448 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
[Nov. 26, 1904. 
Marksmanship* 
Editor Forest and Stream: 
Among the numerous interesting letters which have ap- 
peared in your paper lately upon the subjects of barking 
squirrels and snuffing candles with the old backwoods 
flintlock rifles, that of your correspondent J. W. Shurter, 
in Forest and Stream of August 13, appears to me to 
be of the greatest value, because it gives reliable details 
of the degree of accuracy actually obtained with those 
weapons. There is, as Mr. Shurter says, no doubt but 
that, when sending specimens of the rifles and- the tar- 
gets made by them to the Emperor Napoleon, the best 
work of the best marksmen would be selected. The tar- 
gets — 10 bullets in a square of 4 by 4^2 inches at 75 yards, 
and 10 in a 6-inch square at 125 yards, were really good 
for round balls of moderate size fired from rifles with the 
open hunting sights then in common use; but they are 
also quite sufficient to dispose of the myths about the 
marvelous accuracy of the old weapons related by various 
writers of histories and novels. 
With regard to barking squirrels, if a bullet weighing 
SO to the pound, which is stated to have been the size 
used by Boone, passed through the bark close behind the 
elbows of a squirrel lying flat on a branch, I believe he 
would be killed almost invariably ; because he would re- 
ceive a great shock produced by a sudden blow upon the 
network of nerves called the solar plexus. Audubon 
also was so careful and truthful a writer that it is diffi- 
cult to doubt any statement made by him, even if some 
well-known riflemen have tried to kill squirrels by bark- 
ing them and have frequently failed. Possibly their bul- 
lets were not of sufficient diameter and did not strike the 
exact spot necessary for giving the shock. A deviation 
of half an inch would make a great difference. Is it, 
however, quite certain that Audubon really wrote the ac- 
count so often quoted? I read in an American paper 
twelve years ago that the whole narrative appeared in 
"Hilliard's First Class Reader," published in 1859.* 
I first became interested about rifles through reading, 
more than fifty years ago, the accounts of writers like 
Fenimore Cooper and Mayne Reid; and for years I 
really believed that the marvelous accuracy described 
could be obtained from backwoods rifles owing to their 
thick and heavy barrels diminishing recoil and vibration. 
But when I saw these rifles in the hands of hunters with 
whom I lived in the Adirondack Mountains and in 
Canada, I was disappointed at finding that, although they 
shot well enough for killing game, there was nothing in 
their accuracy which I had not seen equalled by British 
rifles of lighter weight and much larger bore. Other men 
who have had far more experience than myself with 
hunters in various parts of America, appear to have been 
equally unsuccessful. They describe the marksmanship as 
good, but almost invariably at short distances. In 1839 
the Hon. C. A. Murray traveled in the States, hunting 
deer in the Alleghany Mountains and buffalo on the 
prairies. In his journal, when writing about the Alle- 
ghanies, he says : "We killed a good number of deer, and 
sometimes amused ourselves shooting at a mark for small 
wagers. On these latter occasions I witnessed the skill 
of most of the professional hunters in the district. At 
a short distance — from twenty-five to thirty yards— they 
shot with much precision, but although their rifles are so 
long and heavy in metal, their performance at 150 yards 
was very inferior to that of many sportsmen whom I 
could name in Britain." In 1847 an Irish gentleman named 
John Palliser, traveled through Louisiana, Arkansas, and 
Missouri, spending a winter near the Ozark Mountains 
at Fort Union, then a depot of the American Fur Com- 
pany. He was acquainted with many of the hunters and 
trappers, and engaged one of the most celebrated of them 
named Boucharville as guide and companion, of whom he 
writes in the highest terms. Palliser killed buffalo, griz- 
zly bears, wapiti, and other game, large and small, but 
does not even hint at any extraordinary short or long 
range shooting on the part of the trappers. Boucharville, 
whenever time allowed, made a rest for his heavy rifle 
by driving his ramrod and wiping rod into the ground 
crosswise. The best marksmen mentioned was a Mr. 
Denig, physician at the fort, who often shot prairie fowl 
in the neck at 50 yards or more, which was certainly 
splendid work. 
