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Sooner or later it comes to each of us: our eyes weaken, our sights blur, and unless we elect to retire to the porch swing and shoot rubber bands at squirrels in the bird feeder, we're off to the store to buy a telescope sight.
Our forefathers had no such option. But with typical American ingenuity, they improvised solutions that kept them shooting -- sights that work as well today as they did generations ago.
Earliest firearms had no need for sights. Hitting anything with a smooth bored musket was largely a matter of chance. The great Medieval sculptor Benvenuto Celleni made a hobby of waterfowl hunting and, though he bragged of downing two flying geese in one shot with a single ball, much preferred his arcuballista, a crossbow fitted with a peep sight adjustable for windage and elevation
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| By the 16th century, crossbows were the worlds most accurate weapons. They were not completely replaced until rifles became commonplace two centuries later. |
The fabled 16th century Musketeers, in spite of their name, were best known for their swordsmanship. Their muskets served, as one captain said, "no other purpose than to support a ramrod." Desoto, in his explorations of Florida, bitterly complained that his guns weren't worth carrying and depended on his sword.
The discovery of rifling changed everything. By imparting a spin to the ball, gyroscopic action kept it traveling in a straight line. For the first time, shooters who took careful aim could hit what they shot at.
History offers no better testimony to the effectiveness of rifles than the battle of New Orleans where Andy Jackson's backwoods sharpshooters routed British regulars in a victory that capstoned the American Revolution, proving once and for all that a good rifle in the hands of a capable shooter could hit its mark at astonishing distances.
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| Original equipment sight (top) is improved by fiber optic front bead, but remains in poor focus. Folddown (below) mounts further down the barrel for better focus. Flat top, white insert, and screw adjustable windage make precision sighting easy. |
Part of the key to early riflemen's accuracy was sight placement. Rear sights on all early long guns were placed well down the barrel, as much or more than an arms length from the shooter's eyes. At that distance, sights were in crisp focus and precise aiming was easy.
As faster burning gun powders were concocted, barrels were shortened and sights began creeping up the barrel and closer to the eye. By the Civil War, rear sights were mere inches from the shooter's face, making accurate shooting a very young man's game.
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| Reversed sight (bottom) adds 5 1/2 inches more eye relief and is an easy fix for mild focusing problems. |
Yet old men persisted. Their easiest solution to fuzzy sight syndrome was to turn the sight around, thus gaining a quick 5 or 6 inches of eye relief. It was such an obviously simple improvement that both Colt and Winchester began shipping some of their early carbines from the factory with rear sights already reversed. When that was not enough, owners filed new sight dovetails further down the barrel and reinstalled the sights there.
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| A century's worth of rear sight refinement (left to right) shows small but effective changes in windage and elevation adjustments, sighting notches, and contrast. Potential accuracy increase from the old semi buckhorn (left) and the new adjustable flattop (right) is ten fold. |
Shooters also found that small changes make big differences. Widening the traditional V notch rear sight and thickening the thin knife blade front gave a bolder sight picture without sacrificing accuracy. Contrast between front and rear sights was improved by using silver (coins were a favorite), ivory, bone, and gold. WW I hero Sargeant York habitually licked his thumb and wiped the spit on his front sight to brighten it before attempting a difficult shot.
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| Early gun owners were particular about their sights. When they couldn't buy what they wanted, they made it. Silver was the favorite material and coins were the easiest source. Colt sight (left) was made from a quarter; Winchester sight (right) came from a nickel. |
Shooters had long known that in the same way squinting improves focus, peering through a small hole near the eye sharpens sights and the target. Handmade peeps, some of them from violin pegs stuck in a hole in the gun wrist, not only increased focal length but had the effect of making the target appear larger.
A variation of that principle was the sighting tube; mounted atop the length of the barrel, it not only improved focus, it defeated the dancing heat waves that particularly plague hunters in hot climates.
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| Shooting spectacles were not as silly as they look. They did work. But the restricted view was unsuited to hunting. |
Odd but effective sighting aids were shooting glasses, not the gold-wire-frame-amber-tinted-aviator-style-hey-look-at-me-i'm-a-shooter kind the big boys wear, but simple frames with one or both lenses frosted except for a small clear aperture in the center. The restricted view effectively sharpens images and appears to magnify.
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| If the peep sight looks good to the camera, it is even more impressive to the naked eye. With only the front sight to worry about, target acquisition is extremely quick. |
Regardless of their configuration, all peep sights have one other important advantage. In conjunction with brain and hand, the eye instinctively moves the field of view to place the image in its best light -- dead center in the circle. When a front sight is the image, it ends up smack dab in the center, superimposed over the target. The phenomenon is unfailing and quite remarkable. But it took mass production to popularize it.
Lyman was the first manufacturer to mass produce a tang mounted peep sight for hunting rifles. The device folded down and out of the way when unneeded, then flipped up with the thumb when wanted. It was an instant success in spite of the fact that its elevator locking nut was prone to working loose.
