American Shooting Journal – August 2019

48 American Shooting Journal // August 2019

BLACK POWDER

shooters might prefer using a heavy

rifle while shooting at the targets

over cross-sticks, but then switch to a

lighter rifle for the offhand shooting

at the “bucket.” My heavy .44-77, the

rifle I call “Hannah,” weighs about

15¼ pounds. To me, that is a heavy

rifle and I did practice my offhand

shooting with it before taking it to

Quigley. But Scott’s rifle is a scoped

.45-90 that weighs over 17 pounds,

which means he had the only rifle I

know of at Quigley that was heavier

than mine.

Whether or not the weight of

our rifles helped us will never be

known. Scott and I were pretty evenly

matched and we both ended with the

same score, just 21 hits out of the 48

possible. We did have a good time

and we shot the match for the fun of it.

ANOTHER HIGHLIGHT I’LL MENTION was

seeing my ol’ friend Kurt Altenburg

take first place in the White Buffalo

class. There are several classes of

shooters but the top 10 that were

mentioned near the beginning of

this story are the top 10 overall with

no distinction to shooting classes.

Examples of the shooting classes

at Quigley include the Men’s class,

which is for men 61 years old and

younger. Men over 62 fall into the

Senior class and men over 72 shoot

Sibley fires offhand at the 350-yard “bucket.” in the White Buffalo class. Kurt was

Scott Sibley’s and author Mike Nesbitt’s heavy Sharps rifles.