The Daily Chieftain

BLUE-EYED MARKSMEN

The Proven Superiority of Northern Races Over the Latin in the Use of Firearms.

The Saxon and the Celt, the Teuton and the Norseman—which merely is to say the blue-eyed peoples possess a capacity for marksmanship none of the Latin races ever may hope to attain. It isn't a Spaniard's fault that he cannot fire a bullet straight. He can't help it. He was born that way. He has a racial defect in far vision. The trouble is seated in his eyes, and against a blue-eyed antagonist he must always be the loser when it comes to scoring on a target at fairly long range. Neither can the Indian or the negro shoot so as to make it good betting that he is going to hit anything. They mean well, but they won't do.

What it is about the blue-eyed man which renders his far sight superior to that of his dark-eyed cousin oculists are not agreed upon. They have not satisfactorily determined whether his advantage is derived from a pigment which clarifies his vision or whether the shape of his lenses is somewhat different, furnishing him a greater range of sight and a more magnified picture of distant objects, but regarding the fact itself they have long since ceased contention.

All the historic marksmen of record—from Natty Bumpo to Capt. Bogardus—had blue or hazel eyes. Look over the long list of western "killers" who flourished in the frontier days, now passed away, and you will recall that the invincible ones, those who were quickest on the trigger and who never missed their man, were blue-eyed. Billy the Kid, Wild Bill, Bat Masterson and Jesse James—good men and bad, sheriffs upholding law and desperadoes defying it—had eyes as blue as the unflecked sky of June. The Tennessee mountaineers who from behind Jackson's cotton bales poured so withering a fire into Pakenham's scarlet-coated veterans that even that intrepid soldiery could not endure it and fled from its fiery breath as from before the mouth of a furnace were blue-eyed riflemen.

Every regimental officer of experience and every gun club man knows that the records of target practice will show the blue-eyed men well in the lead over their dark-eyed fellows, and the longer the distance the more marked becomes the disparity.—Chicago Chronicle.