ENTERPRISE – It began with a feuding family and an argument over stray cows and escalated into a frontier-style shootout that left two men dead.

A bullet from a lever-action .30-30 caliber rifle knocked Wallowa County cattleman Dennis Beach, 55, out of his saddle. Moments later, ranch caretaker Shane Howard Huntsman, 40, lay sprawled in the snow nearby, also dead of a gunshot.

The Jan. 18, 2007, gunfight would have fit perfectly into a Western yarn by Louis L’Amour, including its rugged setting on an isolated northeastern Oregon cattle ranch 40 miles north of Enterprise. But five years later, what happened on that bitterly cold winter afternoon remains as tangled as a saddle blanket in a barbed-wire fence.

“The only two persons who really know what happened are Travis and Donna,” says Wallowa County District Attorney Mona Williams.

Travis Beach and Donna Carol Beach Dunning were the survivors — and they tell much different stories of the encounter that drew national attention for all its Tombstone trappings.

Travis Beach, now 33, desperately fought for control of the rifle that the caretaker had used seconds earlier to kill his father, Dennis Beach. He won the struggle, shot and killed Huntsman and needed almost 30 stitches to close seven head wounds sustained in the chaos.

Dunning, now 64, was Huntsman’s girlfriend and Dennis Beach’s cousin. A jury found her guilty of attempted murder and assault. She spent 32 months in Coffee Creek Correctional Facility in Wilsonville, but was released last October when the Oregon Court of Appeals reversed her conviction, finding that a sheriff’s deputy shouldn’t have been allowed to offer expert testimony for the prosecution.

Dunning then pleaded guilty to a lesser charge, third-degree assault. She was released on time served and two years of post-prison supervision.

During Dunning’s 2009 trial, the district attorney tried to make the case that Dunning and Huntsman were the aggressors. “If Shane Huntsman hadn’t brought a gun into the situation, both those men would be alive,” Williams says.

Dunning insists that Dennis and Travis Beach were the troublemakers. Her cousin and his son trespassed, tried to rustle cattle and bullied and frightened Huntsman and her into a meaningless fight that caused both deaths, she says.

“All they had to do was leave,” says Dunning, who’s writing a book about the confrontation. “They weren’t even supposed to be there.”

No foreboding

The landscape of northern Wallowa County near the ghost town of Flora is a tapestry of pine forests, broad meadows, knuckled basalt and granite ridges and knife-edged gorges.

The extended Beach family descends from two brothers who cow-punched together in about 1890 throughout the area. In recent years, bad blood has divided the Beaches and the men of the clan have been known for their occasional fistfights.

“It seemed to be the way that family dealt with one another,” says Williams, herself a lifelong Wallowa County resident.

Still, Travis Beach recalls no sense of foreboding as he and his father drove the eight miles from their ranch to the ranch headquarters of Dunning’s younger brother, Tom Beach and his wife.

The temperature was minus 18, Dunning recalls, and the ranch owners weren’t home. Dunning and her boyfriend lived in a nearby cabin without running water or electricity and worked as caretakers.

It should have been a quick errand to collect four stray cows, Travis Beach says. He’d spoken by phone to Huntsman about the strays two days

earlier.

“He said, ‘I’ll have them sorted out and ready for you to load,'” Travis Beach remembers.

Travis Beach had known Huntsman for some time as a laid-back guy despite his reputation for wild living. Travis Beach himself had been in at least one fight during his college years and another in Idaho, in contrast to his dad, who was a community pillar in Wallowa County, population, 7,100.

Dennis Beach was a member of the local grain growers board and the Enterprise school budget committee.

So what came next was way out of character, Travis Beach says, even given the history of hard feelings in the family.

“I’ll blow your head off”

Dennis Beach parked the pickup and stock trailer and unloaded his saddle horse. He stepped into the saddle, intending to haze the cows into the trailer while his son worked on foot.

Huntsman and Dunning had been feeding horses and approached as the Beaches looked in the pole corrals for the strays. “They were just going through the yard opening all the gates,” Dunning says. “They acted like they owned the place.”

Huntsman ordered the Beaches to leave, Dunning says, while she worked to prevent cattle from leaving the corrals. “I was trying to shut the gates,” she says. “It was below zero and I was freezing.”

The district attorney says a photograph in Huntsman’s 35 mm Pentax camera shows that four strays had been waiting in a corral for the Beaches. But Huntsman and Dunning had turned two of them back among the other cows, and they told the father and son they couldn’t have them, Williams says.

Sharp words followed. Huntsman went to the

ranch house for a rifle.

“He must have had a massive fear all of a sudden,” says Dunning, who took Huntsman’s camera from a nearby pickup and snapped a picture of the Beaches.

