The short, bearded man in fringed buckskins eased into the split-log seat of the shooting bench, nestled into the buttstock of the muzzleloader and squinted down the barrel.

"You want me t'catch you?" I offered.

"Uhh, naaww," he shrugged into a slightly different position. "Jest let me fall."

The muzzle blast was shattering when he touched off the 33-pound, three-gauge musket, sending a six-ounce lead ball thundering into the butt of a log down on the beach. Recoil rocked Bill back and lifted the barrel well clear of the bench. When the smoke cleared, he peered at the target and asked, "You wanna shoot it?"

"I don't think so," I said. "You wanna shoot it again?"

"Nope."

It's been my good fortune to poke around much of this country and quite a few others around the world, shooting and hunting, fishing and photographing, during which I've encountered a multitude of interesting individuals. Characters. I've shot with my buddy rednecks, guides and outfitters, with royalty, film stars, music and television greats, and sports superstars. But, looking back, one man most frequently comes to mind, and I'd like to share with you my memories of him, of an amazing man, of a guy I doubt that you or any of your buddies have ever even heard of: Sylvan Hart.

When our jet boat crunched onto the gravel of Fivemile Bar, after our long run up Idaho's Salmon River, the man pushed open his gate and started down the hill to greet us. It was my first time to see this unusual frontiersman, but there was no mistaking that this was Buckskin Bill. He wasn't 10 feet tall, as might have been expected from the tales I'd heard. But the little man with the springy step, long gray beard and a ridged helmet hat made of cowhide could be none other than the legend called the "last of the mountain men."

Buckskin was born Sylvan Ambrose Hart in 1906, in Indian territory that later became Oklahoma; he moved to the Idaho wilderness area 45 years before my visit with him in 1978. He moved there as a good place to survive the Depression and made it his home. It was wilderness when he arrived; it was still wilderness, 50 miles from the nearest paved road, when I visited.

Buckskin Bill, born Sylvan Hart, came to the Snake River during the depression and set about a life of self-sufficiency.

Getting there was, and still is, simple, but not easy: on horseback or on foot; or upstream by jet boat or downstream by raft on the "river of no return." Fivemile Bar is 275 miles downstream from the headwaters of the Salmon River and 122 miles upstream from the confluence of the Salmon and the Snake rivers. Remote. Wild. Fascinating.

In the years since my visit, I've savored the memories and pondered the strengths that drove and allowed this unusual man to live the life he lived. He wasn't really a recluse or a hermit (perish the thought), he simply liked living there in the wild.

"If a man can look out his window and see another house," Buckskin told one visitor, "he's a poor man."

He lived alone, but he wasn't lonely.

Buckskin went to the Salmon River during the Depression--because of it. "My reaction to the Depression," he wrote, "was to find a place with the natural resources to defeat it. I could have found no better place than the Salmon River. I spent about $50 a year then for what little I needed to buy. I always had a garden, it was easy t'get fruit, and I made moccasins and clothing out of animal skins."

He took me to the spot where he lived that first year in his wilderness. It was a shallow, narrow draw on a bench of the mountainside, over which he had laid logs, long gone now. Ceiling height: about four feet. His quarters had improved immensely by the time of my visit, consisting of three separate "rooms" for assorted purposes, primarily living, cooking and sleeping, most of them with a pink, stucco motif. Plus, there stands the "castle" he constructed high on the mountainside, complete with portholes, which he built "just because I thought I should."

He made virtually everything he had: lodging, tools, cooking utensils, knives, clothes, footwear--and guns. Self-reliance was the name of Buckskin's game. He never had electricity, his running water was the roaring Salmon River just feet away, and a telephone was something from another world.

Not only was he a superb craftsman, he was an artist as well. He embellished many of the rifle stocks, belt buckles, knives and kitchen utensils with ornamental engraving and inlays. He searched abandoned mines for lead, steel, silver and copper remnants, which he used to fashion both the tools he used and the items he crafted with them.

Bill's only pistol--a .22 short. He made everything but the barrel, and the stockwork showcases his artistic flair.

THE GUNS OF BUCKSKIN
Decades before I met him, Buckskin built one of most remarkable flintlock rifles I've ever seen, one of several such rifles in his rack when I was there. For it he drilled out a piece of jackhammer steel for the barrel and hand cut the rifling. He built the lock and double-set trigger, crafted a stock from a piece of mountain mahogany and embellished it with inlays of mountain sheep--a ram resting his head on the ground at a waterhole, and eagles attacking a lamb.

