Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 80, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 April 1910 — KILLED WITHOUT HITTING. [ARTICLE]

KILLED WITHOUT HITTING.

Daniel Boone Was a Wonderful Marksman and Never Missed. As a small boy Tip heard an old gentleman, upward of 100, tell about seeing Daniel Boone, and about some of his mighty doings when this old gentleman himself was a small boy, according to the New York Times. He said that Boone was a very large man, something over six feet, deep-chested, very heavy shouldered, but Was small In the belly, with long, thin, strong legs, large, hard hands and feet and Iron gray hair .and hazel eyes, very large and with sights always opening and shutting, working actively like tho nervous pupil of the eye of a game rooster. Boone was passing through from a trip out West and had with him only his hatchet, hunting knife and rifle and was without dogs or companions. He had only a coonskin cap, buckskin hunting shirt down to his knees, high laced cowskln moccasins and no pants or underclothes. His rifle was as tall as Boone himself and very heavy, with a long, thin, white hickory ramrod. This old man had been a hunter all his life and said the rifle was the biggest and heaviest he had ever seen.

The gfeat thing was to see Boone shoot. Boone, without taking a rest, hit a spot every time as big as a man’s hat at 200 yards, aiming very slowly and deliberately, for that was long her fore the days of cartridges and. quick snap-shooting. Boone at forty or fifty yards “barked” two squirrels, then an* unheard-of marvel, though common enough now. He hit the bark of the tree right under wlfere the squirrel was sitting crouching, and when the rifle said "pop” Mr. Squirrel was blown up into the air five or six feet, and picked up stone dead without 30 much as a scratch on him. Killing a tough old fox Bquirrel without a bullet touching him or drawing a drop of blood looked like a big magic or witchcraft to early settlers and Indians. <

Boone drove a nail or two and showed how he loaded his gun. He had a small powder horn filled with finest grain powder about as hard and clean from smut as the best modern; a little hollow powder measure made of elderwood, such as boys make whistles of. An he showed how he gauged his powder by laying the rifle bullet in the palm of his hand, then pouring on powder until the bullet was just exactly hid in the pile of powder. This was the right load, so he cut his elder to this measure. After pouring the powder down the barrel he laid a piece of greased linen patching of finest, smothest homespun over the end, and forced It down the barrel with the butt end of his knife, cut off the patch ing sticking out, then shoved the bullet home ufith the ramrod—a hard, tight job. With a quick jerk of the wrist he would pack tight the bullet and powder and drive so hard that the ramrod almost jumped out of the gun on the rebound.

Boone’s rifle stock was the shortest and most angularly curved of any in the village. And this same Daniel Boone stock, seen for the first time by the old gentleman, has now been adopted as a world model by all armies and manufactories. As a matter of fact, some of the finest Yankee wholesale manufacturers deliberately copied thi Kentucky rifle stock as their model, as Dr. Norvin Green, the organizer and first president of the Western Union Telegraph Company, long ago told.