The Unparalleled Archery and Horsemanship of the Comanche Warrior

The question you're getting at is how did the Comanches in particular, because when these Dodge and Catlin and these various people saw Comanches in Texas in 1830s, they just flat couldn't believe what they were looking at. They couldn't believe their abilities with horses, breaking them. Never seen anything like it before. Never seen anything like it before. No saddle either, right? Yeah, they did have a saddle. That was part of the Spanish technology. Very, very, very minimal. You'll see it with museums. But ... Do you see if you can find one of those saddles? Yeah, a Spanish saddle or ... Anyway, but yeah, they had ... But particularly the shooting. There it is right there. Wow. Yeah, very, very minimal. See how ... Right, minimal, yes. And one of the ways they could shoot underneath the neck of the horse was to hang a thong off side of one of the saddles. But ... A thong. Well, a loop, a leather loop, a leather loop that would allow them, because otherwise they would need to be supported as they came down underneath those. And they were fairly small people, right? They were fairly small people. So they would kind of climb off the saddle and hang on the side? Hang on the side, full gallop, full gallop shooting ... Under the neck. ... accurately at arrows that would kill a man 30 yards underneath the neck. Wow. So the question there, I don't know the answer to that, and I don't know that anyone does. What the white men saw just absolutely floored them with abilities with arrows. And among other things, they would ask the Indian boys to ... They'd set up a dime and a tree or a coin, and they'd go, okay, now here, you stand here and close your eyes and aim and hit that. The Comanche boy would miss it by a foot. Look at that picture right there of them doing the interaction. That's incredible. So they're basically using the horse as a shield? Yeah, that's the whole idea. Wow. And if you see them from the other side, I've seen trick riders do this, you can't even see them from the other side of the horse. Wow. And again, this was something that trick riders after, in the Wild West, Shosen Beyond, would do these sorts of things. But ... I'm sorry, so go back to what you were saying. So when they were standing still ... Oh, so with the Comanche boy, they would ask him to shoot that dime. Comanche boy wouldn't hit ... I mean, he was playing by their rules. They wanted him to stand and aim and whatever. And again, if you see the Lars Anderson videos, there was no such thing as closing one eye. There was no such thing almost as standing still and shooting. It was constant movement. It was shooting from movement wherever they were going. So they were really accurate that way. So it was sort of like the member in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid where they say, here Sundance, try to hit that. And Sundance Kid shoots at it and misses it. And then on his way out, he moves. He says, do you mind if I move or something, or I'm better if I move? It's the same deal. It was all about movement, and it was never about anything stationary. Anyway, so yeah, all that ... To answer your ... I have no idea how they got good at that. That's a real shame that they don't have a written history. Yeah. That's one of many, many things. That's a real shame that they don't have a written history. And I would have loved to have seen someone be able to do that. I mean, God, how incredible would it be to see what it looked like to see them? I mean, we just missed the motion picture by 67 years. You've got to think they were doing it for hundreds. Hundreds and hundreds of years. It's almost like just too magical to capture. Sorry, it's gone. Gone right before you'd invent a camera. No. I mean, at least we have some still photos. We do, and I put in pretty big chunks of text into my book of people of the time who saw them and who described it. That's all you can do, is just what they saw and how astounded they were when they were looking at it. So you must have been pretty excited when you saw that Lars Anderson guy. Oh yeah, because I ... Pull that guy up. Pull up a video of that guy so we could watch it, because it is pretty amazing. It's not that I didn't believe what I was reading, but on some level, it's hard to believe they can do what people said they could do. It's interesting, because this guy gets hated on a lot in the archery community. It's very funny, because they say that a lot of what he's doing is tricks and a lot of what he's doing is nonsense. It's not really true that people actually did that. But watch him do it. Yes, I say. Okay, unless that's a trick. It's not a trick. He's clearly doing what he's saying he's doing. There's no ifs, ands, or buts about it. Are they tricks in terms of is it something that maybe wouldn't be as effective, but it's really cool to see? Yeah, for sure. But so what? So what? He's still showing you that you can do things. But he throws a ball and then shoots it. You shoot it with his foot. Look at that. He shoot it in the head with his foot. He's also the rate of discharge, which is one of the things I had trouble believing. When you see him shoot, he's just ... It's one every half second. He throws it, catches it, and he can shoot an arrow right after he catches it. Look at how he throws something in the air and then shoots two shots, two. He throws it in the air, and then by the time it hits the ground, he hits it twice. I mean, it's incredible. And he's really accurate with this thing. He also ... One of his cases is that he is always moving. It's continuous movement. He doesn't close one eye. He doesn't stand still. He is moving all the time. Yeah. He's doing arrows, which is what he said was the trademark of the great ... The Magyars in the great archer cultures. Look at this. Jumps in the air, gets off an arrow before he hits the ground. I mean, amazing. And he's even catching arrows and then shooting them back. Anybody that says that what he's doing is nonsense is a fool. Look, I'm an archer. He's plainly doing it. You are an archer? Yeah, that's why I have an archery range back there. Okay, so you've got it. I'm a bow hunter. Yeah. Well, okay, that's ... This is really impressive stuff. I mean, I don't shoot traditional archery. I shoot a compound bow with a sight and I can line it up to the exact yardage and all that stuff. But I know enough to know that what this guy's doing is pretty special. So he's showing arrows in the quiver versus arrows in his hand, how he can just grab them and pull them. Right. So his case is that we all think that it's a quiver, right? Yeah. He says nobody who was any good ever used a quiver. You can transport them in a quiver, but in battle, you're holding them in a clustered bunch in your hand. Just the way we're seeing these people here. In these ancient depictions, the actual drawings from hundreds of years ago, the way he did it, holding the arrows in his draw hand, and so he can do it very quickly. Really interesting. It is. It's such a good stuff. This is probably ... I mean, because of this one gentleman, it's probably the only way we're really going to know that this was possible. Because no one else is doing anything like this guy. Look at this. He's doing drive-bys on the back of a bike, and he hits ... I mean, back that up again so you could see that, because that is insane. Watch how he's doing this right there. Look at this. I mean, three times he hits in a second, he hits three targets on a bike as he's riding by, which would emulate a horse other than the difference between the elevation change. You know, you go up and down on a horse. The other thing about the stories of the Mongols, that they had developed an ability to shoot as the horse was in the air, because it wouldn't ... like the stomping of the horse's hooves would ... Oh, I see. During that pause. Yes. So as the horse was up, that's when they would release, so it would have the least amount of impact on their accuracy. Pretty incredible stuff. But it's one of the things that made Comanche's Comanche's, a mastery of the horse, plus that would now combine with this ability to shoot from a moving horse. Now, did they have a particular prowess with archery that was known amongst Native Americans? Was it extraordinary amongst other tribes? I don't know that for a fact, but I do know the reaction of people who saw them, who had seen plenty of other Indians. Nobody had ever seen anything like it at the time. Now was there a group of Northern Plains Indians that could do ... I don't know. The reaction was almost universal by people who had seen a lot of Indian tribes, and they'd never seen that before.