ABSTRACT
Begun in the backwoods of Kentucky and immortalized by none other than Daniel Boone–frontiersman extraordinary–this sport required a keen eye and a steady hand. Boone and his fellow riflemen bet on perfect shot execution to “fall” the most critters. The naturalist John James Audubon witnessed such a contest, leaving us this description of what happened:
Judge to my surprise, when I perceived that the ball had hit the piece of the bark immediately beneath the squirrel, and shivered it into splinters, the concussion produced by which had killed the animal, and sent it whirling through the air, as if it had been blown up by explosion of a powder magazine.
