Kemper County shotgunner

June 27, 2008 12:01 am

— Annie Oakley, the famous shooter who performed on Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show for 17 years, once shot 4,772 glass balls with a .22 rifle out of 5,000 tossed into the air. The tiny five foot tall expert wowed crowds across the land in the late 1800s and early 1900s with shotgun, rifle and pistol alike. Her modern day equivalent is Tom Napp, who does amazing things with repeating shotguns. He throws something like nine clay targets into the air and proceeds to bust each one before they fall to the ground.
In between these two, beginning shortly after Oakley’s era, smokeless shotshell powder exploded (excuse me) onto the scene and companies like Peters marketed their product aggressively. Many of us long in the tooth remember those blue shells in blue and yellow boxes that were popular into the second half of last century.
The champions of the shotgun world in those early days of factory loaded smokeless shells were teams of trap shooters. A prominent team that traveled the world and broke millions of clay targets and, in Europe shot truck loads of released live birds, was a group of men employed as promotional ambassadors for Peters Cartridge Company. (Peters made smokeless rifle cartridges and back then shotshells were called cartridges as well.)

Wiley Coleman

One of their finest shooters was a man from Kemper County named Wiley Coleman. Coleman, 1884 to 1948, lived on Highway 16 just a quarter mile from the Alabama state line. One witness recalls that he could toss coins into the air and hit them with a .22 rifle. He was a regular on the Peters team shooting clay “birds” across the nation.
When he moved to Lawton, Oklahoma in 1948 Mr. Ruel Elliott and his wife, Mary Robinson Elliott, bought the Coleman home (July 5, 1948, 60 years ago next week.) Their daughter, Martha Jo, kept many Coleman family documents, photos, letters and competition scorecards related to Wiley’s profession that were left in the house. She married Wallace Aust in 1954 and they now live three miles northeast of Scooba.
The enormous collection of papers reveals enough about the Colemans and their friends to fill the pages of a book. For example, Wiley’s wife, Imogene, became herself a competition trap shooter. She competed from 1926 to 1931 and Mrs. Aust has some of her official scorecards.
Ted Renfroe, a Montanan who won the world championship of live pigeon trapshooters in Monte Carlo in the south of France in 1931 or 1932, was a close friend of Wiley Coleman and Mrs. Aust has several notes, letters and post cards from Renfroe to Coleman during the days of that competition in France. (His post cards are postmarked France even though Monte Carlo is today actually in Monaco.)

Golden era

These were the golden days of the shotgun. Trap shooters in the photos abandoned by the Colemans are using what appear to be Italian made over/unders (likely Berettas) and Remington Model 11 autoloaders. Peters heavy shotshell loads were called Peters High Velocity and their field loads carried the Victor name. Renfro used High Velocity number 7 and one half shot for live pigeons in Europe as indicated by a post card he wrote to Coleman when Renfro broke the world record on live pigeons.
These details fascinate us gun nuts and raise the question, why did the family leave behind the documented story of their interesting lives and what happened to them. It is known only that Coleman had an office in Salt Lake City, Utah. Of interest as an aside is that a post card from France was addressed simply to Wiley Coleman, Salt Lake City, Utah. We can assume that recipients had to check by the post office to retrieve such mail. One card so addressed had Salt Lake City scratched through and “Ely, Nevada, Colliers Hotel” written in, presumably to be forwarded to Coleman who likely was on a shooting tour in Nevada at the time.
Martha Jo Aust has sent all the originals of this vast collection of memorabilia to the Trapshooters Hall of Fame in Vandalia, Ohio. The Museum Director, Richard Baldwin, requested the items from the Kemper County lady. The photographs on this and the following page tell a part of this story better than speculation by the written word. Photos continued on next page.

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