“I don’t know if it was me taking the picture,” she says. “They came unglued.”

Huntsman returned from the house and “his arm was behind his back and I could see the butt of the rifle,” recalls Travis Beach. He and his father were unarmed. “I went toward him and said, ‘Hey, Shane, we’ll go. We don’t need this.'”

“His exact words were, ‘Get on the ground or I’ll blow your head off,” Travis Beach says.

He dropped to his knees, hands raised, he says. Huntsman, the rifle at his shoulder, told Dennis Beach to dismount or he’d shoot his son, according to testimony at Dunning’s trial.

Dennis Beach refused and “was leaning on the saddle horn, talking to Shane,” trying to project an attitude of calm, Travis Beach says. “He (Dennis Beach) said, ‘We’ll go. We’ll leave the horse, the cows, we’ll just go.'”

Huntsman replied, “Well, you had your chance” and fired, Travis Beach says. Dennis Beach “flipped off the back of the horse,” his son says.

Huntsman then snapped off a shot at Travis Beach and a second one as Travis tackled him. “It went off under my arm,” Travis Beach says. “There was no question in my mind that I was supposed to die that day.”

Dunning took a photo of the men struggling for the rifle. In the picture, the bearded Huntsman is atop Travis Beach, who is belly-down on packed snow.

At some point, Dunning put down the camera, and Travis Beach remembers her hitting him twice with a rock and shouting: “Kill him! Kill him, too!”

Travis Beach says he grabbed her arm and she gave the rock to Huntsman. “It was kind of a fight for survival at that

point,” he says.

A bleeding Travis Beach finally won control of the rifle, and Huntsman scrambled toward the barn. Blinded by blood and fearing Huntsman was attacking him, Beach fired and the bullet slammed into Huntsman, killing him.

Travis Beach drove to an Oregon Department of Transportation shop along Oregon 3 to phone for help. Anguished, he told the 9-1-1 dispatcher: “I don’t know if I shot Shane. I shot at him out of frustration. The scope was full of snow. I couldn’t see nothing. Oh, my God, no.”

“An Old West movie”

Dunning says it didn’t happen that way. She says Huntsman never ordered Travis Beach to kneel in the snow and never told Dennis Beach to dismount.

She says Huntsman was holding the men at gunpoint when Dennis Beach spurred his horse at him and Travis Beach tackled him. The rifle accidentally discharged, killing Dennis Beach, she says. “Shane didn’t shoot Dennis, that’s all I’ve got to say,” she says.

Dunning’s attorney, Wes Williams, says a pathologist’s testimony suggests Dennis Beach was rising in his stirrups and urging the horse toward Huntsman when the bullet hit him.

Dunning put down the camera after photographing the men and ran to them, she says.

“I tried to grab the gun, and that’s how I ended up underneath Travis,” she says. “They were fighting on the ground, and Shane had blood all over his head. I thought he was shot. The only thing I remember saying was, ‘Oh, God, stop it!'”

Her hand found a rock, but she didn’t hit Beach, she says. Instead, she gave it to Huntsman, who struck Beach over the head, she says. “That I know, because I was underneath,” she says.

Crushed under two big, struggling men, Dunning “had all the air smashed out of me,” she says. “I was thinking of skinning out of my shirt” to get out from under them.

After Travis Beach got the rifle and shot Huntsman, he shot at her, too, but missed, as she ran to the barn, she says.

“I heard him walking around the barn,” she says. “He was looking for me.”

Travis Beach denies firing at her, and the district attorney says Dunning didn’t tell that story to the state trooper who questioned her after the fight. On a 9-1-1 tape, Dunning told the dispatcher: “Travis shot Shane Huntsman and Shane shot Dennis Beach. They shot each other.”

Travis Beach admits he didn’t say Dunning hit him with a rock during his first five or six interviews about what happened. Almost a week later, “after my head cleared,” he accused Dunning for the first time.

When sheriff’s deputies arrived, they found Dennis Beach’s horse standing near his body, four spent .30-30 caliber cartridge casings, an unfired .30-30 round and a bloody rock.

Today, Travis Beach runs the family ranch without his father. He still hasn’t collected Dennis Beach’s saddle from the Wallowa County Courthouse’s evidence room and he hasn’t ridden a horse in five years. “Watching my dad get shot off one was the last straw,” he

says.

He wants to believe the family feuding that cost his father’s life is finally over .

“He wasn’t only my dad, but my business partner and my best friend,” Travis Beach says. “I like to think the blood’s been spilled and hopefully that’s the end of it.”

The gunfight fascinates people around the Northwest and the nation, probably because of its associations with a simpler time and a lifestyle that many assumed had vanished.

“It was definitely out of an Old West movie,” DA Williams says. “But it was a tragedy for the whole Beach family, both sides.”