A short history of bowhunting

The oldest traces

The oldest traces of the bow discussed below are not bows but points. At Sibudu Cave in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, Lombard and Phillipson studied the impact damage and residues on stone points about 64,000 years old. They word their conclusion carefully: the find “suggests” that bow and stone-tipped arrow were in use there.

In 2018, Backwell and colleagues published an analysis of a bone point from the same site, about 61,700 years old. The impact and burn marks show, in their reading, that the point was first used on a hunting arrow and only afterwards ended up in a hearth.

For Europe, the oldest published case is Grotte Mandrin in France. In 2023, Metz, Lewis and Slimak described points about 54,000 years old. The abstract speaks only of mechanically propelled projectiles. In the body of the paper, the authors say the evidence for the bow is solid only for the smallest points; the larger ones could also have been thrown with a spear-thrower.

Actual wooden bows have survived in bogs. The National Museum of Denmark describes the remains of five elm bows found at Holmegård Mose, on Zealand, dated to around 7000 BC and counted among the oldest and best-preserved bows in Europe. Yew did not yet grow in Denmark at the time.

The man found in the Alpine ice in 1991, Ötzi, lived more than 5,300 years ago. The South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology, where he is kept, describes the bow he carried: a yew stave 1.82 m long, almost finished and without a string. His quiver held 12 arrow shafts and two finished arrows.

The bow in the hunting treatises

In Gaston Phébus’s Book of the Hunt, the bow and the crossbow are among the hunter’s weapons. The bow, Phébus writes, must be of yew or box and measure twenty fists between the two holes where the string is fastened.

When and how the firearm took the bow’s place in European hunting we did not find stated in a source we can cite. The section on Europe below holds only the documented cases.

The bow becomes a sport: nineteenth-century America

Pennsylvania Heritage magazine describes the United Bowmen of Philadelphia, formally organised on 3 September 1828, as the oldest society of archers in the United States. Elmer, in American Archery (1917), calls it the first archery club in America of which there is any record. Its last contest was held in 1858.

The name tied to the bow’s revival is that of the brothers Will and Maurice Thompson. The usual story says that after the Civil War, as former Confederate soldiers, they were not allowed to carry firearms and made bows to hunt in Florida. That is how Elmer tells it in 1917, and Saxton Pope in 1923. Maurice Thompson tells it differently in his own book, The Witchery of Archery (New York, 1878): he was still in his teens when a man named Thomas Williams taught him the longbow in North Georgia, and the winter he spent with the bow in Florida was that of 1867–1868. Pope writes that both brothers fought in the Confederate army and that Maurice was wounded; Maurice’s book does not mention it.

Readers first met them in literary magazines, not the sporting press. The note at the end of the book names “Hunting with the Long-bow” in Harper’s (July 1877), “Bow-shooting” in Scribner’s Monthly (July 1877), and some Florida sketches published two or three years earlier in Appletons’ Journal.

On 23 January 1879, at Crawfordsville, Indiana, in the mayor’s office, clubs from eight cities founded the National Archery Association, with Maurice Thompson as president, according to American Archery. The first Grand National Tournament was held in Chicago in August of the same year, with 89 archers. The association was a private body, not a government one.

Ishi and Saxton Pope

On 29 August 1911, a Yahi man was cornered by dogs outside the town of Oroville, California. The Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology names him Ishi and records that he spent the last four and a half years of his life at the University of California museum in San Francisco. He died in March 1916. In Yahi Archery (1918), Pope calls him the tribe’s last survivor.

Saxton Pope was a physician and came to know Ishi in the hospital, as his doctor. In Yahi Archery he also writes that he and Dr J. V. Cooke took up archery in 1912 “under Ishi’s guidance”. In Hunting with the Bow and Arrow, Pope says Ishi taught him to make bows and arrows, to shoot them, and to hunt “Indian fashion”. Ishi’s bow was of mountain juniper, backed with deer sinew glued with salmon-skin glue; his arrowheads were flaked from obsidian.

Pope also writes that within a few months he and Cooke were outshooting Ishi at targets, and that Ishi himself had soon moved to a jackknife and a file, going back to stone tools only when asked for a demonstration.

Pope and Young

Pope hunted with Arthur Young, and at first with Will Compton too. Hunting with the Bow and Arrow describes deer, black bears, a mountain lion in Tuolumne County, and grizzlies in Yellowstone in 1920, taken for the California Academy of Sciences. In Alaska, Young and Jack Robertson were paid to film. In 1925, Pope, Young and Stewart Edward White were on their way to Africa; the club’s history describes a five-month trip, with lion, gazelle, wildebeest and eland.

