Muzzleldrs Sharpshooting From Trees?

[Josh The Lighthouse Guy]

In passing, I've come across various mentions (and occasional alleged illustrations) of sharpshooters / snipers shooting from trees. How common was this? How practical was it? How often were lookouts in trees mistaken for sharpshooters?

All the stories I can recall are about people seeing (or thinking they see) a sharpshooter - sometimes shooting him out of the tree. Are their firsthand accounts of men claiming they themselves climbed a tree for sharpshooting?

Was there a particular species of tree favored by sharpshooters? Pine trees seem most climbable, but less likely to have a good perch. Oaks would probably have good perches where the main limbs join the main trunk, but would be harder to climb as they don't tend to have lower branches. Cedars would seem like they would have too many branches and too much foliage that it would be hard to climb and see a target. I haven't spent enough time in Virginia or Tennessee to know the trees well enough.

The advantages seem obvious. Perhaps even moreso with lower velocity Minie bullets than modern higher velocity FMJ bullets.

Just finding a climbable tree of the appropriate size and height seems like the easy part. I suppose rather than carrying the rifle on their back it might be tied with a rope and pulled up once a suitable perch was found. Loading a muzzleloader in tree seems difficult, and also being able to brace yourself in such a way that the recoil doesn't cause you to lose your balance and fall out of the tree. Admittedly, I have never fired a black powder weapon so maybe these things are not as difficult as they seem?

 

[JOHN42768]

A breechloader seems to equate to usage in a modern day tree stand while hunting, but muzzleloader is not going to be user friendly

 

[Nathan Stuart]

In passing, I've come across various mentions (and occasional alleged illustrations) of sharpshooters / snipers shooting from trees. How common was this? How practical was it?

As said above, have similarly read various references to sharpshooters (on both sides) firing from perched positions in trees - so believe sharpshooting/sniping from tree positions was quite common during CW.

The obvious advantage for an elevated marksman was that tree positions provided better long-range observation and fields of fire than at ground level. In ideal tree positions, sharpshooters sat on a wide branch and rested their rifles on another raised branch to support their weapon firing. The safest mounted tree positions for concealment and avoiding detection of powder puffs from weapons discharge were staying close to thick trunks in trees deeply located in thickly leafed woods.

Because of reloading tasks, it was clearly easier for riflemen using breech-loading rifles than muzzle-loaders, to operate in these heightened positions.

In a postwar 1885 account, former Confederate sharpshooter, Pvte. John 'Kildee' West of the 4th GA Infantry who received one of the thirteen issued whitworth target rifles issued to the AoNV in late '62 gave the following relevent description:-

..."Sometimes we would climb a tree, and pin leaves all over our clothes to keep their color from betraying us. When two of us would be together, and a yankee sharpshooter would be trying to get a shot at us, one of us would put his hat on a ramrod and pike it up from behind the object that concealed,and protected us, and when the yankee cis (sic) head to shoot at the hat, the other one would put a bullet through his head. I have shot em' out of trees and seen 'em fall like coons. When we were in, grass or grain,we would fire and fall over and roll several yards from where we shot at,and the yankee sharpshooter would fire away at the smoke."...
(Source - https://georgiagenealogy.org/twiggs2/kildee.html )

 

[bankerpapaw]

In passing, I've come across various mentions (and occasional alleged illustrations) of sharpshooters / snipers shooting from trees. How common was this? How practical was it? How often were lookouts in trees mistaken for sharpshooters?

All the stories I can recall are about people seeing (or thinking they see) a sharpshooter - sometimes shooting him out of the tree. Are their firsthand accounts of men claiming they themselves climbed a tree for sharpshooting?

Was there a particular species of tree favored by sharpshooters? Pine trees seem most climbable, but less likely to have a good perch. Oaks would probably have good perches where the main limbs join the main trunk, but would be harder to climb as they don't tend to have lower branches. Cedars would seem like they would have too many branches and too much foliage that it would be hard to climb and see a target. I haven't spent enough time in Virginia or Tennessee to know the trees well enough.

