Gun Digest 2011. Dan ShidelerЧитать онлайн книгу.
experience, which included a hard-worked Model 99 in .303 Savage, had conditioned him to expect a perceptible lag-time between discharge and bullet impact, but the .250 “just simply reaches out and grabs them before one can think,” he marveled in Outdoor Life in 1915, the first of at least seven pieces celebrating this cartridge. “I have never shot an arm which gives such an impression of power.” Constant practice on running jack-rabbits honed skills he enlisted in the eternal war waged by most cattlemen against their common foe, the ubiquitous coyote, and reloading expanded the .250’s versatility to include another hereditary rancher’s enemy, the prairie dog. By the Nov. 1, 1922 issue of Arms and the Man, he believed “I have done more really good shooting with my Savage .250 than with all the rest put together.”
Belief in the .25 Stevens was something of a genetic trait in the Tedmon family, as this photo of one of Allyn’s sons shows.
The new job in Colorado, however, and its scarcity of the kind of shooting opportunities he had enjoyed in Wyoming, soon led to a cooling of his enthusiasm for his Savage .250 and a resurgence of interest in the guns of his youth, the Stevens single-shots. Cash-strapped as usual, he had sold his .303 to finance the new .250 but evidently never considered parting with his cherished Stevens 44, converted by this time into an even more useful .32-40 after sustaining cleaning-rod damage to its bore. (Stevens made a particular specialty of such reboring.) Although his fondness for “Those Stevens Rifles” had crept into earlier pieces, it was with that nicely researched treatise of 1926 that his initial reputation as a high-velocity advocate waned, and his public identification with the guns of Chicopee Falls began to take shape. (Lest his unsolicited nickname of “the Godfather of Stevens Rifles” be interpreted as somehow self-serving, he felt compelled to conclude the piece with a disclaimer: “Don’t take me for a Stevens salesman, for what I have are not for sale.”)
The Godfather reviewed and applauded Stevens scopes for their good value in the July, 1927, The American Rifleman and lamented the passing of Stevens’ acclaimed Model 44½ falling-block action in the July, 1930, issue. The following year of 1931 proved to be, in retrospect, one of particular significance for him, as the magazine published three interrelated pieces that established unmistakably the special niche he was to occupy in the shooting world the remainder of his life. “Small Deer Rifles,” in the March issue, recounted and analyzed his trials of innumerable cartridges, from rim-fires to downloaded high-power rounds, on a variety of small game species. “The .25 caliber Rifles vamped me,” he declared, referring principally to the .25 Stevens RF and the two .25-20s. Note that in Tedmon’s usage, the term “small deer,” an Elizabethan expression, referred to any wild mammal. Allyn made this quaint phrase, used once before in a 1921 Arms piece, his very own as effectively as if it had been trademarked.
Stevens was an early advocate of telescopic sights, especially when they were mounted on Stevens single-shots.
“Sighting ‘Small Deer’ Rifles,” following in the August issue, was a plea for small-game riflemen to recognize the futility of obtaining a clear aiming-point with metallic sights on targets so small as to be obscured by the blade or bead of a front sight. “Nothing less than a good telescopic sight is fit to put on a really good ‘small deer’ rifle.... You can’t afford not to have one.” This argument correlated perfectly with two other favorite themes: the fine value represented by Stevens scopes relative to others selling at twice the price, and the ethical hunter’s moral imperative to strive to avoid crippling, “the agonies of gunshot fever.”
The latter consideration became his principal thesis in the final part of his 1931 The American Rifleman trilogy, “Rim Fires and Game,” in the November issue. The object of that theme was the .22 RF cartridge, which Tedmon passionately insisted was the single greatest contributor to unnecessary suffering among small game of all varieties. “I know that many squirrels are killed with the .22 LR; on the other hand, many...crawl away wounded to die a lingering death not due these game little beasts.” That he was speaking from bitter personal experience he did not conceal: “During those thoughtless and heartless days of a man’s life, I shot dozens of prairie dogs with the .22 LR. Today I get little pleasure and plenty of regret when I recall how many were hit, only to crawl gamely into the burrow to die, victims of my thoughtlessness.”
ETHICAL CONCERNS
Extreme as Tedmon’s feelings may seem to contemporary readers, he was by no means alone in holding such views: “I have for years joined with Col. Whelen and others in condemning the .22 RF for shooting game; that is, anything larger than rats...English sparrows and the like.” In the August 1, 1922, issue of Arms and the Man, sightmaker “Trim Nat” (Tom Martin) enlarged upon this point: “Why will some men insist that the .22 LR hollow-point is amply large enough for such game [woodchucks]? It is not, and it is only trade selfishness and cruelty to advocate its use. The main effort is to sell the .22 LR as being just the thing for woodchuck hunting.”
But who would be so irresponsible as to make such a claim? A U. S. Cartridge Co. advertisement of the period confirms that these rimfire critics were not setting up straw men to knock down. Arms and the Man, in the March 1, 1920 issue, published a claim by Ozark Ripley, a very well known sporting writer into the 1950s, of clean kills with .22s on geese, turkey, deer, and a timber wolf. Plenty more of the same foolishness can be found by anyone who cares to review the literature of this period. Clearly, hyperbolic advertising, aided and abetted by the fatuous braggadocio of accomplices in the sporting press, promoted the abuses that inflamed Tedmon and others who took seriously their ethical responsibilities as hunters.
Discouraging the use of .22 RFs for hunting (but not, of course, for practice and target shooting) was but half of “Rim Fires and Game”; the other half was a ringing endorsement of Tedmon’s ideal small-game rimfire, the Stevens .25 Long. “After having spent a lifetime shooting at small game and seeing it murdered by others, I can only repeat what I have said time and again before: the .25 RF is by far the best small game rim fire cartridge we have today.” Such sentiments were echoed by almost everyone who wrote about this cartridge, including Whelen (“the only rim-fire to use for hunting”), but everyone complained of its unreasonable cost: well over twice the price of .22 LRs. “There is your answer,” explained Tedmon; “Humanity is a hollow term where the average man’s pocketbook is involved.”
For his own use, Tedmon inclined toward the .25-20 Single Shot, experimenting with loads that stretched the potential of this venerable round, but his words in this piece were aimed at the great mass of casual shooters who did not reload. It should go without saying, moreover, that he was not addressing himself to small-bore riflemen in the class of Charles Landis, who hunted with match-grade rifles and target scopes and whose marksmanship and skill in range estimation were fruits of a lifetime of practice and study of the technical minutiae of their sport.
No Ph.D. in psychology is needed to trace the origin of Tedmon’s unusual compassion for small game animals. Repeatedly, as if in contrition, he lays bare harrowing memories: “I emptied the magazine [of a M1906 Winchester] into that badger. . . . He probably lingered for a day or more, suffering untold pangs of death, while I, brainless yap that I was, rode off forgetful of it all.” That act of thoughtless cruelty seared itself into his memory, and helps to explain later outbursts of vitriol, such as this passage from “Mountain Marmot Stalking in Colorado in Sports Afield, July, 1936: “For those sportsmen who must kill, kill, kill, I recommend a job on the killing floor of a slaughter house.”
SECOND AMENDMENT ACTIVIST
Game hogs, slob hunters, and fools misled by advertising into believing their four-pound .22 repeaters were good medicine for 250-yard varmint hunting were perennial targets of Tedmon’s invective, but another menace loomed larger in his consciousness as the century wore on: “the white-livered busybodies” agitating “to take this right [to keep and bear arms] from us.” This impassioned warning about legislative assaults on the Second Amendment was delivered in “What Would Pat Garrett Have Done?” in the Jan.