Gun Digest 2011. Dan Shideler

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       Note: Reformed Winchester cases were used for all .25 WSSM handloads.

       screen 12 feet from the guns’ muzzle. Abbreviations: SD, standard deviation; OAL, cartridge overall length; F, Federal; R-P, Remington-Peters; BT, boattail; HP, hollow point.

ON THE TRAIL OF “SMALL DEER”WITH Allyn Tedmon

      BY CLARENCE ANDERSON

      When one gets down to a real honest confession of his good times, he usually ends up telling himself it was the little, inexpensive hunting trip he enjoyed most.” Every important gunwriter has on occasion addressed small game hunting, but how many became so enamored of it as to declare that “most of the shooting fun for the most of us has been had with small game”? Well-read riflemen are familiar with the work of Charles Landis, who made a science of squirrel and woodchuck sniping, and perhaps also Paul Estey, another ‘chuck specialist, but the name of their contemporary, and author of the preceding assertions, Allyn Henry Tedmon, is unknown to most twenty-first century shooters.

      Republication of the books of Landis and those of other shooting authorities of the time – Crossman, Whelen, Sharpe – has perpetuated their reputations, but because Tedmon’s work, prolific though it was, appeared almost exclusively in magazines, his name has receded into obscurity and has been preserved from oblivion only by his unique association with a marque still venerated by many, the J. Stevens Arms Co.

      Why resurrect the career of a writer whose work is unavailable except to collectors of vintage sporting magazines? Interest in shooting and collecting Stevens single-shots, and single-shots in general, which began to wane after WWI, has expanded enormously since Tedmon’s day. But absorbing as this may be to Stevens afficionados and small-game devotees, no less significant is his tireless, impassioned advocacy of good sportsmanship – the ethics, that is, of hunting – along with his seemingly obsessive concern with threats to the Second Amendment. Tedmon was not, of course, the only writer of the time to treat these subjects, but he was singular in his vehement insistence on them over a publishing career that commenced in 1914, if not earlier, and continued intermittently until 1959.

       Champion of Stevens rifles, hunting ethicist, defender of the Second Amendement – Allyn H. Tedmon was all of these and more.

      Allyn H. Tedmon Photo courtesy Jim Foral

      “GANGLING PRODUCT OF THE WEST”

      Local history collections in the Denver and Ft. Collins, Colorado, areas record almost nothing of the career of their nationally-known native son Allyn Tedmon but contain good deal of that of his entrepreneur father, Bolivar, who arrived in Ft. Collins in 1878. Perhaps it was Bolivar’s upbringing under the hardscrabble conditions of farm life in the unforgiving Adirondack Mountains of New York that fueled an un flagging desire to better himself, but for whatever reasons, he became a highly successful frontier businessman and civic leader, owning real estate, insurance, mining, and grocery interests as well as erecting northern Colorado’s earliest three-story brick building, the Tedmon House Hotel in Ft. Collins. After the latter property was sold in 1882 for a substantial profit, Bolivar’s political connections reportedly gained him appointment as Colorado’s Deputy Superintendent of Insurance, resulting in the family’s moving to Denver, where Allyn was born Nov. 11, 1884. Most of Bolivar’s business enterprises foundered in the Panic of 1893, compelling him in the late 1890s to accept a position with the Columbia Investment Co. of New York.

      But this personal and financial calamity for his father proved to be a providential turning point in the life of Allyn, “gangling product of the West,” he called himself, setting the stage for his evolution into a shooting authority of national repute. Allyn was enrolled by his father in the college preparatory Dwight School of Manhattan, which suggests that his father’s losses, if crippling, were not ruinous. At Dwight, Allyn established a lifelong friendship with another student, Charles Hopkins, whose accounting and managerial skills eventually earned him the position of Treasurer of the J. Stevens Arms Co. This happy convergence of interests greatly facilitated Allyn’s research, decades later, into the history of the arms maker he came to esteem above all others. The first fruit of that research, and also the earliest detailed examination of the firm to appear in print, was “Those Stevens Rifles” in the Dec. 1926 issue of The American Rifleman, but several similar studies followed.

      Like father, like son: two Stevens-equipped generations of Tedmons after a day’s hunting.

      The germ of Allyn’s infatuation with Stevens, however, was implanted by his own father, whose Christmas gift in 1900 was “the first rifle I ever owned... a Stevens Ideal No. 44...to me, yet, the most beautiful Rifle ever produced in this country.” So emphatic a sentiment, expressed 20 years later and after much grown-up shooting experience, leaves no doubt as to the impression that “first rifle” made on 16-year-old Allyn.

      The family apparently resided, at least seasonally, in northern New Jersey during some part of their “Eastern exile,” as a letter of Allyn’s published in the July, 1902, issue of Recreation identifies СКАЧАТЬ