For a Stone Age hunter, a spear was the best choice for
bringing home the bacon. Until, that is, about 10,000 years ago, when ancient
ingenuity produced the bow and arrow. Modifications and improvements refined
the technology over the millennia, but the bow and arrow encountered no
superior until the invention of firearms in the 1400’s.
As societies adopted
the gun, bow use declined. Still, some dedicated archers maintained the
tradition. The Company of Finsbury Archers, for instance, practiced the longbow
outside London’s North Wall in the 1540s. Other archery societies sprang up in
late seventeenth century England as a nostalgic retelling of the nation’s
history. The Scottish Kilwinning Archers, originally established in 1483 and
reorganized in 1688, still compete by shooting down a wooden bird from the top
of local Kilwinning Abbey tower. Over time, these clubs embellished their activities
with great pomp and pageantry, requiring outlandish costumes, flags, and music.
As might be expected, expensive shows, as became the fashion, restricted
membership to the elite.
By the 1840s, the British had turned archery into a modern
sport with rules, targets and competitions. In the United States, interest in
archery grew after Ishi, a Yahi native, surfaced in northern California. Ishi’s
doctor, Saxton Pope, spent three years documenting Ishi’s skills, including his
use of the bow. ‘Yahi Archery’ appeared in 1918.
In the Introduction to his volume, Pope gives a short
history of the bow, noting that it “was a vigorous competitor with the
flintlock in warfare,” and that Benjamin Franklin had “seriously considered the
possibility of arming the American troops with the longbow, as a cheaper and
more effective weapon than the flintlock musket.”
The growth of archery as a sport has been steady, but as champion
archer Roger Brown of Archery Only observes, “awareness of archery has recently
grown tremendously.” He notes that in the last few years, movies such as the
‘Hunger Games’ series and the Marvel ‘Avengers’ movies featuring the
bow-wielding Hawkeye, as well as 2017’s The Great Wall have all raised the
profile of archery. Redwood Bowmen club president Neal Rubin remarked, “the day
after the Hunger Games movie opened, we were swamped with twelve-year old girls
wanting to learn archery.”
Local clubs have had a presence in the East Bay for decades
and include the Diablo Bowmen (established 1954), Redwood Bowmen (1939), and the
Briones Archers (1969). The major statewide organization for California is the
California Bow Hunters and State Archery Association (CBH/SAA). They all host a
variety of competitions, club shoots and fundraisers for various causes.
Club shoots are part sporting event and part social event. Archers
trek from station to station golf-course style and take turns shooting a
variety of targets. The Briones Archers, for instance, meet the second Sunday
of every month, and participants typically shoot 28 targets, with a lunch
halfway through. The Redwood Bowmen have an annual event called the Western
Roundup. According to lore, a circus train once derailed in Oakland. Scared and
dangerous animals stalked the neighborhoods; the circus and law enforcement
needed experienced marksmen and stalkers to “round up” the animals. Among those
called were the Redwood Bowmen. That event and the club’s contribution to
public safety is remembered each year, as the annual June shoot was renamed the
“Western Roundup.”
Even though modern engineering and material science have
brought about highly precise, lightweight, and durable bows and arrows, the
skill of the bowyer (bow maker) is still alive.
Bill Helsel, for example, is an East Bay bowyer with dozens
of finely made bows to his credit. His backyard workshop houses a rack full of aging
staves (blanks for bow-making), some of which are ten years old or more. Aged
wood has settled and is less prone to changing its characteristics when made
into a bow.
Using simple, but specialized hand tools, Helsel fashions bows
in a traditional style. In contrast to bows made from laminated woods, Helsel’s
are a single piece, from about four to nearly six feet in length, lightweight
and stronger than their thin profiles would suggest. His favorite is a bow of
Oregon yew with an astonishing forty-five pounds of pull at twenty-seven
inches. Many of his bows retain the remains of knots in the wood. They provide
a rustic touch, reminding the user of the bow’s organic origins, but more
importantly, retaining these structures preserves the integrity of the wood and
keeps the surface from delaminating under the intense stresses.
There are different philosophies about the bow for
beginners. The compound bow has cams at the tips of the bow that multiply the
archer’s force and lessen the apparent pull force when the bow is fully drawn.
As a result, the fully extended bow is easy to hold drawn while targeting, a
plus for new archers. Nico Gallegos, of Ohlone Archery, on the other hand,
starts all his archers on a more traditional recurve bow with interchangeable
limbs that can be changed as the archer’s strength and experience increase.
A minimum beginning kit consists of a bow, a half-dozen
target arrows, a quiver (if walking courses), and a case to store it all. There
are of course many accessories and customizing options. Gallegos offers good
recurve bows starting “about $130.” A compound bow can start below $200, with
kids’ models (8 years and up) starting around $100. Ranges charge hourly fees
and offer prepaid options, sometimes at a discount. Contact individual clubs
for membership rules, fees, and course use.
There are a great number of archery resources in the East
Bay. Get out, meet the archers, and discover for yourself the fun and
satisfaction of archery.
Archery Only
(510) 795-0460
archeryonly.com
Ohlone Archery
nico@ohlonearchery.com
www.ohlonearchery.com
Briones Archers
info@BrionesArchery.org
www.brionesarchery.org
Diablo Bowmen
diablobowmenoutreach@gmail.com
diablo-bowmen.org
Redwood Archers
redwoodbowmen@gmail.com
www.redwoodbowmen.org
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