Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, July 20, 1990 TAG: 9007190290
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: KEVIN KITTREDGE CORRESPONDENT
DATELINE: WILLIS RIDGE LENGTH: Long
"You have people who love tennis, you have people who love golf," said Johnston, who was himself wearing fringed elkhide pants, red suspenders, and a day-or-two-old beard.
Like the other members of the Appalachia Primitive Club - who favor 1800-vintage mountain man garb - he had come for a long weekend of muddy camping and an old-fashioned shooting match in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
"This is our golf game," summed up Johnston. "That's the way I look at it."
And the rain?
"It's something you have to put up with to have a shooting match," he said. "People get out in the rain and play golf."
Here in the middle of a farm in the middle of rough-hewn Floyd County, it was a pretty fur piece to the nearest green. But nobody was complaining.
Instead, Johnston, pony-tailed club President R.L. "Buffler" Seay and a few dozen more friendly folks were holding a black-powder shooting match Saturday, despite the on-and-off rain.
They also were throwing knives and tomahawks, munching on cornbread and beans and insisting that the rain didn't matter.
"We knew it was calling for rain. We said, `What the heck,' " explained Raven Morningstar, whose father was a Cherokee-Lakota Indian.
Morningstar - a food-service worker from Elkton - had come to the club's eighth annual shoot at Weeks' farm with her husband, Laughing Wolf.
She was standing in her tepee as she talked. The tepee leaked.
"This is just to see folks. And to do a little trading," she said, standing back from the trickle of rain water, like they did way back when."
"Way back when" is before 1840 - which was about the last time the Daniel Boone types ever got together east of the Mississippi River for a fur traders' rendezvous.
A rendezvous, club members said, was a get-together where traders could swap hides and stories and match frontier skills - knife and tomahawk throwing, and target shooting with their long-barreled black-powder guns.
It was an old-fashioned rendezvous that members of Appalachia Primitive - which sponsored the event held last Thursday through Sunday - were trying to recreate.
The event, which also includes knife- and tomahawk-throwing matches, is staged to raise money for the club.
It is held in cooperation with Big Lick Longrifles, a group of black-powder buffs who also prize old muzzleloading weapons - the kind that use black gunpowder - but do not always adopt primitive frontier clothing and habits.
"For me, it's just the nostalgia," said Big Lick Longrifles President Gary Lucas, explaining why he prefers to shoot the old-fashioned gun. "And you have to be a little more involved with your firearm. It seems to sort of get in your blood."
And your genes, maybe. Lucas' 15-year-old daughter, Joy - a high school cheerleader back in Floyd - is a two-time state black-powder shooting champ on the junior level.
She was one of 62 competitors attending the rendezvous.
A number of them were day visitors who did not dress in period clothing or camp in the primitive campsite.
Club members, however, take the historical angle seriously.
The Floyd County-based club consists of 16 frontier buffs from Virginia and beyond, including one who lives in Pennsylvania. Members hold monthly shooting matches in addition to the annual rendezvous.
During get-togethers, members dress frontier-style in calico and animal hides, sleep in tepees and canvas tents and forgo most modern comforts, including showers.
In the daytime they shoot lead balls at wooden targets and spin knives and tomahawks at playing cards.
At night - dressed in their animal hides - they talk and sometimes drink around their campfires, much as their forefathers did.
"What we're trying to do," said Seay, the club president, "is sort of a living history."
"Shooting's part of it, camping's part of it. It's a way of relaxing," said Johnston.
Johnston, who drives a bus in real life, said primitive camping and black-powder buffs come from many backgrounds. "We have doctors and lawyers and dentists and accountants who are in this up to their eyeballs," he said.
"You'll find as many reasons for coming here as there are people here," said Marshall Knox, a club member and a CPA from Bedford.
Though members insist that the shooting is not the only attraction at a rendezvous, they add that the black-powder weapon was critical to the mountain man.
The guns - which can top 5 feet in length - are built long to give the bullet time to build up velocity from the slow-building black powder explosion, club members said.
And it was a primary tool and more for the mountain man.
"They could only afford one," Johnston said. "The gun was an extension of themselves. All of them had pet names for their gun. Daniel Boone's gun was called Tick-Licker."
Most of the club members own handmade replicas of the frontier weapon. They are as accurate as any modern gun, they say, though they have to be reloaded after every shot.
Most people come to the rendezvous for the shooting match, Johnston said, but trading was a central part of the old-fashioned version.
Trading pays a part in the club's own gatherings as well. Among those who attend are tradesmen who sell frontier clothing and other 18th century-style goods - some of which are only available at black-powder shoots, Johnston said.
Actually, many of the items are purchased, not swapped. But that's OK, say club members, because the frontiersmen sometimes bought things, too.
Though they might have paid less money.
"It costs a lot of money to get into this," said Morningstar, who wore an Indian-style ribbon dress she had made herself.
Morningstar is not a club member, but she and her husband attend several events that offer primitive-style camping each summer.
"You have to buy your lodge [tepee or tent]. You have to make your buckskins. I've got about six outfits." She said the tepee alone cost $500.
Guns, said club members, start at about $400, but can run up to $3,000 or more.
Morningstar and the other primitive-style campers - including most of the club members - had a separate campsite last weekend, divided from other campers by a creek.
In the primitive camp, all tents and tepees were made of canvas. In addition, coolers, plastic, zippers, rubber-soled shoes, Levi's and other post-frontier inventions were frowned upon.
A primitive campsite is most dramatic at night, club members said.
"After dark is when the primitive side really starts showing through - say, from 6 o'clock on," said Johnston. "That's when you really feel like you've stepped back."
A tepee lighted at night, noted Morningstar, looks like a Chinese lantern. "It's really nice," she said.
Visitors, say club members, are welcome - though there is one rule: "If you come three times, you have to shoot," said Johnston.
Club members said they became interested in frontier life by reading books, watching movies or hearing about famous relatives.
"Of course, all kids grow up with the movies and Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone," said Seay.
Seay grew up hearing about his five times great grandfather Meshack Browning, a hunter in what is now Western Maryland.
Browning, said Seay, is still his favorite frontier legend.
Johnston, on the other hand, spoke of western frontiersman "Liver-Eating" Johnston, who lost his wife and child to a band of Crow Indians.
The frontiersman allegedly got revenge by eating the livers of some 300 Crow Indians before he died, Johnston said. "Liver-Eating" Johnston died of old age, and is buried in Los Angeles.
L.D. Johnston, the bus driver, said the frontiersman may have been a distant relation.
by CNB