Firearms on the Frontier

TEXT BY JOSEPH STOCKER PHOTOGRAPHS BY FRED GRIFFIN

Where we've been as a nation as where we're going. They shoot, not with modern cartridges, but with black powder and ball, loaded, not at the breech, but at the business end, like Davy Crockett did it. It can seem like a vexatiously slow way to shoot a gun, but these folks love it: pour the powder down the barrel. Put a small piece of cloth over the muzzle. Place a lead ball in the cloth (the cloth seals the rifling grooves when the powder is ignited). Cut off the excess cloth. Send it all home with a wooden ramrod. Prime the pan if it's a flintlock, or put a cap on the nipple if it's a percussion gun, and fire.

The appeal? "To preserve history," explains Dave Arnold, president of the NMLRA. Plus the challenge in it: "Black powder is slower burning and a dirtiershooting propellant. There's the satisfaction that if you shoot a good score, you loaded each shot yourself so precisely and carefully. And if you go hunting, you don't have a clip. You have only one shot."

And this affirmation from Clair Sorensen, an electrician from Magna, Utah, who shot in last year's meet: "It's really neat to shoot a gun that's 150 years old. You have to have a lot more patience. But even when you're losing [in competition], you're having fun. That's the beauty of black powder."

Sorensen is one of some 25,000 members of the NMLRA. Nearly 400 of them are Arizonans, organized into local clubs with evocative names like the Mazatzal Mountain Muzzle Loaders and the Yuma Territorial Long Rifles.

The guns they shoot are more likely reproductions than originals. Hence a sizable industry has grown up to supply the requisite guns and appurtenances. Some muzzlezleloading shooters like to make their own out of store-bought components. Others buy from gunsmiths at prices ranging from $225 to $25,000 (the latter if you want a custom rifle with gold or silver and engraving with a lot of fancy curlicues).

At the Ben Avery range last year, I talked to Jack Brooks of Englewood, Colorado, who quit a good job as a chemist to make muzzleloaders full time. He turns out four or five guns a year, spending as many as 600 hours on each one, and he feels fortunate to earn a living at what he likes to do.

And then there are the "reenactors," a.k.a. "buckskinners," a.k.a. "living-history enthusiasts." These are NMLRAers who aren't so much interested in shooting muzzleloaders as in living the way folks did when muzzleloaders were the guns of choice.

They come to a meet dressed in leather or coarse muslin. No zippers. Big buttons. "You want to be accurate in how you look," says Mike Hawke, a Tucson educator. ("Accurate" means wearing or toting gear from pre-1840 or replicas. That, says Hawke, is the standard cutoff date.) At their encampment, alongside the shooting range, the buckskinners spend the five days of the meet in lean-tos or tepees. They've hauled their dozen-and-a-half-foot tepee poles hundreds of miles on pickups with roof racks. They hold seminars on how to trade with the Indians and how to make fire with flint and steel. They practice throwing knives and tomahawks. They study natural medicines, and they thus know which tree bark to peel to relieve an 1840-type toothache.

Why go to all the trouble? Because these folks, as the NMLRA's Arnold explains it, "like to relive history... get the feel of what it was like to be here 150 years ago. Too many people today really don't know or care who Ben Franklin was, or Davy Crockett. We care. I've often said that our organization has 25,000 John Waynes. These folks are very clean, very honorable, very patriotic. It's more than nostalgia. It's a philosophy."

An invitation, then, from these buckskinners and muzzleloaders: come see 'em at the Ben Avery range next month. Walk back into history. If nothing else, it might help you with that toothache.

Ever have a yen to go back in time and see what life was like on the American frontier a century and a half ago? Can do. Hop out to the Maricopa County park system's Ben Avery Shooting Range a dozen or so miles north of Phoenix along about the last week in February. What you'll en-counter is surely one of the most extraor-dinary shooting matches extant.

It's the annual winter meet of the National Muzzle Loading Rifle Association (NMLRA), and it's open to visitors.

Congregating there to shoot it out peaceably are men and women from all over who, it would appear, are as interested in

CROCKETT'S PEOPLE TODAY'S MARKSMEN RELIVE THE BLACK POWDER PAST WHEN YOU GO

The 1994 National Muzzle Loading Rifle Association matches will take place February 23 to 27 just north of Phoenix at the Ben Avery range, west of Interstate 17-Carefree Highway intersection. Admission is free.

For more information about this sport, contact the association at P.O. Box 67, Friendship, IN 47021-0067; (812) 667-5131.