Gun Digest 2011. Dan Shideler

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СКАЧАТЬ work” of both the Model 44 and the .32 Long Rifle cartridge, which, he took pains to explain, was, unlike other rimfire ammunition, “inside lubricated” (i.e., the bullet’s grease grooves were inside the case). It also provides evidence that opportunities for the pursuit of “small deer” were relatively abundant.

      Had the family never been uprooted, his father’s gift of a rifle and his initial exploits as a hunter could of course have taken place as easily in Colorado as in the Greater New York metropolitan area. The experience that would have been difficult to replicate elsewhere, however, was Allyn’s exposure to organized shooting activity, especially schuetzen-style competition, of an intensity probably unmatched anywhere in the country. “A worker in my father’s office” who was himself a schuetzen competitor seems to have been largely responsible for introducing Allyn, as a spectator only, to this demanding discipline. Curiously, references to his own father as a shooting mentor, beyond providing the hardware, are conspicuously absent from his later writings: a pointed contrast to Allyn’s intense involvement in coaching his own two sons.

      “I well remember as a boy of 16 or 17... the old Greenville Schuetzen Range,” he wrote in “Those Stevens Rifles,” where “my brother and I met Dr. Hudson and numerous other noted target shooters of the time.” Likewise recalled with pleasure were “visions of the old Zettler Brother’s Gallery.” Born into the kind of rural culture which accepted guns as everyday objects of utility and sport, his exposure to the sophisticated world of schuetzen competition revealed a scientific dimension to riflery that a lifetime of shooting back on the ranch would have been unlikely to reveal. His “shooting consciousness” had been permanently enlarged.

      HOME AGAIN

      By 1904, Bolivar’s financial health had revived sufficiently to allow the family to return to Ft. Collins, where Bolivar, ever the entrepreneur, had purchased another real estate and insurance business. Having by this time graduated from Dwight, Allyn enrolled that same year in the Colorado Agricultural College of Ft. Collins and graduated in 1908 with a B. S. in Agricultural Science. His new degree was not the immediate passport to worldly success he probably envisaged, and because he evidently entertained no desire to join his father in business, he spent the next several years ranching with his brother in Wyoming – a meager living, but one enlivened with plenty of shooting. Once he remarked that, so as to reserve their beef for market, prairie-dog potpie (“the equal of any grey squirrel”) became a staple of their diet. By the mid-teens, however, he finally secured a position with the Wyoming Dept. of Agriculture in Big Horn and Washakie Counties, reportedly becoming that state’s first professional agricultural agent. Neither his professional position nor college education would have been deduced by readers of his early articles, however, as Allyn seemed to go out of his way to cultivate the impression that he was merely an ordinary cowpuncher.

      Allyn played no part in WWI, owing, he once mentioned fleetingly, to a visual problem. This condition would account for his early interest in riflescopes – although for one suffering impaired vision, he reported many impressive accounts of good shooting on moving targets with aperture sights. (Ordinary open sights he derided as worthless.) Possibly the birth of Allyn’s first child, Allyn, Jr., in 1917 also had something to do with his escape from the trenches. Bolivar, Jr., followed in 1920, and both boys became “featured players” and frequent photographic subjects in their father’s articles of the ‘20s and ‘30s. Finally, in 1921, Allyn returned to Colorado to stay, having obtained the job of Arapaho County Agricultural Agent. He settled his family in the county seat of Littleton, a peaceful ranching community some ten miles south of Denver.

      Although Allyn never brought up his career or professional duties in his own writing, “An Agricultural History of Littleton,” published by that city, paints a picture of an energetic young man full of ideas new to this community. As “the new agent from the college in Ft. Collins,” he “tried to persuade farmers that only through livestock could they succeed. This paid off...and in the 1920s Littleton was considered ‘The Pure-Bred Livestock Center of the West.’” The position of County Agent presumably meshed very nicely with the interests of a sportsman, for Allyn was probably a welcome guest at every farm and ranch within his district. The job, however, brought little financial satisfaction, if his complaints of penury were true. Discussing reloading in 1923, he remarked that he had done so for years without a powder scale, using only an Ideal powder measure, because “$10 is a lot of money to have sitting on a shelf, for me at least.” Though an early proponent of telescopic sights, he lamented in 1927 that he had been “without one for years simply because I couldn’t afford one.” A thoughtful reader is tempted to suspect such comments were actually references to his early post-college, prairie dog-eating years, not his late ‘20s circumstances, but even if true, it seems clear his college education never provided him with the financial means of his father, who lived until 1937.

      HIGH-VELOCITY FEVER

      That his special relationship with Stevens rifles culminated in his being anointed “Godfather of Stevens Rifles” in the May, 1940, The American Rifleman by J. V. K. Wager would have been surprising to readers of his earliest articles, because Allyn, like so many of his contemporaries in the ‘teens, had been bewitched by high-velocity and firepower. The spell, in his case, had been cast by a Model 99 Savage chambered for the sensational new .250-3000 cartridge. Having learned through C. E. Howard, a Colorado friend who collaborated with Charles Newton in designing small-bore, high-velocity cartridges such as Savage’s .22 High-Power, that the .250 was “in the works,” Allyn arranged to lay hands on one of the first to become available in 1915.

      That cartridge proved to be a revelation. All his previous shooting experience, which included a hard-worked Model 99 in .303 Savage, had conditioned him to expect a perceptible lag-time between discharge and bullet impact, but the .250 “just simply reaches out and grabs them before one can think,” he marveled in Outdoor Life in 1915, the first of at least seven pieces celebrating this cartridge. “I have never shot an arm which gives such an impression of power.” Constant practice on running jack-rabbits honed skills he enlisted in the eternal war waged by most cattlemen against their common foe, the ubiquitous coyote, and reloading expanded the .250’s versatility to include another hereditary rancher’s enemy, the prairie dog. By the Nov. 1, 1922 issue of Arms and the Man, he believed “I have done more really good shooting with my Savage .250 than with all the rest put together.”

      Belief in the .25 Stevens was something of a genetic trait in the Tedmon family, as this photo of one of Allyn’s sons shows.

      The new job in Colorado, however, and its scarcity of the kind of shooting opportunities he had enjoyed in Wyoming, soon led to a cooling of his enthusiasm for his Savage .250 and a resurgence of interest in the guns of his youth, the Stevens single-shots. Cash-strapped as usual, he had sold his .303 to finance the new .250 but evidently never considered parting with his cherished Stevens 44, converted by this time into an even more useful .32-40 after sustaining cleaning-rod damage to its bore. (Stevens made a particular specialty of such reboring.) Although his fondness for “Those Stevens Rifles” had crept into earlier pieces, it was with that nicely researched treatise of 1926 that his initial reputation as a high-velocity advocate waned, and his public identification with the guns of Chicopee Falls began to take shape. (Lest his unsolicited nickname of “the Godfather of Stevens Rifles” be interpreted as somehow self-serving, he felt compelled to conclude the piece with a disclaimer: “Don’t take me for a Stevens salesman, for what I have are not for sale.”)

      The Godfather reviewed and applauded Stevens scopes for their good value in the July, 1927, The American Rifleman and lamented the passing of Stevens’ acclaimed Model 44½ falling-block action in the July, 1930, issue. The following year of 1931 proved to be, in retrospect, one of particular significance for him, as the magazine published three interrelated pieces that established unmistakably the special niche he was to occupy in the shooting world the remainder СКАЧАТЬ