Let us think about it. The bow has been around for several thousand years. Composed of a simple piece of wood, sinew for string and tied at each end when the bow was bent. When was it invented? Nobody knows for sure but estimates range from ten thousand to twenty thousand years ago. The Bible speaks of them in several places. Even of shooting animals for meat with them. Also used in warfare the Israelites used the weapon to fight against their enemies. These simple but effective bows protected them, fed them and kept their animals from predators. No wheels, no cables and no over draws. For these thousands of years this simple stick and string was used all over the world.

Various cultures used variations of this weapon. The Turks used short recurves for horse fighting. Highly regarded as short enough to shoot from horses and take out the enemy by use of a simple thumb ring that latched on to the thumb and you just turned the thumb.

These nomadic tribes were the scourge of the land and men like Genghis Kahn wiped out the land for hundreds of miles. The sword and the spear were also in use but the principle weapon was the bow. It was safer to shoot from a distance then to fight hand-to-hand combat. Bows were used like this right through the middle ages into the 13-17th centuries. These bows could pierce armor and wipe out hundreds of men at a time. The Romans used them; the French, Germans, Chinese and English were famous for their prowess with the bow and arrow. Today they are finding Egyptians and Chinese writings on walls of caves and monuments of humans shooting Wooly mammoths and other animals with these weapons.

Arrows made of straight, and not so straight, wood with goose or duck or any feathers they could find were tied to these shafts. Some had no points at all, just sharpened with a point at the tip.  Others had flint or rocks hammered into a not so sharp wedge tied to a split wood end. From the cave man to the American Indian, to the African pygmies, they used these crude arrows ... and some cultures still do.  These weapons were for mass destruction wiping out hundreds of the enemies with a single arsenal of several hundred arrows flying all at once. You have seen it in the movies, and that is exactly how it worked.

The English in the 14th century made it mandatory that all males over the age of fourteen practice archery on Sunday afternoons. It was their main defense against armed conquering armed forces. In one French-English battle the waxed bowstring made the difference between winning and losing in a rainstorm.  

The Thompson's in the 1800s and Saxon Pope and Art Young were inspirations to a young man names FRED BEAR. Archery began to catch on and Ben Pearson along with Fred and others showed what a bow with a straight cedar shaft could do. They were impressive. What they passed on to archers like Stacey Grocup, G. Fred Asbell, Howard Hill and Byron Furgeson was something that even compound shooters cannot match. Not because of their lack of skill but because of their STYLE of shooting.

Compounds are here to stay and I am glad of it. But let us not forget how they evolved.  When you release an arrow with a 330+ feet per second compound or a longbow or recurve doing 120 feet per second you are part of a heritage that goes back over ten thousand years. It is not the bow or even the arrow. It is the archer.

So as you draw back the bow, whatever kind it is, you are moving back the clock and becoming part of the history of the world. Historians claim that the invention of the bow is only second to the invention of fire. 

Become that tradition. Become that feeling.  Become that history and ... do not keep it ... pass it on to others ... so the history of archery will continue another ten thousand years...IT IS UP TO YOU.

That's the way I see it in my "View From Behind The String".