Category: Fieldcraft
I took this photo myself. Those Alaskan brown bears can become absolutely enormous.
I spent my last three years in the Army stationed at Fort Wainwright, Alaska. For a substantial portion of that time, I was the operations officer for a CH-47 Chinook helicopter unit.
I picked flight crews and assigned mission responsibilities. That also meant I got to do some really cool flying all across the last frontier. If you were paying taxes back in the 1990s, sincerely and from my heart, thank you for that.
Megafauna
When you encounter moose while flying out over the vast Alaskan muskeg, they typically either ignore you or run. These things are as big as Clydesdales and quite deadly up close, but they’re herbivorous ungulates. They don’t hunt people for food. Alaskan brown bears, by contrast, will gladly make a meal of you.
One fine day, I was piloting a Chinook helicopter north to south just east of the Salcha River on the far side of Eielson Air Force Base. We were flying nap-of-the-earth right above the trees at maybe 160 knots (about 185 mph). In this configuration, I serendipitously happened upon an absolutely enormous cinnamon grizzly bear.
I wasn’t trying to molest the wildlife. He just happened to be right in my flight path. I popped the cyclic back and cleared him by scant feet.
A CH-47 tops out at 50,000 pounds, and it makes the devil’s own racket. Most animals are rightly terrified of it. In this case, my flight engineer reported that, as we passed over this big gentleman’s head, he stood up on his hind legs and swatted at us. Human beings are not the apex predators in this space.
The Monster
In 1923, along the Unuk River near Cripple Creek north of Ketchikan, Alaska, a young fur trapper named Jess Sethington struck out to make his fortune. He packed a .38-caliber revolver and a .33-caliber rifle for personal protection and subsistence. He was never heard from again.
For years afterwards, trappers reported a particularly large bear in the area that regularly stalked them and molested their camps. The bear was unique for the strange groaning sound it seemed to make. Locals named the beast “Old Groaner.”
Old Groaner operated mostly at night and showed little fear of man. Several prospectors and trappers had fired at him, but none had connected in the dark. With all this in mind, in November 1935, two grizzled prospectors struck out into Old Groaner’s territory to stake a claim, accompanied by their dog.
The Attack
One of the miners ventured out alone with the dog and his rifle to post signage establishing his claim. Setting his rifle aside to erect the sign, he was surprised when his dog rushed past him barking furiously.
Grabbing his weapon, he saw a massive grizzly swat the dog away effortlessly and charge. With no time to shoulder the weapon, he fired from the hip instinctively. The muzzle was mere inches from the animal at the time.
The impact threw the man backwards, but his shot had connected. As the bear struggled to rise, the prospector gauged his angles and shot the enormous beast two more times. Old Groaner was done.
The Aftermath
The massive bear’s paws were more than ten inches across. However, that wasn’t what made the animal memorable. Once they got the big bruin dressed out, they found its jaw and skull to be grossly deformed. This accounted for the weird groaning sounds.
The two miners dug three .38-caliber pistol bullets out of the animal’s jaw along with a pair of .33-caliber rifle rounds. It seems that Jess Sethington had connected five times before the monster bear killed him. That was the sole physical evidence of Sethington’s gory demise that was ever discovered.
This was my bear gun while I was stationed in Alaska. It took a BATF Form 1 to build it legally, but when stoked with sabot slugs it was easy to carry while offering some proper downrange thump.
Ruminations
Alaska plays home to some 140,000 bears of all sorts. That’s an estimated 100,000 black bears, 30,000 brown/grizzly bears, and a further 4,700 polar bears. However, Alaska is a really big place. If you split Alaska in half, Texas would be the third-largest state.
Despite the space over which these animals are distributed, they are hardly rare. Attacks on humans are quite unusual, but I met two men during my time there who had been mauled while out hunting.
I never left the confines of the Army post without a serious gun. More often than not, that was a registered short-barreled 12-bore stoked with sabot slugs. I still felt underequipped at times.