The book first appeared in 1923 in San Francisco, from the James H. Barry Co., and in 1925 from G. P. Putnam’s Sons in New York and London, according to the Library of Congress catalogue. The Project Gutenberg text is the 1925 edition, with the chapter on Alaska.

The two names stayed on a club. According to its own history, a programme recording big game taken with the bow began in 1957–1958 within the National Field Archery Association, led by Glenn St. Charles; on 27 January 1961 the group became a club and took the names of two of the four men it counts as its founders, Saxton Pope and Art Young. The Pope and Young Club describes itself as the keeper of the records for North American big game taken with a bow and as a non-profit conservation organisation.

Fred Bear

According to Outdoor Life (1982), Fred Bear’s interest in the bow began with a shooting demonstration by Art Young at a Rotary Club in Detroit. In 1933, Bear and a partner opened a shop in a large garage with $1,200 in tools and cash. The first big game he took with a bow was a deer in northern Michigan in 1935; in 1947 the company moved to Grayling, Michigan. He made promotional films and appeared on television, among others on “The American Sportsman”.

The materials changed too. Bear’s patent, filed in 1946 and granted in 1952, describes a layer of flexible glass fibre on the belly of a wooden bow.

Seasons and money

Wisconsin’s own chronology records, under 1934, the “first bow deer season”. The Pope and Young Club adds, in the club’s history, that Wisconsin had allowed the bow since 1930 and that in 1934 an area reserved for the bow was opened there. No official source we read says it was the first season of its kind in the United States.

Public Law 92-558, of 25 October 1972, placed an 11 percent tax on bows with a draw weight of 10 pounds or more, on arrows of 18 inches or more, and on parts, accessories and quivers, for sales from 1 July 1974. The money goes into the wildlife restoration fund set up by the Pittman-Robertson Act of 1937.

The compound bow

Holless W. Allen filed on 23 June 1966 for an “archery bow with draw force multiplying attachments”. US patent 3,486,495 was granted to him on 30 December 1969. 1966 is the year of the application, not of the patent.

Europe: prohibitions and returns

For Europe, the documents we read tell mostly a legal history, different in each country. The details are on the country pages; this is only their thread through time.

Of the cases we read, the best documented is France. An article in the journal Faune sauvage (2009) shows that the rapporteur of the 1844 hunting law, Franck Carré, held that the bow, being silent, favoured poaching, and that before the Chamber of Peers on 16 May 1843 he said hunting is done only with the gun or with hounds. According to the same article, bowhunters went on hunting “in more or less secrecy” until the Court of Cassation ruled, in 1991 and 1992, that “hunting by shooting” draws no distinction between a firearm and a weapon that shoots arrows. The arrêté of 15 February 1995 followed, and since 1 June 1995 France has allowed the bow. The bowhunters’ federation, FFCA, had been founded in 1986 by Xavier Péchenart.

In the north, the road differed from country to country. Sweden banned the bow in 1938 and still does; in an enclosure trial approved in 1998, hunting could only start in 2001, and then, Svenska Bågjägareförbundet writes, bowhunting took place legally “for the first time since the 1930s”. Finland allowed it for small game by the 1993 decree, for roe deer and beaver from 2001, and for hoofed game smaller than moose from 2017. Denmark has allowed it since 1999, and for red, fallow and sika deer since 2024, after the reports we wrote about in “What Denmark measured, and what it did not”. Estonia banned it in 1995 and 2002 and brought it back in 2013; today it allows it for small game only. Lithuania allowed it from 2000 to 2004 and has banned it by statute since 2024.

In the south, Italy has had the bow in its national hunting law since 1992 and leaves the decision to the regions. Romania went the other way: in 2008 the Chamber of Deputies voted the bow in as a means of hunting, and the final text made it poaching.

Bowhunters also organised across borders. Svenska Bågjägareförbundet writes that the World Bowhunting Association was founded on 27 April 1987, at a meeting hosted by the Danish association, with representatives from 17 countries. The European Bowhunting Federation was founded, according to the Finnish federation, in 2003, by the Nordic countries, at the CIC meeting in Helsinki. The IBEP course was written by Bill Wadsworth in 1969 for an archers’ association in New York State, and the NBEF formally adopted it in 1979. It is a private course, not a state authorisation.

What has not changed

What follows is our opinion, not a finding. The equipment has changed almost beyond recognition, from the elm of Holmegård to glass-laminated limbs and the compound bow. What seems to us unchanged is the distance: the bow asks the hunter to get close, and that is done before the shot, with patience and a knowledge of the ground.

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