Ask him about Attila the Hun, who was undone by sinew.
Or the joys of knapping arrowheads from obsidian.
Perhaps he'll tell you of life on the DaNang River in Viet Nam in the 1960s.
Or of the time he and a van full of rodeo cowboys were serenaded by a young bronc rider on a red-eye drive from California to New Mexico. The guy was pretty good, they all agreed. He should record some of his stuff, they said. Next thing you knew, Chris LeDoux was hawking his eight-track tapes on the circuit.
The 62-year-old Smith grew up in north Texas, but spent most of the past quarter century in and around Cody, Wyo., working with horses and honing his ardor for producing primitive bows, arrows and arrowheads from the most basic of materials - wood and stone.
He and wife Debbie moved into Missoula a few months ago from Huson, where a promising ranching and horse-breaking job fell through when the owner got sick and sold the place.
For now they're “camping out” with their kids - Cody Smith, 29, a carpenter whose wife Shana is finishing up her education degree at UM; Kate, 27, who works at Joker's Wild and has her eye on classes at the university next fall; and Jesse, 25, who's taking welding and heavy equipment classes at the UM College of Technology.
“I think we're going to stick around here,” Bill Smith said. “If I have to live in a city, this is the one
I would pick.”
The product of what he calls primitive bow art is eye-catching.
“You don't draw these kinds of bows like you do a compound bow,” Smith said. “There are no sights, there's no arrow rest. You shoot off your hand, so subsequently the bow has to be canted at an angle for the arrows between your hand and the bow.”
He just finished a “pony bow,” made to be shot from horseback.
“It's a push bow, it's not a pull bow,” he said, leaning with the short bow in hand in the fashion of an Indian on a buffalo hunt. “You push it away. You're holding the reins in one hand and shooting with the same hand. It's a really short draw, real powerful. If you pull full, it's probably 125-130 pounds.”
Though a lot of his bows are “shooters,” few will ever be used for that purpose.
“Most people who buy my stuff end up putting it on the wall,” he said.
He figures he's cranked out two- or three-thousand bows in the past five years, and sells some at the occasional mountain man rendezvous and black powder shootings. In Missoula, you can find his work at Montana Homefitters. But Smith said he's not making a living as an artist.
“I probably could if I had an Internet connection,” he said with a laugh. “I'd like to, because I'm getting to the point where I don't want to break horses much any more. I'm still doing it for the love of horses.”
Smith figures he has fashioned two- or three-thousand bows in the past five years.
Smith brands his passion “survival art.”
“You can actually go out and get you something to eat if you get lost,” he said. “If you've got a pocketknife and a little bit of skill, you can go out and survive.”
He demonstrated, with a day-old bow and the shaft of an arrow, how by loosening the bow's drawstring, you have a workable drill.
“Roll this back and forth and, man, you can drill a hole just damn near as fast as an electric drill,” he said. “These are really simple caveman skills that have been lost down through the ages.”
Smith was 5 years old when he got his first taste of bow making. He tells of how an old man, an Osage Indian, saw the boy sitting on a bench at the bus stop one day in Argyle, Texas, north of Fort Worth.
“Do you have a name?” the old man demanded.
“Yep,” Smith replied. Just then the school bus came.
Months later, the same man saw the same boy at the same bus stop.
“What is it?” he asked.
When Smith figured out what he was talking about, the old man said he was Smith's great-grandfather. Turned out it was true.
The Indian man went on to tell and show the boy many other things as he sat whittling.
“He had reached back and pulled a big limb off the tree behind us,” Smith said. “It turned out it was a mulberry tree. Then he carved a bow in about 10 minutes and gave it
to me.”
The old man, whose Osage name meant “Green Corn,” whittled a couple of arrows too.
“Sittin' there he reached in his pocket and gave me a couple of arrowheads and showed me how to put 'em on,” Smith said.
The bow, green at the time, cured into a wonderful weapon, as Smith found out later when he reached hunting age.
