The members of my AMM party and myself have always liked to enter survival type matches. some of these matches were three day, 24 hour per day matches. Meaning you where not "safe" and able to relax even during the night. Not only were your shooting skills tested, but also your knowledge of all the skills needed to survive on the 18th and 19th century frontier. You have to be alert at all times and you definately need to know your skills and knowledge of nature.
We also sponsored a couple of survival matches ourselves. The members of my party would start having monthly planning meetings 6 months before the actual date of the match. Three months before the match we would start having meetings every two weeks and the last 6 weeks to a month before the match we would meet every week. Setting up the actual match usually took us two full weekends before the match. To tell you the truth, planning and running a survival match was actually more fun then participating in one.
Prizes always included hand made items by members of the party. We would have scrimshawed horns and priming horns, hand forged knives and hawks, and handmade leather shooting bags among other prizes. We never charged an entry fee.
Our matches, like everyone we went to, started out with a scenario that every participant was given when he arrived. Ours were always a "call to arms" to all militia to fight the advancing Indians, the French, or the British.
At our last match the participants were held at a specified and each participant was allowed to advance to receive his scenario and start the match. The first thing the scenerio said was that just before arriving on the scene the participant had a canoe turn over in rushing water and they lost part of their gear. We had previously weighed everyone of our members with and without their gear and arrived at an average of 29 pounds of gear including their guns. As we brought each participant up to get started we weighed them with their gear and without their gear and told them they had lost everything but 29 pounds of gear. We then gave them the choice of dumping whatever gear they wanted to. This is where the mind game starts. One guy gave up his blankets. Another gave up all his food. One guy had to lose 67 pounds of gear to get down to 29 pounds of gear. Boy did he give up a lot of stuff. I had never met this guy before and he was pretty ticked off at me when I told him he had to lose 67 pounds. after they shed enough each one was told he could only take five rounds of ammo, either balls or shot, their choice. We put the extra rounds they gave up into brain tanned drawstring bags with a hand engraved brass token tied to the string. When the match was all over they got to keep the brain tanned bags and tokens. We then started each participant off on a walk that had several Indian targets hidden in the woods and several 12 gauge blank cannons that "shot back" at the participants if they passed the target without seeing or shooting at it. Every time through the whole match we gave them two balls or loads of shot if they hit the target and none if they missed the target. When some of them got down to having no balls or shot they could get a ball by correctly answering a question about 18th century trivia. When all the participants got through the walk in the woods we told them to take their powder horns and lay a 12 foot line of powder on the ground and light it off to see whose line of powder burnt the fastest. Those who elected, in the beginning, to carry a large full horn or an extra powder horn still had plenty of powder left for the next two days and others didn't. However, not being total a$$holes we would let them trade round balls for powder if thats what they wanted. We camped them in a near swamp the first night and the guys who gave up blankets had a bad night with all the mosquitoes. We had them make a ball and shoot it at a target. Many of them were not carrying a bag mold, too bad. One enterprising guy poked his finger into the ground for a mold and melted some lead shot in his small skillet. Others had a mold that didn't match the caliber of their gun and pounded the oversize ball down into an elongated slug that they could shoot.
We had collected 15 different kinds of skat and laid them out for the participants to identify. We had them make cordage from local materials, but many didn't know how. We had them load and shoot prone over the log while under a lattice work of cups of water that was only 2.5 feet about them. Some of them got a little wet and others couldn't figure how to get powder down their barrels while laying down. We built a fort like structure with shooting ports and had 7-8 Indian targets that were operated by strings and pulleys. The targets appeared and disappeared every three seconds. They had two minutes to locate and shoot as many targets as possible, if they had any balls to shoot. We had teams of three start a fire with gathered materials and flint and steel. The minute they started to get a flame we pulled out three of those pump up sprayers and tried to put their flame out. You never know when it is going to rain. We had them do tree and plant identification. We had them make and set snares and deadfalls and a host of other tests of skills.
Since we only had one thing left to do on Sunday we decided we would feed everybody and cooked up bacon and eggs and lots of biscuits and gravy for everyone.
The final event on Sunday which was a fire fight with the Indians was the test the participants like best of all. Lots of hollering and yelling and general excitement. We had placed 40 flat stakes out in a meadow like bushy area that they could see from a 30 foot long firing line. They were allowed to move up or down the firing line to get better shots at some of the tiles. Each stake had a number on it that was covered by a 6 inch square clay tile. There were two stakes with number 1 on them and two stakes with number 2 on them and so forth. Each participant was given back his bag of balls and were assigned a randomly drawn number. As the tiles were shot the numbers on the stakes were revealed. If your assigned number was 1 and a tile was broken to reveal the number 1 that man was considered wounded. If both number 1's were revealed that guy was dead and had to leave the firing line. The guys really liked this type of competition.
We had twenty, mostly hand made, prizes laid out on a blanket for the winners to choose from. Sadly, only 6 men had showed up for the match so we decided to go ahead and give out all twenty prizes to the six guys who showed up.
This match, like all survival matches, took a lot of planning and setup. With only 6 men showing up we decided to forego sponsoring any more survival matches. The two top participants at this match were from the same club up in Michigan. The very next year they sponsored a three day survival match and myself and a couple of my guys went up to participate. Their survival was a whole lot different than ours had been and was a lot of fun. They gave out beads for doing everything and at the end the guy with the most beads won. The participants were sitting in line on a path and they were going down the line and counting everyones beads. I heard things like "Oh, John won, he has 19 beads" and someone else "no, George has at least 20 beads". I was the last one in line and when they counted my beads I had 29. Made me feel real good that an old man could out shoot and out think all those younger guys. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that I am near blind without my glasses and the first day of the event I capsized a canoe and lost my glasses. I guess I should have said a "blind" old man out shoot and out thunk all the younger guys.
Maybe this will give some of you guys who set up woods walks some ideas. Almost any of the individual events we had in that three days could be adapted to a woods walk.
Randy Hedden
www.harddogrifles.com
