One of the things that really attracted me to muzzleloading way back in the 1970s was the myriad opportunities to make my own stuff.
I liked to tinker and still do, but my hopes for the quality of the product always far exceeded my skills in making it. So, I have had a lot of fun and frustration over the years, and generally ended up pretty disappointed with my own creations. You would think, then, that after about 40 years of doing this I would have learned to give it up as a bad job.
YOU WOULD BE WRONG!
I have learned some things, however. As the seriousness of those devoted to muzzleloading and the associated periods and their material culture has yielded a far more authentic understanding of that culture, the bar has been raised for all. It has been a good thing, if a bit hard for some to swallow.
When a guy shows up now dressed in spotless gold chrome-tanned deerskins with a Thompson Center "Hawken", a possibles bag bristling with ball blocks and short starters, a raccoon hat and photosensitive bifocals, he kinda stands out.
Forty years ago, he would have blended in completely.
Yet, there's a part of me that feels sorry for the lost innocence of those early years of the buckskinning fad that some say has faded. (I think it has morphed.) The Scurlock series of Books of Buckskinning sent thousands of us to our craft benches making stuff we thought was historically inspired, even though it turns out it wasn't. Truth, history and better research rained on a lot of our parades; as a result, many gave up and quit.
I don't know what brought this meditation upon me. Maybe it was the article in this month's "Muzzleloader" on master horners Scott and Cathy Sibley, talking about the "naive sense of creativity that pervaded the [early buckskinning] movement," ... a "creative frenzy that had very little to do with the 18th or 19th century."
I felt that frenzy too, and I will bet that many other of the older members here did as well.
I guess, as in so many things in the bittersweet rhythm of a human life, the excesses of our youth are replaced by the more sober reflections of the wisdom that comes with age. Buckskinning has grown up too. History is better served by this, but sometimes I think our inner children were left behind.
I'm posting this here in the Craftsmen forum because this is where the "spirit of making our own stuff" still dwells.
I liked to tinker and still do, but my hopes for the quality of the product always far exceeded my skills in making it. So, I have had a lot of fun and frustration over the years, and generally ended up pretty disappointed with my own creations. You would think, then, that after about 40 years of doing this I would have learned to give it up as a bad job.
YOU WOULD BE WRONG!
I have learned some things, however. As the seriousness of those devoted to muzzleloading and the associated periods and their material culture has yielded a far more authentic understanding of that culture, the bar has been raised for all. It has been a good thing, if a bit hard for some to swallow.
When a guy shows up now dressed in spotless gold chrome-tanned deerskins with a Thompson Center "Hawken", a possibles bag bristling with ball blocks and short starters, a raccoon hat and photosensitive bifocals, he kinda stands out.
Forty years ago, he would have blended in completely.
Yet, there's a part of me that feels sorry for the lost innocence of those early years of the buckskinning fad that some say has faded. (I think it has morphed.) The Scurlock series of Books of Buckskinning sent thousands of us to our craft benches making stuff we thought was historically inspired, even though it turns out it wasn't. Truth, history and better research rained on a lot of our parades; as a result, many gave up and quit.
I don't know what brought this meditation upon me. Maybe it was the article in this month's "Muzzleloader" on master horners Scott and Cathy Sibley, talking about the "naive sense of creativity that pervaded the [early buckskinning] movement," ... a "creative frenzy that had very little to do with the 18th or 19th century."
I felt that frenzy too, and I will bet that many other of the older members here did as well.
I guess, as in so many things in the bittersweet rhythm of a human life, the excesses of our youth are replaced by the more sober reflections of the wisdom that comes with age. Buckskinning has grown up too. History is better served by this, but sometimes I think our inner children were left behind.
I'm posting this here in the Craftsmen forum because this is where the "spirit of making our own stuff" still dwells.
