Archery Museum Traces History Of Bow Hunting

Many people associate bows and arrows with Olympic target shooting, Native Americans or Robin Hood movies, with all their virtuous Saxons and nasty Normans, but to more than a million people in this country, bows and arrows mean hunting.

You won't find any Normans in Normandy Park, but the south Seattle suburb is home to the St. Charles Archery Museum, the nation's largest collection of bows, arrows and bow-hunted animal trophies.

Located in a wing of the Northwest Archery Co., owned and operated by the St. Charles family since 1949, the museum traces the history of bow hunting in America from prehistoric times to the modern.

The museum opened in 1983 when the family, the official measurers of the Pope & Young Club (founded by Glenn St. Charles) - which keeps official U.S. records of all animals killed with bows and arrows - decided to share its collection with the public.

Most of the collection is in a special wing built to resemble a hunting lodge, with a stone fireplace, wood paneling and flooring, and exposed beams in the high ceiling. The most dramatic displays are at the far wall, where various game animals, all of them taken by bow hunters, are stuffed and mounted. The daunting display is one of only two such in the nation, said owner Joe St. Charles, who writes a history column for Bow Hunter Magazine.

An Alaskan brown bear stands six feet high, with fangs gaping and slashing claws extended. A grizzly is frozen in midpace beside a Quebec caribou with massive antlers. Plumaged ptarmigans and turkeys are displayed in their finery, along with a black bear, bighorn sheep, a beaver and a lynx, cougars, antelope, mountain goats, moose and elk - many with 5-foot racks. The trophies fill the entire height of the 25-foot end wall, and march half way around the rest of the room.

In an outside anteroom a bobcat and wolverine are displayed near the pelt of the first polar bear killed with a bow by non-Native Americans.

St. Charles said bears such as those displayed typically are killed from only 30 feet away with an arrow to the heart or lung. Since charging bears can cover such a short distance quickly, bow hunters usually are accompanied by rifle back-up in the event of misses.

The 20,000 licensed bow hunters in Washington state hunt deer, mountain goats, elk and bighorn sheep through various seasons. St. Charles showed how hunting arrows are distinguished from pointed target arrows by their larger fletching and blades.

Cases of prehistoric artifacts, many from Eskimo and Northwest Indian wood, slate and bone cultures, contain implements, figurines and weapons such as detachable sea otter arrows with barbed heads. The attractive display includes Native-American knives and arrowheads, as well as chippers, scrapers, awls, fish hooks and obsidian points, some of them dating back 50,000 years, St. Charles said.

The other half of the lodge room contains the museum's collection of 1,100 hunting arrowheads, 800 arrows and 250 wooden bows. The latter includes examples from the late 1800s of the English-style (straight) longbows that were victorious at the French battles of Agincourt and Crecy. Domestic American bows, St. Charles explained, weren't developed until the 1920s, except for on the East Coast, which had been making them since the 1870s.

Some arrows are American antiques from the mid-1800s, while others are curiosities such as the "skeeterhead" of the late 1950s, consisting of a small tube holding a dozen tiny darts for buckshot-dispersal when shooting flocks of birds.

The strange trident head is used to hunt fish or large frogs, with its four 3-inch-long prongs. Such arrowheads commonly are used to hunt carp on Moses Lake in spring, St. Charles said.

The museum also has 19th century Japanese samurai arrows, displayed with a gold-painted elephant-hide quiver and an 8-foot Japanese bow.Photos show how the bow is used by a Japanese archer in full ceremonial regalia.

Small 3-foot flight bows, which only require 80 pounds of pressure for standing record-setting flights, are shown near larger graphite bows requiring up to 900 pounds of pressure.

St. Charles explains how other, 150-pound bows are used by archers lying on their backs and holding the bow with their feet to set freestyle distance records of more than a mile.

Perhaps the most unique piece in the museum is an 1880 center-shot bow, which shoots arrows through a hole in its middle. (They didn't become widespread until the late 1970s.)Drawings of official patent specifications show how the bow's mechanical release operates.

The museum attracts visitors from all across the United States, St. Charles said, many to use the museum's small but complete reference library, which includes a 1792 archery treatise and archery magazines dating back to the 1920s.

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