In 1846 Mr. G. F. Ruxton, an officer who had retired 
from the British army, traveled through Mexico to the 
Rocky Mountains, where he spent a winter, and returned 
across the prairies to St. Louis in the following summer. 
He was acquainted with numerous trappers and hunters, 
with whom he was often engaged in the pursuit of game. 
He describes the trappers as fine shots ; but neither in his 
journal nor in a novel called "Life in the Far West," 
where some of the most noted among them are introduced, 
does he mention one shot at game or man which could not 
fairly have been expected from a well-made English rifle 
of far less weight than those of the trappers, which were 
very heavy and carried balls about 32 to the pound. His 
own rifle was double-barreled and fired -balls 25 to the 
pound. „ - .- 
Murray, Palliser and Ruxton were all 'ardent hunters, 
and it is 'incredible that they would not have used the 
long, heavy rifles of the trappers and hunters and recom- 
mended them to their own countrymen if they had found 
them practically superior to those they had brought from 
England. „ . , _ . . , 
About, I think, the year 1850, the American and British 
Governments appointed a commission to settle the bound- 
ary line of Oregon. It was accompanied by John Keast 
Lord as naturalist, and he lived in that then unsettled 
part of America for three years, along with the hunters 
who supplied the commission with food. They were liable 
*The sketch was first published in Audubon's Ornithological 
biographies, which bear 4ate from' J8SI %88k~~&v. 
to be engaged in fighting the Indians, and Lord himself 
formed one of a party which rescued some white women 
who had been captured. It may therefore be supposed 
that the rifles were of the best quality and kept in good 
order; yet Mr. Lord, in his book "At Home in the Wil- 
derness," states that he never saw the long, heavy rifles 
of the hunters shoot with any extraordinary accuracy; 
that the men using them missed as often- as other people, 
and that the sole advantage he could discover in them was 
economy of ammunition, owing to their small bore. 
I spent much more money than I could well afford in 
purchasing American rifles, both muzzle and breechload- 
ing, and experimented for many years before finally com- 
ing to the conclusion that rifles are not made which will 
do such work as is ascribed to the old backwoods 
weapons.. P'enimore Cooper, when describing some off- 
hand rifle shooting at 100 yards in the "Pathfinder," 
makes his hero say, "I can see the head of the nail, and 
what I see I can hit." In reality the most accurate rifles 
of the present day when fired from a rest with globe and 
aperture sights, will often miss a mark the size of a nail- 
head, and are doing very fine work if they put several 
successive shots on an inch bullseye at 100 yards. In 
Forest and Stream of September 10, Mr. Perry D. Frazer 
clearly proves the impossibility of driving a nail, except 
by chance, at far shorter distances than 100 yards. 
It is certain that the principle of thickness and weight 
in barrels is right; but it was carried to excess in the 
old rifles. In 1864 I examined two of these in the shop 
of a rifle-maker named Booth in the city of Ottawa. 
They had flintlocks and weighed 12 to 14 pounds each. 
When the butts rested on the ground the muzzles were 
level with my eyebrows, so that the barrels were four feet 
cr more in length. And all this for firing round balls of 
about 100 to the pound. 
Much stress has been laid by some writers on the argu- 
ment that the distance between the fore and hind sights 
on the old rifles gave greatly increased accuracy of aim; 
but aaginst this must be put the extra difficulty of truly 
boring and rifling such long barrels with the tools in use 
140 years ago, owing to the spring of the rod which held 
the steel borer and cutter. The argument as to accuracy 
of aim would apply equally to rifles with aperture sights 
on the stocks ; and yet, since these came into general use 
within the last sixty years, we find that the most cele- 
brated target shots in America have seldom had barrels 
more than 32 to 34 inches in length. In Britain a barrel 
of 34 inches is almost unknown. 
About 1848, a gentleman named Chapman, in New 
York, wrote a very interesting and instructive book on 
"The Improved American Rifle." I lent my copy many 
years ago to a man who never returned it, but, to the best 
of my recollection. Chapman stated that the most accurate 
of the rifles with round balls did not put them into less 
than a 10-inch ring at forty rods. Certain it is that some 
of the finest target work has often been accomplished 
with short barrels. Early in the sixties Mr. H. W S. 