This one was the first of his guns that this mountain man shot for me. With no tuning up or sighting in, he put two .45-caliber balls an inch apart, less than two inches from the bull's-eye, into the butt of a log 60 yards away. With open sights. It was his primary gun for deer and bear.

I asked about the next rifle on the rack.

"That's a .64-caliber percussion, for elk. The stock is from an old .45-70 I found leaning against some corral. It's got a standard 30-inch barrel, with 14 rifling. The flintlock has a 6 rifling, according to the Green Hill formula, which was formulated about 1830 for a bullet of one diameter and length, which I've found to be an honest and scientific formula."

He commented that the next rifle down was a bit embarrassing to shoot because it just put them all in the same hole at 40 yards. It was a .54-caliber Hawken. The heavy barrel had been cut to 26 inches by an Indian, according to Bill, for ease of use on horseback, then the rifle had been used as a crowbar in some mine. Bill salvaged it from a bonfire, straightened it and recut the rifling.

Buckskin built his 3-gauge musket just because he "thought it should be done." He had firm notions as to what was right and proper, and if it should be done, he usually decided he was the man who should do it. Since I had no conception of what manner of projectile a six-ounce lead ball was, I broke that down to grains: 2,625 of them. He loaded that over 145 grains of black powder.

"It would be a bit illegal for hunting waterfowl in this country," he mused. "It'll handle 24 round balls of .45 caliber, and will put three of those in a man-size target at a hundred yards. One of these guns sure would have saved a lot of wagon trains."

I asked Buckskin why he didn't just get a modern rifle to use instead of his muzzleloaders, and he paused a bit before answering. "Well, if you can make a gun, make every part that goes into it, you don't worry about it breaking," he said.

Makes sense. He depended on those guns for his livelihood, and he confided to me what is a given for the very top shooters today: the huge role played by the shooter's mind in his performance. "We just make shots that can't be made," he fixed me with those piercing eyes, "like Ed McGivern did. That elk I killed on the last day of the season one year, which I couldn't do under those conditions--but which I did because I wanted that elk, I needed the meat. The gun just fires itself, and I've got a dead elk."

On the author's visit with the legendary Buckskin Bill, the mountain man demonstrated the awesome power of a 3-gauge muzzleloader that fired a six-ounce ball.

It was the last of our four-day visit with this remarkable man, and I finally was at ease to ask, "Buckskin, just how tall are you?" "Well," he finally answered after a quick glance, eyes twinkling, "I'm really five feet five inches but I say I'm five feet six."

THE REST OF THE STORY
The homesteader of Fivemile Bar became a popular attraction for the many rafters who floated down that part of the Salmon River each summer, and in his later years Buckskin allowed visits, and even held court for them. One group, while we were there, was from Germany. They were shocked when Bill conversed with them in their language. Sylvan Hart was an engineering graduate of the University of Oklahoma. He studied Greek, Latin, French, German, Russian, Portuguese, Spanish, Norwegian and Swahili. In his living quarters he had hundreds, perhaps thousands of books of all descriptions, and had read and studied them all. During World War II he left his retreat and did his part. He worked as a toolmaker for Boeing in Wichita, worked on the Norden bomb sight in Texas and Colorado, and served with the Air Corps in the Aleutians. When the war was over, he returned to his wilderness.

Before we parted company, Buckskin revealed his latest project, another flintlock rifle.

"This lock's gonna look like a dragon snapping at his own tail to produce the fire. That's something nobody has ever done before, and I thought somebody should do that," he said. "I'll have the lock finished about the time freeze-up comes this winter. Why don't you come back then and walk on in. You can take a look at my dragon, and we'll spend some time watching the deer and elk, sheep 'n' bears."

EPILOUGE
It was October of 1980 before I returned to Fivemile Bar. Sylvan Ambrose Hart, alias Buckskin Bill, died in April of that year and was buried there on his homestead. The Last of the Mountain Men, a book by Harold Peterson, is about the life of Sylvan Hart. It's available for $11.95 from Backeddy Books, P.O. Box 301, Cambridge, ID 83610; 208/345-7610.