My Friend Max | I Love Muzzleloading Podcast

Today I share some stories from my friend Max, who got into muzzleloading in 1962, on the cusp of a cultural wave that would define the next 30 years.

Max was born in the 1941 to a family farm in Indiana. I’ve heard conflicting stories on its cause, but Max was born with a bum leg and had to wear a reinforced boot his entire life, you wouldn’t know it unless you looked really hard.

Max never let anything slow him down, his time as a boy was filled with being outside, working on tractors and cars. Never really taking no for an answer, in school, Max tried out for every sports team, every year. He never could play for the team, but I’m told he was a proud team manager.

In Max’s 20s the Vietnam War broke out and much like he did in high school, Max tried to enlist with every single branch of the American Military. He had grown up with stories of WW2 and spent a lot of time with those who returned after. Max wanted to do his part but was turned away from every branch, not for a lack of trying. If you ask Max about it, he’d give you a sly little smile and say “I made ‘em all tell me no.”

Max will tell you that he never had much money. He worked hard and saved what he could, with a wife, kids, and multiple jobs he made it work. He hunted, fished, and worked on nights and weekends with the local farmers to make ends meet. I’ve seen photographs of him driving a motorcycle 50 miles in the snow to and from work, whether to save money or prove he could do it I’m not sure.

In the late 1960’s Max’s “Can-do” attitude would find a new home, in American History. This is where Max’s story and mine, well my grandfather’s, crossed. Max liked to read and he had come across something that got him onto muzzleloaders, and when Max got into something he was into it full bore and then some. After shaking the trees of Northern Indiana someone put him onto my grandfather, Harold Yazel, as one of the local “Muzzleloading guys”.

Max popped into Grandpa’s shop one day and never stopped. He would later pop into my father’s and then my shop on a weekly basis to shoot the breeze and talk muzzleloading.

In 1962 Max took his first trip to Friendship Indiana, to the home of the National Muzzle Loading Rifle Association. He didn’t know it but Max had arrived as a wave of muzzleloading fever swept the nation and it would change his life forever.

You see, at that time muzzleloading was “the thing”, it had everything you could want. You could camp, you could shoot, you could hang out with your buddies - all the things we do today, but like many, Max thought he was the only one. He bought his first rifle, horn, and a set of clothes and he was off.

Max became what he would call a “Buckskinner”, he relished in the idea of being a mountain man, on his own in the wilderness with his rifle and his pouch and thousands of miles of untouched timber between him and anyone else. Buckskinners were part of the larger “Rendezvous” scene at the time. Rendezvous were loosely based on the annual gatherings of the fur trade in the early 19th century, taking inspiration from movies like “Jerimiah Johnson” and “The Mountain Men”, these groups would often take an American Western bent, regardless of their geographic location.

The real draw for Max was how active one could be as a buck skinner. You can believe me or not, but much of our modern-day “Active” or “Challenge” shooting competitions are based on the Rendezvous of the 70s and 80s. Mountain men were running through the woods, shooting targets on the clock, throwing tomahawks, splitting balls, and starting fires with flint and steel, for lack of a better way to put it, being a mountain man was a place where you could be a “man’s man” and test your metal. Max relished these events and worked his way up the ranks at events all over, bum leg and all.

After meeting like-minded friends Max became one of the founding members of “The Widowmakers”. The group was born in 1974 as muzzleloading and rendezvous continued their rise in popularity. The Widowmakers became nationally known as a group of good shooting, fun-having rabble-rousers who didn’t shy away from telling stories and the legends that came from them.

In conjunction with the Widowmakers and the Rendezvous scene, Max loved to go on what we now call “Historic Treks”. Max and his friends would hike miles into the woods in nothing but their 18th-century gear and survive as long as they could. Through rain, sleet and snow, you could find Max tucked under a rock somewhere waiting out the storm, never complaining, and always cheerful.

At the time, these treks grew in popularity, they became one of “THE” things to do. At the NMLRA, some of the founding members of the buckskinner movement would go on to start a tradition of tracing the historic steps of our forefathers through a trek, ending at the NMLRA Grounds in Southern Indiana. Times were different then, people were friendlier and generally a little more understanding of a bunch of weirdos wanting to hike through the woods like long hunters and mountain men. The group made agreements with all the landowners on the trail and got permission to cross through the old-growth woods from the Ohio River to Friendship, Indiana to follow in history’s footsteps.

One year it was time for Max to do his trek. He loaded up his pack and set off.

**Insert Max story about sunbather

Like some before and many after, Max thrived on the trek enjoying every moment in the woods, according to him it’s about as close as he ever got to living in the past. Max’s name is still scribed into the original wolf skin that now resides at the NMLRA Museum in Friendship, Indiana. You’ll find Max’s name alongside his contemporaries like Allen Coon and Max Vickery.

Max had a few names in the Rendezvous scene, to the Widowmakers, he was “Cripple Creek”, to others he was “Many Rifles” on account of his never-ending hunt for the next gun. This hunt continued well into my time with Max asking me if I had seen or heard of anything close to what he was hunting that month.