“It disappeared somewhere down the line,” he said. “All this went by the wayside, you know. I had my life to live. I went to Vietnam and all
that stuff.”
Smith was 40, sitting by a river in Wyoming, fishing and thinking, when it came back to him.
“I saw this limb there, just hanging out deader than hell over the water,” he said. “I reached up to grab it. I was going to stand up - I think I had a fish on my line - and the branch pulls off.
“I scooped down to get the fish and I looked at it and I thought, ‘Wow, that's a nice piece of wood, you know?' So I got my pocketknife out and carved it into a bow. And I've been at it ever since.”
It's a wonder to him it took so long to become a bowmaker.
“In between, I hadn't really given it much thought. I'd made a few bows as kids, you know - go play Indians and run around in the woods,” he said. “I'd never thought about what the old man had showed me, how meticulous it is and what a lost art
it is.”
Smith was a piano salesman for years. He rode barebacks and some saddle broncs on the rodeo circuit for a couple of decades and more.
The horses he trains are often mustangs, the wildest kind. Smith made bull ropes for rodeo riders, he shoes horses, and he used to write songs and play guitar for country western bands.
“He's not a very good bicycle rider, though,” Debbie said.
“Yeah,” her husband agreed. “I broke my neck on a bicycle, right after I retired from rodeo.”
Seems he was fooling around on a kid's bike, “one of those tiny little things from Wal-Mart,” he said. “I shouldn't have been on it.”
Smith said the accident landed him in the Mayo Clinic.
“The girls in there called me Wheelie Man,” he recalled with
a chuckle.
Otherwise, he said, he's survived his rugged life pretty well.
Oh, there were the two broken collarbones, the first sustained at age 4 when he jumped from a high concrete porch in Texas onto the
back of a horse that happened to
be a bronc.
“I'd been to the movies. Hell, that's what you do. I've still got a knot on my shoulder from that,” he said.
There was also the separated sternum. And he's broken just about every rib at least twice.
“Other than that, I haven't broke anything,” Smith said. “My back Š well, that's just compressed vertebrae, nothing broken. I'm four operations into it right now. I've had my neck fused and most of my back fused.
“But I get around pretty good. I still ride horses.”
Smith makes bows and arrows in as authentic a fashion as he can, except for the draw strings. They're usually made of artificial sinew.
Attila introduced the recurved bow to a savage world in the fifth century. Fashioned with tips that curve away from the archer, it was far superior to the C-shaped longbow.
But the horrific Hun also used real sinew, the fiber that connects muscle to bone on you, me and our friendly neighborhood stag.
When first wet, sinew can be wrapped around an arrow or a bow at joints or weak points. When it dries, Smith explained, it sticks to itself, shrinks and tightens up.
“The drawback to real sinew is water. If it rains your bow falls apart, your arrow falls apart,” he said. “That's what happened to Attila the Hun. That's why he got whipped.”
Indians solved the problem by sealing the sinew with beeswax,
Smith added.
“Attila didn't have that kind of technology,” he said.
When he gets on a roll, Smith can fashion a bow in an hour or two. He'll use Rocky Mountain maple, willow, red oak, hickory, hawthorn.
“I can get all kinds of wood just following the tree trimmers around,” Smith said. “This town is full of great trees, and a lot of them are just fixing to fall on power lines.”
The best arrow shafts come from rose hip in the spring, when the stems tend to grow straight and stout. Obsidian is ideal for arrowheads, though the volcanically-produced glass is harder to come by than flint.
Armed with a deer antler in one practiced hand and a stout piece of leather in the other, Smith knaps an arrowhead in less than 10 minutes, in the same manner it was done a millennium ago.
An artist's purpose is apparent in every motion.
“There's a bow in every limb, but you have to find it,” Smith said. “And there's an arrowhead in every rock, but you've got to find it.”
Reporter Kim Briggeman can be reached at 523-5266 or at kbriggeman@missoulian.com.
Photographer Kurt Wilson can be reached at 423-5270 or at kwilson@missoulian.com.
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