Blackpowder Buck: A Classic Article By Charlie Elliott

Editor’s Note: On May 1, 2000 the outdoor world lost a very special friend, Mr. Charlie Elliott of Covington. Mr. Elliott was the author of more than 20 books, served as the southern editor for Outdoor Life magazine, and was the first director of Georgia’s Game & Fish Commission. GON wanted to share with its readers an article Mr. Elliott wrote about a muzzleloader hunt in Georgia. The hunt described in the following article, which originally appeared in the March 1972 issue of Outdoor Life, actually took place on Marben Farm, now a public hunting area known as Clybel Wildlife Management Area, and the home of The Charlie Elliott Wildlife Center. GON is reprinting this article By Permission of Times Mirror Magazines, Inc. and wants to thank Alesia Rast at the Charlie Elliott Wildlife Center for all her research.

IN THE FALL of 1970, Jack Crockford and I made mighty preparations to spend a week hunting with primitive weapons in the Warwoman Wildlife Management Area of northeast Georgia, where we’d had an interesting hunt several seasons before (see Muzzle-Loader Deer Hunt, Outdoor Life, March 1967). Jack is assistant director of the Georgia Game and Fish Commission. For over a quarter of a century, we have shared many hunts, some in our home state, some in faraway places such as British Columbia.

At the last minute, however, our Warwoman plans fell through. At the fireside on Marben Farm, I later bemoaned the fates that spoil hunts. Bennett O’Boyle, who owns the place, chuckled sympathetically.

“If you and Jack want to kill a buck with muzzleloaders,” he said, “why don’t you do it here?”

“We have a good many deer here,” Bill Hester, his manager added. “And if you hunt in the right places, there should be no problem.”

Marben Farm has long been one of my favorite places. It’s located on the Newton-Jasper county line a few miles south of Mansfield, Georgia. The farm is less than a 30-minute drive from my home, and I ranged there with a quail gun as a boy. Almost half of its 3,500 acres is pasture and open meadow devoted to cattle and horses. During the past 20 years or so, O’Boyle has raised and trained many race horses there, and some of their names are familiar on American tracks. The other half of the acreage is middle-Georgia Piedmont typical of the region before the foresters became so enamored of pine trees and planted them as row crops over much of the country that once was covered with luxuriant hardwood forest.

The entire area is veined with narrow creek swamps bordered by sloping, forested hillsides. Some of the swamp floors are open for short stretches, but other portions are choked with honeysuckle and other whitetail fodder. The region is well watered, and almost every sizable creek has been cleared and impounded to create fishing ponds.

“The fact is that we have too many bucks and does,” said Billy Hester. “We’d like to cut down on them a little.”

Several years ago, O’Boyle and Hester started to manage the farm as a hunting-and-fishing preserve. They went in for quail in a big way and are now shooting 25,000 to 30,000 bobs and hens during the preserve season. Feed patches are planted to quail food, but the birds must compete with the deer for this sustenance. When the whitetail season opens, two or three days are devoted to deer hunters, and the same thing is done at the tail end of the season. The usual charge has been $25 a day per hunter, which entitles each man to a specific territory of his own and to assistance in getting his deer out of the woods.

“We don’t allow more deer-hunting days,” Billy said, “because too few deer hunters show up to make it worthwhile and deer hunting interferes somewhat with our quail shooting.”

“Wouldn’t more deer hunters on such a small area be dangerous?” I asked.

“Oh no,” Billy replied. “We have true stands and assign each hunter to one of them. There are only two dozen or so stands, and they’re spaced well apart. We locate them in places that show the most tracks and other sign. If most of the stands are in use, no one is allowed to go out of sight of his stand. We put out our hunters before daylight and pick them up at any time they suggest. Some stay only a few hours, but some guard a deer trail until after twilight.”

