Hello, Bob: Testing the old trope of shooting dimes from a shotgun (VIDEOS)

A familiar installment of Old West legend is the death of a New Mexico lawman via an unusual shotgun load. Here comes the myth-busting.

One of the standard tales of the outlaw period was Billy the Kid’s use of Deputy Marshal Ameredith Robert “Pecos Bob” Olinger’s own double-barreled shotgun stoked with dimes against him in his 1881 jailbreak in Lincoln, New Mexico. While Olinger did perish that day in April and is memorialized, the tale of his untimely end from his own coin-fed scattergun is thought by some to originate from later books on ‘The Kid rather than actual fact.

True or not, the tale keeps getting repeated among Billy the Kid lore and Paul Harrell takes on the practicality of it in the above video, using a muzzle-loading black powder shotgun, with some considerations. Be advised, there is a meat target involved.

And since you have come this far, here are two of the better-known Bob Olinger demise scenes in modern film history: that from Sam Peckinpah’s “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid” from 1973 using “16 thin dimes,” followed up by 1990’s “Young Guns II” with “the best dollar-eighty I ever spent.”

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