![The Sheriff & The Winding Stair Mountain Blues The Sheriff & The Winding Stair Mountain Blues](https://irishgop.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/The-Sheriff-amp-The-Winding-Stair-Mountain-Blues.jpg)
The Sheriff & The Winding Stair Mountain Blues
I know what you’re thinking. Where the hell is Captain McNelly? I hate to be the guy who blows out his own deadlines, but the day-job deadlines have to take precedence right now. I have decided that, rather than beating myself up over not getting the McNelly’s Rangers podcast written and recorded this month, I’m just going to go ahead and push it back to May.
It ain’t just the newspaper work that’s got me buried — I’ve got a real cool thing coming up: Two full days of private firearms training with John “Shrek” McPhee, aka, The Sheriff of Baghdad. There will be four shooters total, including myself and Craig Rullman. Opportunity of a lifetime.
John McPhee, widely known as “The Sheriff of Baghdad” or “SHREK,” is a retired U.S. Army Special Operations Sergeant Major with over 20 years of distinguished service. Specializing in various special mission units, he accumulated extensive combat experience across multiple theaters. Since retiring in 2011, John has been a trailblazer in video diagnostics training, analyzing shooting techniques with unparalleled precision through a specialized app.
One day pistol, one day carbine. Murphy Ranch beef barbecue in between.
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My go-to range music the past few weeks has been Turnpike Troubadours’ A Long Way From Your Heart. It’s a powerhouse record with a lot of Evan Felker’s trademark storytelling imagery. The Winding Stair Mountain Blues is a standout — a modern outlaw tale from a piece of country in Arkansas and Oklahoma that has long been an outlaw haven.
And you’re somewhere in the Winding StairThinking you still got a trick or twoAnd you’re planning out your fight in the lantern lightBut I don’t see this going well for youNo, I don’t see this going well for you
The song ricocheted in my storytelling memory, and rattled the bookshelf. Douglas C. Jones wrote a novel titled The Winding Stair about the pursuit of an outlaw gang in the 1890s, based on the brutal Rufus Buck Gang. The historical gang of teenagers engaged in a brief and horrifically vicious spree of robbery, rape and murder in Indian Territory in 1895. Anglo lawmen and Creek Light Horse mounted police captured the gang and they were hanged in Fort Smith, Arkansas, in 1896. If anybody ever needed killing, it was that bunch.
I have never paid proper respect to Douglas C. Jones here at Frontier Partisans. That’s a major oversight. Jones was the author of a whole bunch of really fine frontier historical novels. He’s probably best-known for his an alternative-history novel The Court-Martial of George Armstrong Custer, but the heart of his work is a series of interconnected novels set in the borderlands of what was once called Indian Territory — Arkansas, Oklahoma.
Jones’ stuff is really good, and worth tracking down. Pairs well with red-dirt music and gunpowder…
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These are Choctaw Lighthorsemen — same region, same concept as the Creek Light Horse. The Choctaw Nation incorporated this photo into the logo that goes on their patrol cars in 2022 — which may be the most badass thing I’ve ever seen on a police rig.