Shooting About. 
New York, Jan. 25 .—Editor Forest and Strtam: 
I11 looking over a tile of the Forest and Stream, 
I came across a discussion of the merits of dif¬ 
ferent revolvers for different purposes ; and it 
occurred to me that some things which I have 
noticed about certain revolvers, would interest 
those of your readers who are interested in this 
sort of weapon. 
My experience in the West began before the 
double-action revolver was well known, when 
they were little used, and the gun was the old 
single-action .44 six-shooter, generally the Colt 
• 44 . called the “Frontier,” or the Colt .45, which, 
I think, was called the “Peacemaker.” It was the 
same as the United States army pistol, and had 
a 7 A -inch barrel. The .45 cartridges were easier 
to get, and I think that in those days pistols were 
not commonly made to shoot rifle cartridges. 
I shot a Peacemaker for the first time when I 
was nine years old, and, as that sort of thing has 
always interested me, I have kept up shooting, 
more or less, ever since. I never did any ex¬ 
hibition work, nor anything that would be men¬ 
tioned as real target work, like the making of 
scores, such as I occasionally read of; but I did 
learn to carry a pistol unconsciously, and to get 
,it out quickly. I never saw any exhibition shoot¬ 
ing except a little done by professionals; and 
no good-natured competitions among men who 
habitually carried guns recur to my memory. [ 
hate always understood, moreover, that one 
would as soon not let the other fellow know how 
good he was, lest it might impair his chance of 
open, fair play in case of a serious altercation; 
still, in this I may be wrong. It was not, as I 
1 emember, a common thing for men to make di¬ 
rect personal remarks about each other’s shoot¬ 
ing, and I have read" that it was out of the ques¬ 
tion for a man of good sense to ask another to 
et him look at his gun unless they were very 
■veil acquainted. 
The old .45 is certainly mighty bad medicine, 
md you can feel pretty sure that if you hit a 
nan in the body with a good one, he will not 
'and up and keep on shooting long. T never saw 
1 man shot in the trunk this way that did not 
oil over at once. 
When I was about eleven years old, there was 
very qm e t man on one of the ranches to 
1 took a S reat liking. I tried to pattern 
iter him ; this seemed to please him, so it was 
! a [ 1 l,sed t0 so with him a good deal. PTc was 
nth me that year when I killed my first antelope; 
i fa ct he killed it, although T had fatally 
otinded it. and. what killing he did, he always 
"it i his pistol. T had taken the liberty of 
f !!I n “ S P° ke ” °n account of an expression 
lls . I have spoke”—his if>se dixit. I don't 
"nk any one else called him Spoke. 
ter we had raked the antelope just men- 
oned, when Spoke had put him behind his 
' other W Tt m ° Ved al ° ng ’ and by and by 1 £ ot 
other. It was getting toward night, and cold; 
’ We f , g U P the two antelope, and hurried 
me for the night work. In the morning Spoke 
and I went to get the antelopes, before chore 
time; and when we got near the place where they 
were hung, he noticed that they were both torn 
down. Then he said that there were two moun¬ 
tain lions there, and that they probably were 
asleep; then he added, “We’ll walk up, and I’ll 
shoot the first one in the neck, and see him bend ; 
then you can take a shot at the other.” I had 
not seen them, but of course I believed him, so 
we tied the ponies to a plum bush and walked 
nearer. We were pretty close before I saw any- 
thing, then one of these handsome animals ap¬ 
peared to me, moving its head a* though it was 
lapping something. Spoke fired before I knew it. 
Uiat big cat just rose, and, arching his back like 
a cat stretching after a nap, collapsed, and began 
to claw and tear things up. I got the other as he 
jumped away, but with a rifle. I think we were 
easily fifty steps away, but Spoke told me some 
years later that he had always felt pretty sure up 
to fifty steps. 
d he pistol shooting of Spoke’s was free one- 
hand work. He said he liked to get them "n 
the neck just behind the skull, because it “made 
’em bend.” 
Spoke was quite a character. At that time, al¬ 
though he was only twenty-six years old, he had 
quite a faculty with the men, even the older or 
the married men; and it was he who was always 
sent info town for those who did not turn up 
the Monday after pay-day. . They all liked him, 
and he always brought back the delinquents. My 
father, who was one of the owners, sent him a 
year s subscription to a Springfield weekly paper. 