Jack was scheduled to begin his holiday on November 11, a Wednesday. On Monday of that week, I spent most of the afternoon at Marben Farm with Billy and his brother Sammy. We made the rounds of the stands that had been most productive in the past.

All the stands are about the same — 2×4’s nailed securely to the tree branches with a wide board nailed to them for a seat so that a man can sit comfortably and lean against the tree trunk. Short pieces of 2×4 are nailed to the trunk to form a crude ladder. Most of the stands are 20 to 30 feet above the ground, high enough to give the hunter a clear view for several hundred feet along a trail or old woods road or through open woods.

I had gotten the impression that the whitetails were concentrated in a few choice spots, but the farther we went that afternoon, the more convinced I became that all of Marben is a deer haven. Around the ponds, along the creeks, and in almost every hollow, we found fresh tracks, bushes horned clean of bark, and much evidence of browsing.

Jack Crockford can’t sleep if there is a chance to see a buck over his sights the next day. On November 11 he was at my house a good two hours before daylight. Even so, he would hardly take time to eat the breakfast I had been slaving out of a hot stove.

Jack is one of the best deer hunters I have ever known. His daddy started him out in Michigan when he was seven years old, and he killed his first buck that same season with a rifle. That was 40-odd years ago. Except for a few years when he was flying The Hump in Asia as a fighter pilot during World War II, he has collected his venison every season since then.

Jack has more or less made the whitetail deer his life work. After the war he took a refresher course in wildlife management to supplement his degree and joined the Georgia Game and Fish Commission as a biologist. His main assignment was to build up the deer herd, which was then confined to relatively few of Georgia’s counties.

The way he went about it is a fascinating story in itself. It involved setting up a complex area-management system and a restocking program. Pits, nets, and framed boxes as traps for capturing wild deer were much too slow and often injured the animal. Crockford therefore developed a gun that shoots hypodermic darts and worked out drug doses in cooperation with the Veterinary Department of the University of Georgia. Several other men contributed to the present-day design of the gun and the darts. With the help of this outfit, deer can be captured and then moved and released at another site without harming them. The gun is now used widely here and in other countries in game management and police work.

For his contributions to conservation, Jack has been the recipient of many awards, among them the coveted Nash Award for outstanding work as a professional conservationist.

Jack builds muzzleloading rifles as a hobby. In his shop in the basement of his home, he turns out custom pieces that would have been the envy of many old-time gunsmiths. He handcrafts the parts, except the barrel, and fashions each arm after the various old rifles of American history. The two prize items in my small working collection are a Crockford .50 caliber rifle and a .31 caliber squirrel rifle, both designed after the old Kentucky pieces.

Here’s Charlie Elliott lining up the sights on his muzzleloader. To learn more about Charlie Elliott you can visit the Charlie Elliott Wildlife Center in Mansfield.

We were not certain that we could find our assigned tree stands in the dark, so Billy Hester carried us in his pickup and walked in with Jack to his stand and then took me to mine with a flashlight. We were stationed in the same stretch of forest, approximately three-quarters of a mile apart. There was a pine-and-hardwood ridge between us.

Heavy ground fog lay in the colorful autumn woods, and daylight was slow in coming that morning. The backside of the plantation around my stand was as quiet as a remote Wyoming valley.

As soon as it was light enough to see, I loaded the .50 caliber flintlock with 120 grains of black powder, rammed home the 500-grain lead ball, flipped back the frizzen (combined pan cover and steel on which the flint strikes), and primed the pan with fine black powder.

Then I set off on a 5-minute tour around the stand to look for tracks and trails on which I could concentrate my attention from the stand.

In front of me, the hillside sloped off toward a low swamp. Two deer trails came out of the swamp, and another crossed them just under a sharp break in the brow of the hill. And I noticed that the entire hillside was cut with tracks made after the rain that had fallen the day before. A faint breeze came up the slope toward my stand. Two seats had been built in the tree, one 15 feet up, the other 25 feet above the ground.