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| This century old Marble's Safety Axe Company, Automatic Flexible Joint Rear Sight was the best of its kind and the world's best seller. |
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| New MARBLE ARMS folding peep sight combines positive click stop windage and elevation adjustments, three different eye pieces, and superb craftmanship into a sight Webster Marble would have envied. |
Webster Marble recognized the fault, patented his solution, and as early as 1893 was offering his improved tang sight in competition with Lyman. A few years later, Marble added a spring loaded base to his sight that allowed it to pop up from its folded position and into perfect sighting alignment automatically. His Automatic Flexible Joint Rear Sight dominated the market for the next 50 years.
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| Pope Island Gold (left) and ivory (right) were the best of vintage sight material. Both, however, had hot spots that encouraged sighting errors. Fiber optic bead presents a uniform spot in any light. |
Marble also invented and improved a hatfull of other sights, each a solution to a common sighting problem. By 1905, gun sights occupied 6 pages of his little catalog; by 1910, his impressive array of sights made him the world's leading sight maker. Today, MARBLE ARMS is still making gun sights at its same old stand in Gladstone, Michigan, U.S.A., with an assortment of practical easy to use sights that would make old Webster proud.
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| From 1905 to 1914, MARBLE'S offered the service of "Captain Jack" to sight in customers' rifles for a dollar each. Apparently most hunters preferred to do the job themselves. Jack O'Connel left after only two years; Jack Hemple (shown) hung on for six. The position was closed after WW I. |
During a century of constant iron sight development, roughly 1850 to 1950, telescope sights continued to improve at the hands of bench rest shooters and military snipers. By all common sense, these obviously effective devices should have been embraced by sportsmen as something of a miracle. The reasons why they were not are as valid today as they were then and should give hunters pause before they strap an assasin's assistant atop their favorite shooting iron.
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| Scopes and slings add weight and bulk. If you don't believe two pounds makes a difference, try stuffing one onion, one cucumber, two tomatoes, two beets, three potatoes, and four carrots in your jeans and see what it does to your agility and stamina. |
Scopes for hunting should be a last, not first, resort. Scopes are as ugly and out of place on a fine firearm as a manure wagon at an Airstream rally. They are heavy enough to destroy the balance of any gun and can turn a 7 pound easy handling piece into a 9 pound pig. Scopes make it impossible to carry a rifle with one hand, forcing its owner to march through the forest at port arms leaving behind a trail of snagged brush and broken branches that make stalk and stealth impossible. Adding a sling makes it worse.
Beyond that is the serious matter of ethics. Scopes do not belong on hunting rifles simply because they violate the principles of fair chase. Hunting is about outwitting the superior senses of wild animals on their own turf and in their own terms. It is not about anonymously assassinating unwitting creatures at distances beyond their capacity to sense danger. There is nothing more to be proud of in that than stomping ants in the driveway.
Several seasons ago I sat a stump in weather so cold the seat of my pants froze to the snow. A row of day old tracks punctuated with yellow beads of doe urine ran beside me, through the clearing and on into the woods beyond. I had hoped a buck might come from there, upwind and into the open. He did not.
I was about to retreat to my truck when a deer head with antlers appeared from behind, so close to my right ear I could see his eye lashes. He stopped next to me, shoulder to shoulder, and scanned the clearing, looking over and beyond me as if I were invisible. I could see his rib cage breathing, its hair near brushing the barrel of the Winchester in my lap. Then he put his nose to the tracks and walked straight away, across the opening and into the woods.
A seige of violent shakes overtook me and I had trouble catching my breath. Never, ever, had I been that close to a living whitetail.
Would I have shot him if his little 6 point basket were larger? Probably not. He was, after all, on his way to an appointment with a lady fair; his head filled with thoughts of love and his nose with her perfume. He was a fool, but a young one. And if boys had to die for love, few of us would have finished school. Besides, I had not outwitted him. In his present state he was witless.
I saw him briefly next season being run around in circles by a nervous wench who wouldn't stand still and wouldn't run away. I felt sorry for him tortured by such a little twitch, and looked at him over my sights. But he was still a 6 point and I left him to his misery.
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| Author's Model 94 equipped with fiber optic front, flat top middle, and tang peep. For walking I prefer the peep; for posting, the middle. |
The next season ended my charity. He came the second morning at 11:20, a fine testosterone loaded 8 point, a seasoned seducer, cocky as a college quarterback. From within a small screen of spindly spruces, he licked his nose and stared in my direction hoping to find a mistress for a matinee. He was old enough to know better. It was not a difficult 90 yard shot; he died none the wiser.
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| The love struck buck was a handsome devil - but dumb. |
In the contest between man and animal, firearms are advantage enough. Iron sights are the handicap that keeps the playing field level, forcing us to hunt smart and shoot selectively so our accomplishments are worth being proud of. In a time when everything else is far too easy, personal pride is something worth shooting for.
Many thanks to Clint Dunathan, Craig Lauerman, Dave Nyberg, Dave Shirley, and Ingrid.
© 2007 Arni Dunathan
Arni Dunathan is the author of the newly published collector's guide "The Encyclopedia of MARBLE'S Knives and Sporting Collectables." |
