity for modern wannabe cowboys (and cowgirls) to experience some of America’s great western adventure. For more than a few of us, it’s turned into something more than an enjoyable hobby but a passionate pursuit as well.

We’re a small club and sometimes I’m concerned about that, as I’d discovered in nearly thirty years of church ministry that there are certain problems implicit to small groups that larger groups somehow escape. But in time we’ll grow. And the club’s efforts—to spread the CFDA style of fast draw shooting, starting similar clubs throughout Oregon—will pay off. I’m looking forward to seeing an annual Oregon school of the fast draw come out of the club’s efforts, two of us having benefited from a similar school in Montana early in our fast draw shooting experience. And a reenacting group would be nice as well. But for the meantime, we’re going to continue pushing the fast draw envelope here at home. No club member has shot faster than .400 of a second in a match as of yet. But there’s real pleasure in watching individual members approach that barrier each and every time we meet.

RONIN
The Rev. W. W. Ronin
aka Gregg Townsley
CFDA Life Member #41
Orygun Gunfighters Founding Life Member #1