The pouch of the hunter always carried some flax or tow for use in cleaning the piece. The rifleman would wind a wisp of this tow about the end of the "worm," moisten it by passing it between his lips, and then pass the tightly fitting wad of tow up and down the barrel until the latter was perfectly free from powder residue. Then the little ball, nicely patched, was forced down on the powder charge by the slender ramrod, made with great care from the toughest straight-grained hickory wood.
Powder and ball were precious in those early days, and though strong men ever love the sports of weapons, waste could not be tolerated even in sport. Sometimes at night the frontiersmen would gather for the pastime of "snuffing the candle," and he was considered a clumsy rifleman who but fanned the flame with his bullet, or cut too deeply into the base of the candle-wick, and so extinguished the light. Again the riflemen would engage in "driving the nail" with the rifle ball, or would shoot at a tiny spot of black on a board or a blazed tree-trunk, firing a number of balls into the same mark. In nearly all such cases the balls were dug out of the tree or plank into which they had been fired, and were run over again into fresh bullets for use at another time. Thus grew the skill of the American rifleman, with whose weapon most of the feats of latter day short-range marksmanship could be duplicated.[1]
The early American depended upon his rifle in supporting and defending his family. Without it he had not dared to move across the Alleghanies. With it he dared to go anywhere, knowing that it would furnish him food and fending. When the deer and turkey became less numerous near him, he moved his home farther westward, where game was more abundant.
His progress was bitterly contested by the Indian savages all the way cross the American continent, but they perished before this engine of civilization, which served its purpose across the timbered Appalachians, down the watershed to the Mississippi, up the long and winding streams of the western lands, over the Rockies, and down the slopes of the Sierras to the farther sea. Had it never known change it had not been American. An ax is an ax, because a tree is a tree, whether in the Alleghanies or the Rockies; but the rifle met in time different conditions. The great plains furnished larger game animals, and demanded longer range in arms, so that in time the rifle shot a heavier ball.