Cleveland, author of a work upon American rifles dated 
1864, which I still possess, won a match with a .40 caliber 
Maynard rifle having a barrel only twenty inches long, 
against the members of a rifle club using the old- 
fashioned muzzleloaders with very heavy barrels. The dis- 
tance was 220 yards, and all Mr. Cleveland's shots were 
in the right half of an 8-inch bullseye— in about a 4-inch 
ring. 
General Jacob, of the Indian Army, tried numerous 
experiments with rifles of various patterns during a period 
of 25 years, and at ranges up to 2,000 yards. He finally 
found that with rifles of a weight that could be carried 
without too much fatigue — that is, from nine to ten 
pounds — he obtained the greatest regular accuracy with 
barrels 24 inches long, as that allowed of their being made 
sufficiently thick to prevent injurious vibration and jump. 
There must be many of the old rifles with barrels four 
feet and upward in length still existing, and if some of 
them had their grooves cleared out with rifling machines 
so as to cut away the rust and leave them as perfect as 
when new, a test of their accuracy and trajectory with 
round balls would be deeply interesting and worthy of 
record in rifle literature. But the test should be a fair 
one ; that is to say, the balls should fit only with such 
a degree of tightness that they could be pushed into the 
muzzle by' a steady pressure of the, ramrod ; for anything 
tighter than that would be impractical for either man 
or hunting purposes. 
In Forest and Stream of September 17, 1885, there 
was an account of a trial at 100 yards of a .42 caliber 
muzzleloader by Romer with balls weighing 130 grains 
and the same weight of Hazard FG powder. Great ac- 
curacy, combined with a very flat trajectory up to 125 
yards, was the result. But a ball which, with a linen 
patch, can be forced with a fair degree of quickness into 
the grooves of a .42 gauge rifle weighs about 112 grains, 
or 63 to the pound. The ball actually used weighed rather 
more than one of 54 to the pound, and was a proper fit 
for a .44 gauge muzzleloader. It tswjst therefore have re- 
quired driving into the grooves with a mallet or some 
instrument to which considerable pressure could be ap- 
plied A delay of that kind in loading would often cause 
loss of life when skirmishing with Indians, or loss of the 
game when hunting. 
In 1887 I tried a series of experiments with a .35 caliber 
Maynard rifle, loading it with round balls at the muzzle 
and using lubricated cloth wads next the powder, with 
patches of unbleached linen; the balls weighed 63 grains, 
or about ill to the pound, and fitted so tightly that I had 
to drive them into the muzzle with blows of the hand 
upon a piece of wood hollowed so as not to deform the 
balls. The rifle weighed 8 pounds 3 ounces, had a 26-inch 
barrel, and the grooves had one turn in 32 inches. The 
fore sight was of white metal with a broad, flat top, and 
the rear aig-ht a very open notch. I used Curtis & 
Harvey s No. 6 powder, gradually increasing the charge 
from 30 grains to 82 before there was any sign of strip- 
ping. With 78 grains the balls could be kept in about a 
3-mch ring at 100 yards in calm, clear weather. The only 
rest procurable was the seat of a chair which I used 
while sitting on the ground, so it seems probable that 
the rifle might have proved as accurate as the Romer .42 
caliber if fired, like that, with aperture sights and from 
a machine rest. When, however, I used thinner patches so 
that the balls could be forced into the grooves as quickly 
as is necessary in hunting, there were at once evidences of 
stripping, so that the shooting could not be depended 
upon beyond very short ranges. 