Max would explain this hunt for a rifle like this,

“See, I’m left-handed and I shoot left-handed, so even when I started I needed a custom gun, there just weren’t many options out there for a leftie.”

This rationale for needing a custom gun drove Max to own, according to Lizard, “More Flintlock Rifles than all of us combined”. It was always fun to see what Max would be hunting. One morning Max would come into the shop with a box and a new rifle, one he’d been talking about for a year. He’d show it off, talk about the maker, the parts and where the wood came from. He’d shoot it, get it shooting, and maybe take it hunting but then I’d stop hearing a lot about it. Sooner or later, Max would come in with a book or a magazine clipping about something, usually an odd niche flintlock where less than 10 were built by some crazy german gunsmith in the 18th century and Max would be off on another hunt.

Again, as Max would put it, he didn't have much but he loved his rifles. Max would travel to events for years haggling over parts, making trades, and working odd jobs to gather the pieces for his next gun. I’d ask him from time to time, “How many guns are you putting together Max?” and he’d just smile.

Buckskining changed as all things do, culture shifted and focus rolled from one thing to another. Much of the Buckskining culture would stay in the west. Popular culture like the 1992 adaptation of “Last of the Mohicans” and “The Patriot would shift the historical focus of the Eastern United States to the 18th Century. Max and the Widowmakers would do the same, transitioning from buckskin-clad mountain men into wool and linen marksmen of the eastern woods.

Max’s life changed too along the way. Through this journey he would lose an unborn child, his wife to illness, and later a daughter too. Max was never really dealt a good hand in the game of life, but he played with a smile on his face all the same.

I first met Max as a young boy at Friendship. As a kid, Max and many of his friends were legends, larger than life, folk heroes like Boone and Crockett. I fell asleep around many a campfire hearing stories of the Widowmakers and their adventures in days gone by.

Max traveled around a lot but ended back here on a small plot of land with a house, an old barn, and his muzzleloaders. Each fall he’d come to the farm and ask if he could hunt our little woods and each year we’d say “yes of course Max!”. October would roll around and Max would come out and move his treestands around to a new spot he was sure would put him in the path of a big bruiser. Later Max would bring a homemade blind to the woods so he didn’t have to climb. A plywood box sat on an old trailer axle, just large enough to get his flintlock rifle into. With a thermos of coffee and a heater in there, we’d joke that he was running a hotel, not hunting.

Every now and then Max would connect with a deer, but much like his neverending hunt for the next flintlock, Max didn’t often find the deer he was looking for. What Max really enjoyed was the hunt.

When I came back to the area after college, I was fortunate to be able to reconnect with Max, not as my grandfather's friend, or my father’s friend, but as my friend. Max liked to stop by to see what kit I was building, and what kind of bag I was making and he’d bring what he was working on.

As time passed, Max shot a little less and talked a little more. He traded in his buckskin for a new Chunk gun built by Allen Hunter and he spent more time at camp than he did on the range but he enjoyed every minute of it.

Max had been welcomed into the community and did his best to give back. As he was wheeling and dealing for the parts for his next gun, he’d also be buying parts for another, one he’d never shoot. For as long as I’ve known him, Max would buy enough parts every year to have a rifle built to be given away to a child at the NMLRA primitive range. Max would say, “I can’t build it myself, but if you all can find someone to build this, I’ll keep buying parts.”

The hard part about being friends with guys like Max is watching them get old. Max and I kept planning to go hunting together with our flintlocks but he up and got too sick to hunt 4 years in a row. I’d stop by to see him now and then to give him an update on the bucks of the woods, how the turkey population was going, and of course an update on my last range day. We got him an electric scooter so he could get around at events. You’d think he was a racecar driver to see him scooting around in that thing. He hung a pack basket on the front and had it all set up to carry his rifle and horn.

Later started the dreadful habit of dropping things off like old guys do, acting like they keep forgetting to take things back. A bum pacemaker nearly killed him one year but he bounced back like he always did and we made plans to go hunting that fall, just as we always did.

Max passed away in June of 2022.

As I walked into his church that morning I was greeted by hundreds of lives he touched just as he touched mine. Max wasn’t just a kind soul in muzzleloading, he was a kind soul everywhere and the room glowed with his warmth. The funny thing is, everyone I talked to said the same thing, “He’d be real upset to be causing a fuss during Friendship”.

I made my way to the pew and sat in a row of buck skinners, the legends left from my boyhood stories. Gary, Chuck, Allen, and Lizard all shared stories about Max that morning. Those fit to be printed have been with you here today, others are better told around a campfire.

Max’s tradition of buying parts for a kid’s rifle continues to this day with an annual collaboration at the NMLRA primitive range to make sure a child goes home with a muzzleloader they can cherish forever.

I’m taking Max’s pouch and horn hunting this year, using the last rifle he watched me build in the shop.