The Longbow

A week ago I was finishing up a bow that I had started working on about a year earlier. My intent was to write about that, but then it started snowing and I got my mind wrapped up in snow and storms from the past. Now that the snow is here to stay and it is just a part of our daily routine, we can leave that subject and move on to another. It’s funny how something like a little hype about a snowstorm can consume most of our energy, but then wait a couple of days and we forget that there is still snow outside and that we can go skiing and all of that good stuff. Last Monday we were cross country skiing on our road with the wind blowing and it was snowing like crazy. And now that the weather is a little more on the decent side and we have fresh new snow, I’m sitting inside complaining how cold it is.

So back to the bow. I have always been fascinated with the history of this area. The thought of the Native Americans that lived here always leaves me wondering and thinking about how they did things. And so I’ve always been tinkering around trying my hand at making bows and arrows, tomahawks, buckskin, strings from groundhog skins, and even making fire with a bow drill. I've tried making all kinds of things and it was probably fair to say that my room as a youngster looked like an early American museum. Over the years I've kind of left all that go by the wayside. Although I still find the history fascinating, I just don’t have time for it. I've crafted a few bows for the kids here and there and that's about it. But tucked away down deep somewhere, I still have the desire to dig into trying to do things the old way. The ultimate dream is to harvest a deer with a primitive bow that I’ve made myself. With that in mind and with the hope of moving myself closer to my dream, I’ve been learning to shoot and hunt with a traditional bow for the past eight years or so. Since a lot of you probably don’t know this, let me explain the difference between traditional and primitive bows. Primitive bows were usually made out of a local tree, split and shaved and tillered until they shot nicely. Traditional bows are usually made from laminated wood and backed with fiberglass. They are usually shaped in a mold and often have the nice recurved tips for added speed. They are called traditional because apparently that was the tradition in the 60s and 70s, before the modern day compound bow was invented. They are shot the same way as a primitive bow and really, the only difference is the fabrication. Traditional and primitive bows are generally shot without sights while modern day compound bows almost always have sights. My hope is that when I do get that primitive hunting bow built I will be proficient with and understand how a long bow works. I’m finding that there is so much to it, so much knowledge and understanding, that what we often think of as just a stick and a string, is actually a masterpiece. I would suggest that the bowhunter from the 1600s had a much better understanding of how their bow worked than the average bowhunter of today. Little things like, stiffer arrows fly to the left of where you aim while weaker arrows fly to the right. Most modern archers just move their sight pin and never even think about why.

The Plains Indian has been so glamorized that generally when we think of the Native American, we think of horses, teepees, and war bonnets. And when we think of the early bows we think of the short bows from the western movies that were shot from the backs of horses at buffalo and General Custer and Buffalo Bill. These are often the bows that modern traditional bows try to mimic.

If we take a closer look, the tribes of the eastern woodlands were a bit different. One of the main people groups that lived in our area were the Massawomeck, a branch of the Iroquois. You might say that the tree was to them what the buffalo was to the Plains Indian. Instead of teepees made out of buffalo hides, they lived in wigwams or longhouses that were made from saplings and bark. They made acorn flour from the oak trees. They hunted for deer and fished. They weren't quite as nomadic as the Plains Indian and actually did a good bit of farming. And because they mostly hunted on foot, their bows were longer, often taller than the man carrying it. The longer bows didn’t break  as easily as the short bows and so they didn’t need any backing glued to them. Most of the eastern longbows were just a simple D shape as opposed to sinew backed bows from out west which often had the recurved limbs. And because of the length they could make them fairly powerful, shooting longer and heavier arrows and giving them greater accuracy at a farther distance.

So this is the style of bow that I was finishing up. I had been hunting with my uncle in Ohio about a year and a half prior. It was one of those days that you didn’t want to leave camp because it was dumping down the rain and ice was everywhere. And so I cut down an oak  sapling and spent the better part of the day at camp, making a bow stave. It's best to let the wood season before finishing a bow and so after getting it slimmed down half way I taped the ends up so they wouldn't split and let it sit. After Christmas I started working on it in the evenings a little at a time. I used a block plane to shave it down and I ended up getting it thinner than I wanted which translates into something like this, the 40lb bow that I was hoping for turned out to only be 20lb at my 30” draw. But it's fun to shoot. And it's a step along the way. I hope my next one is just a little better.

I really like the thought that, more often than not, what you’ll get done tomorrow, is often determined by what you are doing today.