After all, it is certain that powder charges equal to the 
bullet in weight could have been used by the old hunters 
in only exceptional instances. Their rifles usually carried 
balls between 40 and 60 to the pound ; sometimes 32 to the 
pound, especially on the prairies or mountains. If we take 
a ball of 45 to the pound, a powder charge of equal weight 
would be more than s l A drams. Men living remote from 
towns .where ammunition was scarce, or those who lived 
for months in camp, could not have afforded such charges, 
and they would have been unnecessary, because less than 
half the quantity would have been amply sufficient for 
killing deer, bear or man at the ranges ordinarily found 
m the brush. I have tried the effect of a round bail of 
48 to the pound from a .45 caliber carbine with 2 drams of 
powder. It had a trajectory quite flat enough for practi- 
cal work, and drove a plug of flesh through both shoul- 
ders of a deer, killing it almost on the spot I therefore 
think that a charge exceeding one-third the weight of lead 
was seldom used in the old rifles because it would have been 
unnecessary and wasteful. With that charge they were far 
superior in trajectory to the British rifles made for spherical 
balls during the first half of the nineteenth century. The 
recognized best charge for muzzleloading shotguns was 
equal measures of powder and shot. British gunmakers 
having had little experience of rifles, began, and for many 
years continued, to make them for the same proportions 
of powder to lead; so the general rule was to load each 
rifle with its own bullet meld full of strong powder. This 
gave iY 2 drams for a 16-bore, 2 drams for a 12-bore and 
2.y ? drams for a 10-bore. The grooves were usually made 
wi+h so rapid a twist that these charges could not be ex- 
ceeded without a risk of the bullets stripping. The tra- 
jectories were therefore high, but the accuracy at known 
ranges was, I believe, fully equal to that of the heavy 
American rifles. The late Horatio Ross, who was one of 
the best shots at game or target in the British Islands, 
describes in a book on deer stalking a trial he made of a 
double rifle by Purdey, the marks being chalk disks ex- 
actly the size of the bullet patches at 100 yards. He fired 
twelve shots from right to left barrels alternately, and 
broke eleven disks. The patch, which fitted an ounce 
round ball, was only iy 2 inches in diameter. This trial 
occurred as long ago as 1833, and shows the care with 
which rifles were made seventy years ago. Mr. Ross be- 
lieved that the accuracy of the old spherical ball rifles 
had never been equalled by those of the time when he 
wrote this, in 1880, at sporting ranges. The want of 
power, owing to the small powder charges, forced British 
sportsmen, when hunting dangerous animals, to use rifles 
of much larger caliber than would otherwise have been 
necessary. And, similarly, when American hunters had 
reduced the bore of their rifles in order to economize 
ammunition they were obliged to increase the proportion 
of powder in order to make their small bullets effective. 
When the rifles had a turn in the grooves sufficiently slow 
to allow the use of a large charge without the balls strip- 
ping, they gave a combination of accuracy with flat tra- 
jectory far superior to that of the British rifles. Captain 
Forsyth, of the Indian Army (who was Conservator of 
Forests in . Central India), recognizing this fact, effected a 
great improvement in English rifles by reducing the twist 
in tne_grooves._ Of course the larger the ball the less is 
the spiral required to maintain its accuracy, and Forsyth 
found by experiment, about i860, that a ball of about 15 
to the pound could be fired with five drams of powder 
and carry perfectly true at sporting ranges from a barrel 
rifled with one turn in 8 feet 8 inches. Weapons of this 
kind were used with great success until the invention of 
the express rifle, which, owing to its bullet being of an 
elongated shape, had a flatter trajectory than any spherical 
ball at ranges exceeding about 125 yards. 
Although elongated bullets are said to have been in- 
vented in the eighteenth century, they could not have been 
equal to the spherical in accuracy, otherwise they would 
certainly have been adopted by American makers when 
the hunters spread across the prairies and into the Rocky 
Mountains. Those mentioned in old works on gunnery 
were egg-shaped and therefore ill adapted for keeping in a 
line with the axis of the bore when passing out of the 
barrel. The first elongated bullet of which I have read 
that gave good accuracy, was invented about 1823 by a 
Captain Norton, of the British Army. It was cast with 
projections which fitted the grooves of the rifle mechan- 
ically, and made with hollow points which were filled with 
percussion powder ; Norton's object being to blow up the 
ammunition wagons of -field artillery, which he proved to 
be readily done at 1,000' yards or more. The British mili- 
tary authorities, however, made no use of his invention. 
In 1848 Chapman published his work describing the 
American rifles of the best kind, such as those made by 
Wesson, Billinghurst, James, and others. The bullets 
were called "pickets," shaped like sugar-bowls, with the 
points sometimes sharp and sometimes flat. The bases 
being placed upon a linen patch, they were driven into the 
grooves by blows of the hand upon a kind of piston rod, 
the end of which was reamed out to fit the point of the 
bullet. The rod worked in the center of a cap which 
fitted the muzzle of the rifle, thus insuring that the bullet 
was truly centered in the bore with a perfect mechanical 
