Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Comancheria

Glad to have you back K'.



...about like the Eastern Screech Owls and Tufted Titmice all over the friggin' place in that Costa Rican jungle scene in "Acts of Valor".... The REALLY surprising thing being that with all that fmj flying around they didn't hit any tourists

Anyhoo... on with the thread.

Curses, my copy of Frederick Law Olmstead's "A Journey Through Texas" is nowhere to be found, but will doubtless surface the minute I don't need it.

Olmstead traversed the state in 1857-58, leaving detailed descriptions, including of San Antonio. An indication of the paucity of recorded detail in that we have to go ten years after Jack Hays had moved on for the closest available description of Texas during the years when he and his rowdy crew were holding court in old town San Antonio.

Interesting thing is how empty Texas was, even as late as that date. Much of the country between Houston and San Antonio didn't really fill up until a bewildering variety (to me) of German/Eastern European immigrants flooded in the in the 1870's.

New visitors to Texas will be puzzled, as I was, by all sorts of cultural and cuisine references in regional communities that do not tie in to popular Texas history as they know it, even after allowing for the Hill Country Germans (Wends? Czechs? Polish Catholics?). One good thing about all these peoples however being that they firmly esconsed the blue-eyed blonde into the Texas human landscape... (Oh, Miss C. Moczygemba, where are you today??? )

Out of sequence I know, but just now google books is giving me the pages of Olmstead's description of his weaponry circa 1857. Bears repeating while I have it...

For arms, expecting to rely on them for provision as well as defense, we selected a Sharp's rifle, a doulbe fowling piece, Colt's navy revolvers, and sheathed hunting knives. IN this, we found we had not gone wrong as every expert who inquired highly approvng our choice...

The Sharp, in sure hands (not ours), threw its ounce ball as sure, though far deeper, into the mark, at one thousand three hundred yards, as a Kentucky rifle its small ball at one hundred.... By the inventor it can be loaded and fired eighteen times in a minute, by us, without practice, nine times. Ours was the government pattern, a short carbine...

Two barrels full of buck shot make, perhaps, a trustier dose for any squad of Indians than any single ball, when within range, or even in unpractised hands for wary venison, but the combination of the two with Colts, makes, I believe, for a travelling party, the strongest means of protection yet known.

Of the Colts we cannot speak in too high terms. Though subject for six to eight months to rough use, exposed to damp grass, and to all the ordinary neglects and accidents of camp travel, not once did a ball fail to answer the finger. Nothing got out of order, nothing required care, not once, though carried at random, in coat pocket or belt, or tied thumping at the pommel, was there an accidental discharge.

BW note, is this the first use of the term �accidental discharge�?

In short, they simply gave us perfect satisfaction, being all they claimed to be. Before taking them from home we gave them a trial alongside every rival we could hear of, and we had with us an unpatented imitation, but for practical purposes we found one Colt worth a dozen of all others.

Such was the testimony of every old hunter and ranger we met. There are probably in Texas about as many revolvers as male adults, and I doubt if there are one hundred in the state of any other make.

Heck, he sold me, I went out and bought one, prob�ly the only firearm purchase I will ever get to make on the word of old Texas hunters and rangers.

For ourselves, as I said, we found them perfect. After a little practice we could surely chop off a snake�s head from the saddle at any reasonable distance and across a fixed rest could hit an object the size of a man at ordinary rifle range. One day one of our pistols was submerged in a bog for some minutes, but on trial, though dripping wet, not a single barrel missed fire.

A border weapon, so reliable in every sense, would give brute courage to a dyspeptic tailor.

Birdwatcher