It is not easy to whip out a pistol and split a playing card edgewise at 30 paces. Joe Bowman did it routinely, and he had a few more tricks up his elaborately embroidered western sleeve.

“I remember him throwing a washer up in the air, firing a pistol, and saying, ‘I shot right through it,’ ” said Dan Pastorini, a former quarterback for the Houston Oilers and a longtime friend of Mr. Bowman. “I laughed and said, ‘Sure, Joe.’ So he wrapped a piece of tape over the hole in the washer, threw it in the air and fired again. The tape was gone.”

Joe Bowman, known as the Straight Shooter and the Master of Triggernometry, died June 29 in Junction, Tex., where he had stopped for the night after putting on a fast-draw and sharpshooting exhibition for the Single Action Shooting Society’s annual convention near Albuquerque. He was 84 and lived in Houston.

The cause was a heart attack, his wife, Betty Reid-Bowman, said.

At gun shows and rodeos all over the country, Mr. Bowman dazzled audiences with his fancy gunplay and sharpshooting with pistol and rifle. In one of his more elaborate stunts, he put two lighted candles on either side of an ax blade, balanced a .22-caliber bullet on the blade and then split the bullet with a rifle shot. The two pieces of the bullet extinguished the candle flames.