I’m thinking these first couple of posts will be about background stuff and then we’ll get into the fun stuff, like shooting. The Single Action Shooting Society is the largest organization of Cowboy Action Shooters out there. They are the governing body that runs the majority of shoots and specifically puts on the world championships every year at “End of Trail.” When you join SASS you have to register an alias to be used at all SASS events and shoots.

When we decided to join, one of the biggest decisions was coming up with that alias. It’s a helluva lot harder then it sounds. First of all the alias has to be unique, and with over 60,000 members there aren’t many left. So I started researching and looking at other people’s aliases and here is what I found.

There seemed to be three different routes you could go. First you could pick an historical or literary name. The first member of SASS is “Judge Roy Bean.” Names like “Billy the Kid”, “Wyatt Earp”, “Chisum”, “Will Money”, and “Josey Wells” were obviously taken, but I still had hope for a name from this category. See, I grew up reading Louis L’amour and Zane Grey. I also loved westerns on Saturday mornings so I started looking through all my stuff for a name. No matter what I tried it seemed like someone had already picked it. So I moved on to the next category.

The second category seemed to involve descriptive names. Aliases like “Black Tom”, “Dirty Steve”, “Ohio River Gambler”, and “Vaquero Hayes.” The problem I had with this category was that everything seemed to be like that joke about porn star names. You know, combine the name of the street you grew up on and the name of your first dog kinda crap. So while this category works for a lot of people, and works well, I just couldn’t come up with anything I liked.

The last category seemed to be humorous names. Names that had a play on words like “Rapid Lee”, “Drew First”, and “Gunzilla.” This category of names appealed to me so I started thinking about aliases. Finally it hit me and when I filled out my application I put the one from this category first. That’s right; I came up with a name for each category.

My historically alias was “Gideon”, an ancestor of mine who was a colonel in the Civil War then went on to be a justice of the peace.

My descriptive alias was “Big Creek Kid” since I grew up on a little river called “Big Creek” when I was a kid.
And my first choice of aliases came from the humorous category, “Judge Mint Day.” Since I was in law enforcement and my ancestor had been a judge I liked the link and I thought it had a catchy ring to it. It also gave me equipment ideas right away. So I kept my fingers crossed and I called SASS. Lucky for me no one had thought of it yet so that’s my alias.