The Colonel and Little Missie by Larry McMurtry

Author:Larry McMurtry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2005-11-18T16:00:00+00:00

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ONE aspect of late-nineteenth-century performance that has long since gone the way of the passenger pigeon was the endurance shoot, in which contestants fired thousands of bullets or pellets at a variety of targets, including live pigeons. Some blame these shoots for the extinction of the passenger pigeons; the popularity of squab at high-end restaurants was another factor in the passenger pigeon’s fade, along with habitat destruction, mass hunts, and the like. (The term “stool pigeon” derives from these stupendous all-day shoots. The stool pigeon was a decoy bird tethered to a stool or fence post.)

By the time of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West the endurance shooters mainly shot at glass balls, trap-thrown, or wooden blocks. Captain Adam Bogardus, who shot with Cody’s show on some occasions, had a hand in the invention of the skeet trap; he also may have been the first marathon shooter to use the Ligowsky clay pigeons, an invention which in time regularized skeet shooting, a sport that once enjoyed a much greater popularity than it does today. Annie Oakley and her husband, Frank Butler, ran a high-end skeet club after they had left Cody’s show.

These endurance shoots were popular everywhere. Doc Carver did particularly well in the Hoboken area, where there were many German shooting clubs. It was not a sport for those with little stamina. In Brooklyn on one occasion Doc Carver broke 5,500 glass balls out of 6,211 thrown. Doc Carver and his opponents, of course, had loaders. Annie Oakley, on one occasion and perhaps one occasion only, shot 5,000 clay pigeons in a day, loading her own guns. She broke 4,772 or thereabouts.

The real problem in these endurance shoots, as Doc Carver testified, was eyestrain, the result of so much squinting. After the 6,000-ball shoot in Brooklyn, Carver had to go to bed with a cloth over his eyes for two days. Although he did more than anyone else to popularize these shoots, he was not, as he often claimed, the absolute top marathon shooter of his day—the title probably belonged to one Adolph Topperwein, who committed only nine misses out of 72,500 balls thrown.

On the other hand, Doc Carver made his living as a competitive shooter for almost half a century, taking on all comers in advertised shoots in America, Europe, and Australia. He probably shot more shots, most of which hit their targets, than any competitive shooter of his day.

W. F. Carver and W. F. Cody had been rivals to some degree since their buffalo-hunting days. They ran into one another in New Haven in 1883 and immediately decided to put on a Wild West show together. Carver claimed that he already had a Wild West show and merely invited Cody to come in as an act of generosity. The reader should be warned that absolutely everything that Cody and Carver said about one another, in the course of a rivalry that lasted at least four decades, should be taken with a large grain of salt. When speaking of one another, neither is to be believed.

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