An adult male brown bear can reach 10 feet long and weigh 900 pounds in the summer. What purportedly determines whether you survive a violent encounter with one of these creatures is the relative size of your head to his jaws. If he can get his teeth around your skull, he will pop it like a grape. If not, you only get scalped.
There is an amazing series of books that were required reading for those of us planning to spend any time in the bush, titled simply, “Alaskan Bear Tales.”
There are three volumes, and you can find them on Amazon. Be forewarned, these stories can be pretty gruesome. However, they serve as a reminder that there are some places where man is not always at the top of the food chain.
Categories
Knife what knife!?!
Its a Colt New Frontier L-Series Made in 1974 Case Colored in caliber .22 Magnum. I loved mine until the tragic boat incident! Grumpy
Its an upside down Winchester Model 12 30″ Full Choke Barrel in 12ga
Categories
Yep
Its a Colt Model 1903 Pocket Hammerless in caliber 32 ACP Pistol / .32 Auto (7.65 Browning)
Carrying a single-action revolver for self-defense isn’t a choice to make without considering all the drawbacks
of this venerable — but certainly outdated — pistol. Photo: Clayton Walker
[Editor’s Note: Countless stories and articles have debated the practicality of carrying a single-action revolver in the modern world. This fictional piece aims to personalize the decision and spark thoughtful discussion.]
Eli Turner didn’t intend to be an anachronism. He just liked his tools made from steel and soul, things considered time-worn traditions and things that looked good tucked inside sweat-stained leather.
That’s why the gun on his belt was a Colt Single Action Army, .45 Colt, four-and-three-quarter-inch barrel, black factory grips and the faint silver holster gloss that only comes from years of quiet devotion.
People noticed. A few of them admired him, but most scoffed behind his back.
Eli didn’t care. When he pressed the hammer back with his thumb and heard the four distinct clicks — C-O-L-T — it felt like he was hearing history. For a man who’d spent most of his life secretly believing he had arrived 150 years too late, it meant something.
Still, he knew history had its limits, but did it really matter? He’d soon find out.
The Legendary Texas Ranger and man who ran Bonnie and Clyde to ground, Frank Hamer.
He carried his Single Action Army revolver “Old Lucky” clear into the 1920s, though he was carrying a 1911 pistol when he took part in ambushing the famous outlaws.
Real or Romance?
Eli told himself there were advantages to his choice.
The big-bore single-action is simple in a way modern guns forgot how to be. No safeties to manage, no decocking lever, and no magazine to secretly unseat and turn the gun into a “none-shooter.” The Peacemaker either worked or it didn’t.
His Colt was dead-on reliable, digesting blunt-nose .45 Colt loads like a farm mule: slow, steady, unstoppable.
Eli knew that if he drew the gun, cocked the hammer and aligned the fixed front blade, the next thing to happen was going to be loud and very persuasive. To him, there was something undeniably grounding and even a bit thrilling about carrying such a piece of history. For these reasons and more, he intentionally chose to be a relic.
School of Hard Knocks
However, late one Tuesday night outside a gas station, romance met reality.
Eli wasn’t looking for trouble but trouble came looking for him. He had stopped for gas while visiting Capital City when a man jumped from behind the dumpster in the parking lot. He had a cheap but large knife in hand and was shouting something about Eli’s wallet. Eli was momentarily stunned and shocked at the sudden appearance of real danger, but practiced instinct took over.
He reached for the Colt.
In the place where theory intersects practical application, he began to see the problems that come from relying on nostalgia.
His presentation was fumbly as he tried to get the big gun out of its shuck hidden under his jacket. He soon discovered thumb-cocking a single-action revolver while your heart is hammering harder than a boilermaker is anything but graceful.
His thumb actually missed the hammer on the first attempt—slicked by adrenaline, not sweat — and by the second attempt, the knifeman had closed the gap.
Time turned to cold molasses. The robber had seen the big Colt, but his meth-soaked brain hadn’t yet registered the danger.
When the attacker was only four steps away, the Colt barked with a familiar boom — though it seemed weirdly quiet, almost like a squib to Eli — and the mugger stumbled back, suddenly remembering urgent business elsewhere. He made it about 50 feet before wobbling unsteadily for a moment and then collapsing near the street.