I climbed the tree and tested both stands, but I wasn’t completely satisfied with either. From the lower seat I could not see the place where the trails crossed under the brow of the hill. From the upper stand, much of my best terrain was hidden by foliage.

I had been as active as a squirrel for over 10 minutes and knew that I had to settle down if I wanted to see a deer, but I felt I could find a better position on the ground somewhere along the brow of the hill.

I climbed down, checked the priming in my pan, pulled camouflage gloves on, and arranged my mask to hide my entire face except for my eyes. I walked away from the tree at the rate of about four or five steps a minute, pausing after each step to select the best cover ahead so that I would stay hidden from the trails below me and yet keep them in sight. At the same time, I was looking for a spot where I could hunker down and become a part of the landscape.

It took me five minutes to move from the tree to the brow of the hill. I decided to light in a colorful clump of low sweetgums, but I never quite made it. A flicker of movement caught my eye, and then I made out the rump of a deer moving in the thicket at the edge of the swamp. I couldn’t see the head.

The animal seemed to be going to my right, a course that would eventually put it out in the open, so I clicked back the hammer as quietly as possible and raised the rifle so that I’d be ready if I saw antlers.

Behind the screen of brush, the deer changed direction, and the next movement I caught was to the left in a thick clump of small pine trees. As slowly as possible, I swung the barrel of my rifle around. The deer saw the movement and stopped dead still. The animal wasn’t more than 40 feet away, but I could only see small patches of buckskin color among the trees. To save my soul, I could not see anything that even resembled antlers.

For at least two minutes we stood there and ogled each other. I was holding the rifle on my shoulder, and the barrel grew so heavy that I had to use every ounce of strength to keep the front sight from wobbling all over the place. As still as I was, and so well camouflaged, I suppose that the deer could not make me out. I was just running out of muscle when the animal’s head moved slightly, and I saw the gleam of an antler. It was high enough above the ear to indicate that the buck was more than a spike.

I was close enough for a neck shot, but I couldn’t see the neck. I tried to guess where the rib cage was and moved the rifle slightly to get on. Then I waited for endless seconds, staring at the foliage. Finally, the deer’s outline simply grew clear to me among the leaves. I squeezed off my shot, the rifle jumped in my hands, and the buck went down.

(From L to R:) Current director of the Wildlife Resources Division David Waller, the first director of Georgia’s Game and Fish Commission Charlie Elliott and former assistant director of the Georgia Game and Fish Commission Jack Crockford visit at the Charlie Elliott Wildlife Center shooting range.

You’d have a rare picture if you could have snapped one of me trying to reload that flintlock with 11 thumbs. I didn’t take time to measure the powder. I simply poured what seemed like enough into the barrel, rammed home a patched ball out of the loading block, and then spilled some priming powder into the pan. All that is a far cry from seating another cartridge in the chamber of a modern rifle.

I didn’t complete my loading job a moment too soon. My 500-grain ball had hit a bit too high behind the shoulder, but not high enough to break the deer’s back. During my reloading, the buck had kicked around on the ground. He came out of shock, and then he was on his feet and heading for the swamp.

My second shot was at the whole deer. I did not try to choose an aiming point. I simply shot downhill at his back. Luckily, the ball broke his spine, but I didn’t know it right then. So I again went through the frenzy of pouring powder, seating another ball, and priming.

The buck was stretched out and gasping, so I used the third ball to end his troubles.

While I gutted and cleaned him out, I had some time to consider the antlers. He carried a nice rack with four points on one side and five on the other. In my part of the country we call that a 9-pointer. I guessed his field-dressed weight at 140 to 150 pounds.

After my arrival at the stand, all this had taken less than 50 minutes. It was something like a quarter of a mile out to a place where we could load the buck onto a truck, and I considered dragging or packing him that far. But I decided against it.

Jack, as I knew he would, had spent some time wondering about the spacing of my three shots. It even occurred to him that I had fallen out of my tree and was signaling for assistance. But then he decided I would have shot several series of three if I had really been injured.

