This article first appeared in Muzzle Blasts Magazine in 2020. NMLRA Members get access to digital scans of all the Muzzle Blasts Magazines since 1938. Join Today
By John Curry
Seems as though every single thing on God’s green earth possesses a subtle, inescapable, somewhat droll sense of humor. Even the basic, rudimentary forces of nature herself have a way of laughing/poking fun at you when you least imagine or expect it... And if a lad (or in this case, several lads) be smart, they’ll learn to laugh right along with Ma Nature and/or everybody else.
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Last winter, in the midst of a wonderful Christmas get-together held at Linton, Indiana by the renowned, NMLRA sanctioned, Buck Creek Muzzleloaders, I was waggishly reminded by an old friend – (Squire Jerry Gilreath), of an ill-fated, historically oriented endeavor we’d made with a number of like-minded friends thirty plus years ago. A relatively ambitious, late October foray into the rugged, Deem Wilderness Area of the Hoosier National Forest. Truth be told, a rather embarrassing mini-fiasco which
(due to the insufferable assault on our pride) never quite made it into the pages of Muzzle Blasts - until now. Not that we’d done something bad or harmful or anything like that mind you. Looking back, it just seemed as though our collective luck during that particular venture, more or less flew out the window and the proverbial, “historic-re-enacting stars” were somehow firmly aligned against us.
Return with me now, to those thrilling days of yesteryear… and a happy-go-lucky pack of rowdy, southern Indiana rednecks who had just recently discovered the wonderful world of the ultra-primitive, period-correct, eighteenth-century scout. (Ahhh yes): Favorably seated around our large, warm, brightly burning council fire at a big, fall, George Rogers Clark Memorial, “show-and-tell” in the ancient hamlet of Vincennes with a million, curious tourists all around us; our lively, diverse conversation ultimately fell upon that intriguing, new concept of actually taking one’s weaponry, clothing, equipment, accouterments and such out into the wild, untamed forest. Away from the more, semi-controlled, socially-oriented practices like rendezvous, monthly shoots, structured living history events, etc. and back into the un-forgiving deep woods from whence their need was actually developed. You could tell these lads were seriously interested as the dialogue slowly but surely meandered from
“how peculiarly appealing” to “less jess do it”.
Now, this was like music to my ears as I had been dabbling in that manner of thing since my high school days. Mostly alone and mostly to the laughter and disdain of the more established, more traditional, muzzleloading community. Preforming the lion’s share of this bewilderingly neglect-ed, functionally applied form of research in regard to the unsettled, Pre-Rev. War period frontier totally by myself with no appreciable interest from my peers was beginning to give me a morose, melancholy, “last of the Mohicans” complex… Seeming to me as though nobody knew, no-body wanted to know, and (to the best of my understanding), nobody even cared.