New Mexico – The Wargaming Erratic

I have had a productive “paint what you got”. This winter I opted to use the challenge to tackle a big paint queue of part painted figures as opposed to the mountains of untouched miniatures.

It means I have progressed some 1st Schleswig Holstein War figures while some oddballs have made the journey to “wargames ready”.

These cowboys are clearly the latter.

So this lot are again “many years ago” Triples Sheffield purchases long before what a cowboy/dead man’s hand appeared. The leader is a “blue moon” character as sold by Old Glory in the UK while the gang are Dixon miniatures from that great Yorkshire firm – Dixon Miniatures.

The “blue moon” leader (again) is in fact Jesse James while the bauxite gang model was in fact Frank James, his brother, that I wrongly attributed in the previous PWYG painting post.

This is Frank James erstwhile leader of the bauxite gang

He is part of blue moons “slice of Americana” range

On with the Van Stevin gang led by none other than Pieter Van Stevin himself.

Pieter Van Stevin – a no nonsense Dutchman living in Dawson Colorado the boom town coal mine near Cimmaron New Mexico in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo mountains.

The rest of the gang are

I decided to give Pieter a faded Union jacket being a devout Protestant originally from Grand Rapids West Michigan by the Great Lakes

The Van Stevin gang who are down south on the Santa Fe trail southern route running through Kiowa Indian lands rich with Spanish Pueblo adobe mud buildings.

A bit about Cimarron. Cimarron sits beneath the Sangre de Cristo mountains in northern New Mexico. Its fame nowadays relates to the St James hotel whose regular visitors included Wyatt Earp, Buffalo Bill Cody and Jesse James amongst others.

At its height it was on the Southern leg of the Santa Fe trail to which it gave its name. Taking the Cimarron route was risky as it crossed New Mexican desert with no water holes. Still the mountain route to the north through Raton and Taos required dismantling of wagons to physically lift them up rock faces at certain points on the route. Tough choices or what!