Hunting Big and Small Game with Muzzleloading Pistols: Using single-shots, double-barreled pistols and revolvers for taking game.

Introduction

image_2.png Books in the Muzzleloading Short Shots series were developed to give black-powder gun enthusiasts information in tightly-focused packages. Each book contains candid comments about guns, powders, bullets, ignition systems and hunting techniques.

These brief treatments are based on 50 years of shooting and hunting with muzzleloading guns. I started writing for the outdoor press in the 1970s in The American Rifleman and have sold articles to many other publications. I am now the Corresponding Editor for the Gun Digest Annual covering black-powder guns, products and hunting.

Besides these, I have written four other outdoor books (now also E-books) including Practical Bowfishing (Stoeger), Crossbow Hunting (Stackpole) and Backyard Deer Hunting: Converting deer to dinner for pennies per pound (Author House).

My most recent title is X-Treme Muzzleloading: Fur fowl and dangerous game with muzzleloading rifles, smoothbores and pistols (Author House). These books are between 200-300 pages, and Backyard Deer and X-treme Muzzleloading have detailed information about individual hunts.

While the prices given in the Short Shot books were valid in 2013, they have been generally increasing every year and vary with international exchange rates. These should be used as general guidelines.

Constraints on economical E-book publishing prevent me from using as many photos as I would like. For these go to the soft-cover edition of X-Treme Muzzleloading, my other soft-cover books and videos.

In the rear of the book, links are provided to the web pages of almost all manufacturers, and these should be consulted for up-to-date prices.

Loads listed in this book were safe and effective in my guns, but I cannot take responsibility for those assembled by others. Any loads should only be used in newly manufactured guns in good condition – be prudent, be safe and good hunting.

Chapter 1: Preparation for handgun hunting

The author targeting the Thompson/Center Arms’ Encore 209X.50 at the Nail Ranch in Texas prior to killing a 350-pound boar hog.

Sometimes a writer can get so close to his subject as to overlook the obvious. This happened to me when I was about half-way through this book. I had fallen into a mental trap that wrongly assumed that those who would be interested in handgun hunting were already expert-level handgunners, and that their interest was a derivative of years spent in competitive pistol shooting.

When I was growing up, available shooting options were dominated by NRA three-gun target shooting done with a .22, .38 Special and .45 ACP. By the time I was a young officer in the U.S. Army, I owned a good set of semi-auto pistols, had access to unlimited free ammo and on-base shooting ranges. Through slow and rapid-fire shooting, I learned the basics of grip, trigger control, breathing and sighting a handgun.

Not surprisingly, I qualified as Expert the first time that I shot the Colt .45 Auto with my unit. Although not quite kosher, I also carried my own .45 as my duty pistol. I also had an old Colt ACE .22 L.R. conversion, which I would occasionally use to take small game. I reloaded for the .45 ACP and also for the Auto Rim version of the cartridge which I shot in a 1917 Colt revolver. I never hunted big game with either gun, although I did commonly shoot hard-cast Keith bullets in the revolver.

Only when I purchased a Thompson/Center Arms Contender (no. 1618) with an assortment of barrels, did I follow Keith’s examples and actually use it as a hunting handgun. Even then, it was exclusively for small game, although I had a 10-inch .44 Remington Magnum barrel for the gun.

By the time I started hunting big game with muzzleloading pistols, I was already well experienced with a variety of handguns, had shot years of competition with both cartridge and muzzleloading guns, knew well where my problem areas were, and was mature enough as a shooter and hunter to seriously undertake the sport.

This level of experience is increasingly uncommon today. Instead, film, TV shows and video games show handgun shooters using semi-auto hanguns in both hands blasting at targets and hitting them by laying down a wall of lead into which the target/s may accidently stumble. Advertising and popular culture also appears to push light weight, short, high-magazine capacity handguns for self-defense that are very difficult to hit with at much beyond 15 yards.

Neither of these techniques are of much use to the handgun hunter where the precise placement of the first shot is the most important factor in bringing down a piece of game – not how many bullets are placed in the animal or how rapidly they are delivered.

Learn to shoot pistol

Of all firearms, handguns are the most difficult to learn to shoot well. The worst of the bunch are light-weight, short-barreled semi-auto pocket pistols which most often have poor to no sights and some of the worst triggers ever inflicted on any firearm. It is almost impossible to learn to shoot using such a gun. Yes, some of them will go bang, bang; but they will teach