BACKTRACKING
The Peoria Blackbird
by Terry Hogan
Fred Kimble was his name. Clay pigeons were his claim to
fame. They were called the
"Peoria Blackbird". The
nameÕs a shame. He was from
Knoxville. Perhaps they should have been called the Knoxville Nuthatch. But I
suppose like a good storyteller, I should begin at the beginning.
"It was a dark and stormy night." Of course this has nothing to do with
the Peoria Blackbird, but both Snoopy and I believe a good story begins that
way*.
Back before there were clay pigeons, there were
pigeons. And in the name of sport,
real pigeons were captured and then released to be blown to bits by
"sportsmen" shooting shotguns at these feathered targets. These events
were called "trapshooting" and had their roots in England in the
early 1800's. They were called
trapshoots because traps were used to hold the live passenger pigeons until it
was time for them to meet a near-certain death. But before "trapshoots", it was still a sport that
was "old hat". It was old hat as the pigeons were placed in holes in
the ground and old hats were placed over the tops of the holes. When it was time for a pigeon to be
released, the old hat was pulled aside, by the pull of a string tied to the
hat. The pigeon, sensing a chance at freedom, flew from his position of
relative safety to death.
Of course there were folks who didn't really
care to see these birds blown into feather dust by the upper crust sportsmen,
but this probably had little to do with the change. As we all know, the
passenger pigeons were all killed. And they were the primary target used in the
United States. This extinction made the future use of passenger pigeons as
objects to be killed, problematic.
In the U.S., a guy named Charles Portlock came
up with the idea of shooting glass balls as an alternative to pigeons. This was soon after the Civil War
(1866), when it was no longer acceptable practice for people in blue coats to
shoot people in gray coats, and the reverse. He got the idea from Japanese glass floats on fishing
nets. He is also supposed to have
been the inventor of a glass ball launching device, of sorts. Clear glass balls
apparently didn't provide a good target or the right degree of satisfaction to
the sportsmen. So they tried
colored balls. They tried balls
with feathers glued to them. They
tried balls with feathers inside them.
They even put gunpowder inside the ball to get a bigger bang out of the
sport. But alas, shooting feathers off of balls, or glass balls off of
feathers, failed to bring satisfaction to these sportsmen.
But the balls were easy to hit. They traveled in
straight lines and at fairly constant speeds. Easy targets made good shooters. Annie Oakley once broke
4,772 out of 5,000 glass balls.
She must have terrorized the men the way she could shoot balls. But it was just too simple. Something had to be done.
The next evolutionary step after the loss of the
passenger pigeons and boring glass balls stuffed with feathers was a clay
pigeon. The clay pigeon was invented by George Ligowsky of Cincinnati. Made of baked clay, the targets were
very hard. It was pure clay, a thoroughbred clay pigeon. But it showed its ancestry and failed
to satisfactorily explode like a real pigeon. It lacked that needed feedback of a puff of feathers
drifting to the earth.
Along came Fred Kimble of Knoxville,
Illinois. Remember Fred? I started the article with him. In or
near 1884, Fred came up with a better idea. He invented the composition clay target. Fred and his
partner Charlie Stock came up with a clay pigeon made of clay, coal-tar, pitch
and apparently some other stuff. (Another source reported that the Peoria
Blackbird was a mixture of "river silt and plaster of Paris".) In
either case, these composite clay pigeons were shiny black. He also developed a
"trap" to throw these new and improved clay pigeons. The Peoria Blackbird was better than
Ligowsky's clay pigeon because when Kimble's was shot, it nicely broke apart
(perhaps resembling exploding feathers).
But Kimble was not done with the shooting
business. He also is attributed as
being the inventor of the mallard duck call. Frankly, I would have bet that the mallard duck came up with
it first, but I've been wrong before.
Now that he invented the mallard duck call, so he could call mallards in
closer, he needed something to make it easier to kill them all. He is attributed as being the inventor
of the choke-bore shotgun in 1868. To put it simply (and probably therefore
wrong) a choke decreases the spread of the shotgun pellets allowing for a
tighter pattern. So if you aim
correctly, the shot will travel farther in a tighter pattern, resulting in more
pellets hitting the duck. Now, as
a temporary digression, I was shot by a 12 gauge shotgun with full choke. I can
attest to its effectiveness. I still carry pellets which upset X-ray
technicians. I also can identify with the ducks. But unlike me, the ducks don't
have to explain what those silver dots are on the X-ray films.
Fred Kimble shot to the top of clay pigeon
business with his splattering pigeon. He became quite a good shot himself,
using the shotgun that he invented. We are sometimes told in old cowboy movies
that he who lives by the gun, dies by the gun. But not Fred.
Fred died in 1941. He was 95 years old.
He must have been one tough old bird.
Footnote:
*For those readers who think I may have been
having a senior moment, I should explain.
Awards are given annually for the worst written line. One such line was the above So some
years ago, Snoopy (Peanuts comic strip) decided to become a writer, and he
started his novel with the above line. I, like Snoopy, always liked the line.
References
Early History of Organized Trap Shooting. www.traphof.org/history.htm
Manufacture of Early Clay Targets. www.internetgunclub.com/articles/showarticle.php?id=39
www.hunting101.com/gunsandbows/shootsports/shootingsports003.htm
tmh
8-5-05