178 The Winning of the West 



charging foe. A flagrant example is the story 

 which describes how the white man sees an Indian 

 very far off making insulting gestures; how he 

 forthwith loads his rifle with two bullets which the 

 narrator evidently thinks will go twice as far and 

 twice as straight as one, and, taking careful aim, 

 slays his enemy. Like other similar anecdotes, this 

 is told of a good many different frontier heroes; the 

 historian usually showing a delightful lack of knowl- 

 edge of what is and what is not possible in hunting, 

 tracking, and fighting. However, the utter igno- 

 rance of even the elementary principles of rifle-shoot- 

 ing may not have been absolutely confined to the 

 historians. Any one accustomed to old hunters 

 knows that their theories concerning their own 

 weapons are often rather startling. A year ago last 

 fall I was hunting some miles below my ranch (on 

 the Little Missouri) to lay in the winter stock of 

 meat, and was encamped for a week with an old 

 hunter. We both had 45-75 Winchester rifles; and 

 I was much amused at his insisting that his gun 

 "shot level''' up to two hundred yards a distance at 

 which the ball really drops considerably over a foot. 

 Yet he killed a good deal of game ; so he must either 

 in practice have disregarded his theories, or else he 

 must have always overestimated the distances at 

 which he fired. 



The old writers of the simpler sort not only de- 

 lighted in impossible feats with the rifle, but in 

 equally impossible deeds of strength, tracking and 

 the like; and they were very fond of attributing all 



