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Jan 21, 2013

Brown Bess Beats Rifle Shooters

The Illinois Ranger has been away from this blog since last March, but he's back now and will be adding more information and making updates as the Winter wears on. Here's a braggadocios story from him:

In a paper target shoot last fall at the Mascouten Bay Longrifles grounds, using his Brown Bess the Illinois Ranger demonstrated the superiority of a large caliber smoothbore musket over rifles at close range. The Illinois Ranger was loading with buck and ball, everyone else was shooting rifles at targets only about 15 yards away. That's kind of close range for rifles, but great for smoothbores. First target for the day was a red paper about 3 inches square, one per target. Some of the rifle shooters missed it more than once. ha. The Illinois Ranger put two red papers about a foot apart on his target, and hit them both first shot. He also put some mysterious small caliber holes in a few of the rifle shooter's targets with the spread of his buckshot, but it took a while for the rifle shooters to figure that out.  :-)

Then the Illinois Ranger switched to bird shot for targets even closer and hit a bunch of standing feathers in one shot, and blew away 3 or 4 swinging balls in one shot – whereas some of the rifle shooters couldn't hit any of those targets at all.  ha.

Next the Illinois Ranger blasted away all the golf balls (about 8 of them on an elevated board) in one shot, whereas the best rifle shooters could only hit one at a time. He felt sorry for the rifle shooters and spared their pop-up turkey target, it was wood and one shot from his deadly Brown Bess (loaded with buckshot) would have totally destroyed that target too.  :-)

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