From the Star Wars epic films but I had to look it up for precision. Still not quite as I remembered it! Here we're speaking of the Legend of the Buscadero, a tale spread by no less than the Sam Myres family after Sam's death in 1953.
I have this buscadero set above in my own collection, by Heiser in the '50s.
That it needed telling at all was due to Arvo Ojala and his patent for his steel-reinforced holster that hung from a form of buscadero. Clashes with the litigious entrepreneur caused Bill and Dale Myres, Sam's sons, to go on a publicity offensive to make Myres' claims to the belt in the 1950s:
Only now do we realise that, as plausible as the Myres tale is/was, 'there was another': the No. 14 catalogue of well-known saddlery Al Furstnow in Montana, with a buscadero set pictured there at bottom left. In 1914, ten years prior to Myres' claims.
This caused the research team to go looking for the true relationship of Furstnow catalogue numbers to their dates of issues. We'd done it before with Heiser and discovered that Heiser's catalogue numbers were sequential but were unrelated to their year of issue except for a single coincidence in the series. We also did this for Folsom Arms' catalogues because of the Audley holsters they produced after Audley's death, and discovered the same: sequential numbers that were unrelated to the year of issue except for a single coincidence.
Read on:
Jack Thomas, above, is credited with at least one Myres buscadero set, by Bill Myres himself. Below is Bill in a newspaper article in the '50s, with Thomas' set that matches Sandra Myres' (wife of Sam's great nephew) description of the buscadero in Sam's biography: a small belt on the face of it for the holster:
Berns-Martin did the same with their setup that they also called a Buscadero in the '50s, which was a massively curved belt with a strap on it for the holster.
Above and below, 1951.
But in Furstnow's case, despite the claimed founding year of his operation being supported by newspaper appearances as 1884, his partnership with Coggshall was dissolved at the end of that century and he then rebooted his operation as Al Furstnow Saddlery -- in 1900. Then there was this article in 1936 disclosing that year's No. 36 was then being printed.
Making No. 14, with a buscadero set in it, convincingly to have been for 1914. Furstnow himself lived only until 1925 and the operation continued to appear in newspapers only until WW2 began. And the 25-3000 caliber listed as for Furstnow's belt? In Sharpe's 'Rifle' book as introduced 1913:
And so, it seems, the tale of Sam Myres being the creator of the buscadero is false. Which makes more sense than it seems, because the notion it was created for Capt Hughes for being wounded in one arm was on shaky ground. Wounded by an Indian's arrow in 1872, according to the book Lone Star Ranger. So why resolve it for him with the buscadero in the 1920s as claimed by Myres in multiple interviews?
The book Holstory didn't start out to be a mythbuster production but it has turned out that way. It was a benefit that these old-timers couldn't be interviewed: they, like the big names who are still living, created false origin stories that eventually became their 'truths'. So instead we holstorians kept looking until a real, verifiable 'truth' c/b confirmed:
Most salient to me about the above story: that the buscadero name and legend came from Eugene Cunningham! Cunningham also single-handedly made Tom Threepersons a worldwide legend in his time -- 1920s, '30s and '40s -- and ALL of Cunningham's tales were all false, derived from interviewing Tom's wife and not Tom himself. Cunningham was an El Paso Times writer and I've been pondering for some time the dates of his comings and goings from the El Paso area; it's as if he RECRUITED the Mexican Indian to be a local embodiment of the legendary Canadian Indian of rodeo fame, by 1916, then really 'went to town' with stories from 1920 onwards. Easy to change one's identity during the unsettled times of the turn of the century, then WW1, then the Roaring Twenties during Prohibition. Which Tom enforced.
Eugene unapologetically wrote for the likes of All-Fiction magazine to make his living, and that living then helped Tom in his retirement including a TV program in '64. On the evidence, if Cunningham said it in print, it was All Fiction :-). A story about Tom by Cunningham in that magazine, 1931:
To read more about it all in my book titled "Holstory -- Gunleather of the Twentieth Century
-- the Second Edition", click on the new link at top of page.
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