If you have followed my original post and the replies (in Long Range Muzzleloading), concerning the marksmanship abilities of Capt. Daniel Morgan's Sharpshooters, you might find this interesting. Morgan wasn't the only officer tasked with forming companies of top marksmen. Capt. Michael Cresap had the same mindset as did Morgan, so he recruited a company of 130 top shooters of rifled guns and used them strategically to pick off British officers. In the pages of the August 28 edition of the Pennsylvania Packet newspaper is an account of a demo performed by Cresap's men on August 4, 1775: "at upwards of sixty yards, and without any kind of rest, there was not one who could not plug 19 bullets of 20 (as they termed it) within an inch of the head of a ten penny nail." The more I read and think about the skill level these men showed, I'm of the belief that exceptional shooting was probably not very rare. They used their rifles every day or two to get food, and they often used them to eliminate two and four legged threats. I believe they were intimately in tune with their rifles, and they raised, sighted, and shot them without any thought of how or why, and a successful result intuitively happened. I compare it to us driving our cars. We don't analyze the process or even think about what we're doing, we just get in and drive and we arrive safely. By the way, Cresap's company marched to Boston and did their part to assist in the siege there of April, 1775.
Topic: Aim small, miss small, Revolutionary style (Read 32 times)