Turns out he was fortunate the gas station happened to be less than a mile from a big city Level 1 trauma center.
The 285-grain Keith-style slug driven by 18.5 grains of IMR #4227 — just as specified by John Taffin in American Handgunner Magazine — had done awful things to the chest cavity with the slightly right-of-center hit and missed both the heart and spine.
Mr. Meth Man would survive, partly by luck of the draw and some very skilled doctoring, but he’d need to seriously reconsider his life choices after leaving the ICU a week later.
The vaunted Colt SAA was carried for many years by all varieties of lawmen, gunslingers, outlaws, armed guards and private citizens.
It was effective — when it was the cutting edge of handgun technology in 1873 — but there are better options today. Photo: John Taffin
Problems
After all the resulting hullabaloo and a six-hour interrogation at the police station, Eli was released as his statement, the witnesses and the gas station video cameras all agree he was defending his life when he fired the one shot.
However, on the drive home, he had over an hour to think about how the confrontation had gone down. The slow presentation and missing the hammer on the first attempt really bothered him. He also wondered if he actually meant to only fire one shot.
He wondered if maybe the old-timers had steadier hands.
“Maybe they also died more often,” the other side of his brain responded.
Over breakfast the next morning, Eli pondered the Colt (still in police custody as evidence), but this time without the sepia nostalgia filter in place.
He kicked around:
• Considerable weight, length and bulk to carry and bring to bear.
• Six rounds — five, actually, if you’re doing it safely with non-transfer-bar models.
• Slow reloads under the best conditions and virtually impossible under fire.
• The sights, which were questionable at best when compared to virtually any modern design.
• One-handed cocking required practiced dexterity.
• A long hammer travel increased lock time and could increase the effects of shooter flinch.
He thought about the guys he knew who carried Ruger Vaqueros and Blackhawks on camping trips — big men with big hands who loved the guns — but he knew they generally carried another, more modern pistol for the daily “just in case” stuff.
The truth was unavoidable.
A single-action revolver worked beautifully … unless you needed to run it at the speed of survival. It then became a complex test of nimbleness rather than an optimized tool for defense.
He knew, and had experienced firsthand, that in a real fight you don’t want a test — you want a cheat code, full stop. A black polymer gun didn’t feel anywhere as “honest” to Eli, but it became clear why the “plastic fantastic” had become the modern standard for CCW.
Artificial Intelligence isn’t. Brent asked AI to produce a photo illustration of a single-action revolver in a concealable belt holster and this was the result. On the other hand, it shows that even the world’s most sophisticated computers had trouble finding a good example of a concealed SAA holster!
Reflections
Eli knew why he loved the SAA in the first place: a single-action forces discipline. It rewards deliberate action and demands respect. And, there is the whole history and nostalgia thing.
He now realized carrying one isn’t stupid — but it is specialized. If you train with it, understand its limits and accept that you’re using a tool built for a time 150 years ago, it can still serve. Plenty of folks in the backcountry trust single-actions for protection against dangerous critters, and they have saved many lives.
But for everyday self-defense?
Eli finally admitted the hard truth to himself: He liked the Colt because it felt like a handshake with the past, not because it gave him the best odds in the present. Now, he knew in the hard, cold light of life and death, survival is the only result that actually counts, and his odds were better with a more modern choice of handgun.
The Decision
The next day, before heading out, Eli went to his safe and took out a modern 9mm polymer magazine-fed pistol with a red-dot optic — lightweight, high-capacity, fast to reload, quick to sight and embarrassingly practical.
Are they dull? Yes, but sensible? Eminently.
After it was given back to him six months later, Eli didn’t retire his Colt out of shame. He kept it because it had earned and deserved respect, even if it didn’t now ride his belt every day.
Eli still shot his trusty six-shooter on weekends, feeling the weight of each deliberate shot. Every time, he smiled. The romance wasn’t gone, but it wasn’t going to be the first choice for social emergencies anymore.