The advantages seem obvious. Perhaps even moreso with lower velocity Minie bullets than modern higher velocity FMJ bullets.

Just finding a climbable tree of the appropriate size and height seems like the easy part. I suppose rather than carrying the rifle on their back it might be tied with a rope and pulled up once a suitable perch was found. Loading a muzzleloader in tree seems difficult, and also being able to brace yourself in such a way that the recoil doesn't cause you to lose your balance and fall out of the tree. Admittedly, I have never fired a black powder weapon so maybe these things are not as difficult as they seem?

Oaks, yes. But forget about trying to get up in a cedar tree!!!

 

[yulzari]

I was advised that shooting from a tree was inadvisable as one has no discrete escape route but, if it were necessary, it is best from a forward slope where the trees are backed by vegetation to avoid producing a recognisable silhouette against the sky. Obviously personal camouflage is de riguer. In ADOO times the smoke from each shot marks the position of the shooter and is the principal difference between the forum period and later more modern smokeless powder work.

Sharpshooting, as more accurate mobile skirmishing, differs from 'sniping' selective static fire on key targets such as field artillery or officers. The different skills require, ideally, different weapons and training. The rifles of British army riflemen were for superior sharpshooter skirmishing and no sniper level rifles were specifically issued really until the Great War. The service rifle, perforce, had to be pressed into service in the sniper rôle.

I have been told that 'sniping' as a term dates back to at least the mid seventeenth century and is recorded in the English Civil War as 'snipping'. ie to snip out senior officers removing command and control which, on the period battlefield, required the presence of them directing troops close in the battlefield. Also as a psychological campaign in a siege situation.

 

[R. Porter]

When I was growing up, the loblolly pine trees in our back yard were like telephone poles with branches too high up to use for climbing. Once you got up to the branches they didn't provide much cover.

 

[gary]

It happened all the time during the ACW. The trouble is the tell tale plume of white smoke that betrays the shooter's location and once you're spotted, you're as good as dead. One Confederate lieutenant prohibited his men from using trees for this very reason.

Even into WW I, WW II snipers climbed trees and used them to their advantage but with concurrent dangers. The British didn't like the idea and thought it was nonsense that Germans used trees; until they recovered some German training material. Britain's highest scoring sniper of WW II, Sgt. Harry Furness, told me his golden rule was, "Thou shall get away."

Recently I read an account of Petersburg where a soldier in a trench was receiving fire while he was reading the paper. He thought it was a high trajectory stray. Then a second one. He now knew there was a sharpshooter perched in a tree aiming for him. He moved muy pronto. A New Englander was moving around the line hunting for sharpshooters and he brought the Confederate down. The fallen soldier was grabbing for branches as he fell. No luck. Body meets earth. Anyway, the New Englander moved along hunting for more Confederates and the last our man saw of him was he was being carried away on a blanket, gasping for breath. He couldn't thank him because of it.

 

[7thWisconsin]

Yes - trees were useful sharpshooter nests but they do have the problem that there is no route of retreat or secondary position. You're there until the enemy goes away or kills you. The common solution was to turn a gun firing cannister on a sharpshooter position.

 

[The Ninth Ohio]

Given the regular occurrence of overshot, the last place I would want to be as an ACW sharpshooter is in a tree.

 

[Joe Whitworth]

One would have to have pre ranged shots. Taking into account the 10-20 foot height above the ground usually illustrated the graduations on your sighting system (iron sights or telescopic) would lose reference. The rainbow trajectory of the projectile makes the death zone narrower and narrower with increasing distance making a hit even less likely. IMHO climbing into a tree to take a smoky location revealing iffy shot at a distant target that may result in a shower of steel and shattered tree tops on my head is a bad idea, looks good but a bad idea. Solid ground to rest on for and to run on after the shot seems wisest. YMMV

 

[Nathan Stuart]

Some Union soldiers derogatively referred to Confederate sharpshooters in trees as 'tree frogs'.

Below is a sketch of a tree-perched Confederate sharpshooter that appeared in 'Battles and Leaders of the Civil War' Vol. II (1887), @ page 202. (It's noticeably a concealed and stable treetop position for target firing).