Jack had three chances at bucks that morning. Like many successful whitetail hunters, he remains on stand for only a certain period of time. Then he feels the urge to move. He’s a top woodsman and can drift through the woods like a cagey old buck. He seldom fails to see any creature that stirs within the limits of his vision.

After an hour of more on his stand, Jack climbed down to hunt a buck instead of waiting for one to come to him. We were free to wander and safe too since we were the only hunters on the farm that day. Jack saw his first deer at an old house place on a timbered ridge and watched the deer for half an hour. The small nubbin buck was browsing on a clump of honeysuckle. From time to time the deer looked back over his shoulder, and my partner figured there were other deer nearby and possibly a good buck. Jack watched and waited, and the little buck finally moved around the honeysuckle. Then Jack noticed that the deer had a game left leg.

“If I’d seen it earlier, I’d have taken the little deer just to put him out of his misery,” he told me later, “but he went behind that clump and I never saw him again.”

Jack saw another spike, but he was too far away for a shot. Then he walked up on a big deer, probably a buck, but the animal spooked out of one thicket and stopped in a couple of sumac farther on.

“He wasn’t too worried,” my partner reported. “He just stood and looked at me, but I couldn’t see antlers. I looked until my eyes watered, trying to make him a legal deer. Then he moved, showing a good rack. But before I could get my sights on him, he was gone. All around the place, bushes had been horned down to a frazzle.”

Bill Hester walked back to my stand at 9:30, as he had said he would. He insisted on fetching a couple of his farm workers to drag my buck out of the woods. The ground fog was still with us, but we tried to take several pictures in the feeble light before hauling the deer off to the clubhouse.

After my early-morning muzzleloader kill, the remainder of my day could have been anticlimactic. It wasn’t. There are two deer tags attached to the Georgia hunting license, so I was still legal in the woods with my flintlock and tried for an even better buck than the one I had already taken. I have seldom enjoyed myself more, and never have I seen so many solitary deer and so many bunched-up whitetails.

One lone animal with unusually long spikes caused me to wonder about my eyesight. I was in open pines, and I could see 150 yards or more in every direction. Clad in camouflage, I was moving cautiously, one slow step at a time. The brown pine-needle carpet was damp and several inches thick, so I made no noise.

Charlie Elliott enjoyed much of his time in the Georgia deer woods. Here, he poses with a Warwoman WMA buck.

I suppose if he hadn’t moved, I would have bumped right into the little buck. I can only guess that I was concentrating on what I could see at the limit of my vision. When the buck snorted and jumped so close to me, I was so startled that I must have jumped as high as he did. He was less than 15 steps away and right out in the open. He didn’t run. He just stood there for at least 15 seconds.

At that range, I’m sure I could have downed him easily, though it would have been a running shot if I had raised my rifle. When he did move, he made only half a dozen bounds and stopped to look back. Then he went out of sight at a leisurely pace toward the creekswamp.

I goofed on the only other buck I would have killed. I was crossing the dam below one of the ponds. Being in the open with my eyes on the woods beyond, I was really just walking instead of hunting. The buck I jumped then was in a thicket at the base of the dam no less than 25 feet below me. I didn’t see him until he snorted and jumped, but I got one good look at his magnificent rack before he vanished in the thick brush.

It was my finest day in the whitetail woods, and the buck I did get was my first whitetail buck with a muzzleloader, though I had killed a bull elk with my .50 in Wyoming. The story of that hunt (“Was Elk Hunting Ever Like This?”) appeared in the February 1969 issue of OUTDOOR LIFE.

Jack didn’t score until the season was almost over. Since I wasn’t there to take his picture, he passed up a sizeable 8-pointer and took a small, tasty fork-horn for winter meat. Jack promised me that he would make up some of his deer into jerky and save it for next season’s muzzleloader hunt.