Annual black powder shoot firing off this weekend

The 42nd Annual Memorial Day Weekend Blackpowder Shoot will be Saturday through Monday at Fort Assinniboine, off U.S. Highway 87 south of Havre.

This annual shoot is put on by the Bullhook Bottoms Blackpowder Club. Long-time club member and shoot co-organizer Jim Griggs said the club is expecting about 90 participants from around the Havre area, as well as Glasgow, Helena, Missoula and more areas.

This is the oldest black powder shoot in the state, he added, and he attributes that to the club’s emphasis on making this a family event, with men’s, women’s, junior and sub-junior classes.

“We just want ’em to come out and have fun, and we’ve made it a family event, where the kids shoot and the women shoot, and we involve the whole family,” he said. “Ours is the oldest shoot in the state right now. Fort Benton went by the wayside, Lewistown started up then went by the wayside. These groups just did not promote their youth or their women. They just made it a man’s deal and that only goes so long.”

They have more women shooters than ever, Griggs said, “and they’re very competitive.”

The youth classes, he added, divide the kids into sub-junior up to 11 years old and junior for kids up through high school graduation. The junior class is different from the national guidelines which bump youth into adult classes after 16 years old. The organizers felt it was important to give those teenagers a few more years experience before they have to shoot against the adults

“Most of them, by the time they graduate, they are pushing the big boys,” Griggs said. “That way we’ve kept our youth shooting and active. If they can’t shoot, they don’t want to come out there and hang out with Mom and Dad.”

Along with the 27 formal matches, they hold fun shoots and knife and tomahawk throwing competitions.

The main portion of the competition runs Saturday and Sunday with an awards ceremony at the end of the day Sunday. Monday is reserved for primitive and long-range shooting, this year named in memoriam for Larry Sutter, a long-time member and organizer of this portion of the shoot. Some competitors need to leave Sunday and they can shoot these matches the first two days, but the awards ceremony is Monday around 2 p.m.

Saturday night, the club hosts a dinner for competitors and guests with barbecue chicken and pork and pot luck side dishes. Afterward they hold several matches with fun games including the women’s frying pan throw, with age brackets from peewees to seniors, and a pancake race that is so popular it has to be run in heats. Competitors in the pancake race have to build a fire, start a pancake cooking, flip it, run to another station to throw a tomahawk, run back and flip the pancake again.

Competitors have the option of camping on the fort grounds for the weekend, which is a unique experience, Griggs said. In years past, they had several people, including himself, staying in tepees, but the conveniences of modern campers have proven to be too much of a lure for that anymore.

“Those of us who had tepees got too old to want to sleep on the ground anymore,” he said.

The club also gets permission to take people around the fort grounds and over the years some of the competitors have returned to participate in Living History Day, and take formal tours, the following weekend. A competitor from Malta has made it a yearly trek, Griggs added.

The club has never required Frontier-era dress, so the event often sees shooters in tennis shoes and shorts next someone dressed all in buckskin, but for Living History Day, June 4 this year, club members and any guests get a chance to dress in their period wear and display and discuss their antique and period firearms with people touring the fort. Along with black powder, flintlock and percussion rifles and pistols, they’ll have cartridge firearms, including those of Havre gunsmith Dick Hanson, who Griggs said “probably has one of the finest collections of cartridge rifles from Civil War times up to modern day.”

“We fire the cannon, we put a display of our rifles up, hides and have all of that for the people coming through,” Griggs said.

The range opens at 8 a.m. each morning and shooters can practice until 9:30. Before the matches begin, competitors have a mandatory shooters’ safety and procedure meeting, part of why the competition has a clean safety record, Griggs said. Plus, the competition is run so that all the competitors shoot the same match at the same time. It makes it harder for competitors because they can’t make up a match if they aren’t there at the right time, but it improves safety and running time.

Admission is free for spectators, and entry fees for participants is $2 for registration and $1 per match entered with classes for men, women and youth. The event also includes fun matches and activities.

For more information, people can call 406-265-8239.

Saturday events

25-yard pistol

25-yard off-hand cartridge

25-yard off-hand Skip Owens Memorial

25-yard Jaden Griggs Memorial Sub-Junior X-sticks

50-yard hunter

50-yard women’s X-stick

50-yard Chad Doney Memorial Junior X-sticks

50-yard cartridge

50-yard X-sticks

50-yard off-hand

100-yard X-sticks cartridge

Silhouettes

Numerous fun matches

Knife and hawk match

Primitive matches

Sunday events

50-yard pistol

Fun match squirrel

50-yard X-sticks re-entry

100-yard off-hand cartridge

Fun match, high card

50-yard musket

100-yard X-sticks

100-yard off-hand

fun match, pie plate

Primitive matches

Larry Sutter long range

Monday events

Larry Sutter long range

Primitive matches.