-This, paper he liked very much and afterward 
continued to take on his own account. Fie 
thought so much of it that I have known him to 
make a sixteen-mile trip to the post-office after 
dark to get it. 
I had many occasional evidences of Spoke’s 
skill with his .45. Once some years later, when ] 
was manager of a place, he was with me. One 
morning we started to the ranch from one of the 
line-camps, and, as the weather was hot, we set 
out at five in the morning. We had got about 
a mile from the camp, when we turned a corner 
in some soft swale near the creek we were fol¬ 
lowing, and came right on a grizzly and a cub. 
Without a word Spoke shot her in the hip That 
worried her a good deal. The ponies were both 
startled, the cub had run up a tree to its first 
hmb, but the old bear seemed more exercised 
about her hip than about us,. As soon as Spoke 
could, control his pony, he gave the bear his 
favorite shot behind the ear, and that was fatal. 
She raised herself a little with her hind feet, -and 
pawed her cheeks with the front, like a dog try¬ 
ing to slip his collar, snarling and* spitting blood. 
Then she tried to come toward us, but she did 
not walk straight; she fell, and was so quiet that 
T thought her dead, so I killed the cub. When 
he fell from the tree, the old one woke up, but 
she could not walk, and Spoke said she would die 
soon; so I loped back to the camp and brought 
three of the boys to take in the quarry. When 
"e got back to Spoke, she was dead. 
As we rode along I told Spoke how surprised 
I was to see a man with only a pistol unneces¬ 
sarily attacking a grizzly; particularly a bear with 
a cub. He simply said, “You needn’t be; it’s 
safe enough when you are not too near and on 
horseback.” It was then that I asked him if he 
would give me an idea of what a gun was good 
for, to which he replied that he did not like to try 
a thing like that, for he did not think he could. 
“I shan’t say a word about it,” said I. For 
some time that was all that was said about that, 
but after we had proceeded five or six miles, 
Spoke called my attention to two rocks near the 
trail whose parallel faces were perhaps eighty 
steps apart. “You was askin’ for a show. Now 
take them rocks,” said he. “I’ll banter you; but 
don t say nothin about it.” So he rode midway 
between the rocks, facing at right angles to them, 
then fired twice without fully turning in his 
saddle, or leveling his gun as high as his chest. 
These rock surfaces, of irregular shape, might 
be approximately six feet in diameter and about 
fifty feet either way from the marksman. They 
were both hit as near the middle, I should say, 
as a man could judge at the distance. The two 
shots were incredibly close together. It was the 
best practical exhibition of pistol shooting I 
ever saw. 
Accepting the banter, I tried it three times 
without hitting the second rock. Spoke shot 
from left to right, and I wanted to ask him if 
he could shoot as well the other way, but I did 
not. It was never mentioned between us sinc^ 
Whenever I passed those rocks alone after that! 
I always tried that shot, and although I can 
now get both rocks, I don’t get the center of 
the second. 
The other boys, especially the older ones, were 
good shots, too. They used to kill rabbits, 
coyotes, grouse, squirrels and occasionally deer 
and bears while on the line. Some of the boys 
had rifles in camp, but cartridges were different, 
expensive, heavy and hard to get, so they were 
seldom carried on the saddle, unless there was 
fear of Indians. Spoke and I once pistoled a 
black bear, and roped her two cubs. . Such a time 
as we had dragging and driving the cubs to 
camp! Spoke did a little clever rope work, get¬ 
ting his as it was climbing a tree. 
On Sundays, sometimes, the minister or the 
priest would come, and hold his service in the 
men s dining room, which was run by the wife of 
one of them. After dinner the crowd would 
chase rabbits or wolves. We always tried (and 
often succeeded) to pistol any seconds that actu¬ 
ally broke the pack. Occasionally of evenings 
the boys would take a lamp to the smithy and 
run bullets. I remember how they used to dis¬ 
cuss the different cartridges from the eastern 
companies. 
Each used to carry a round or two of new 
cartridges for business, and a lot of home-mades 
to shoot about” with. Then there were the dif¬ 
ferent powders and mixtures of grease—and the 
catalogues. 
Spoke never took to the new models that others 
had their tries at; and he did not need to; but 
he used to say the .45 was a “wicked wallop,” and 
