Handmade Arrows Also His Specialty : Craftsman Hits Bull’s-Eye With Bows

In the heart of Idaho’s modern capital, tucked away between the neon lights of restaurants and fashion shops, sits a tiny shack that has survived the wrath of bulldozers and developers since 1897.

Inside the shack is 76-year-old Ron Robison, a throwback to the Wild West who also refuses to cave into changing times.

He is content spending his days hand-crafting bows and arrows the same way they’ve been made for thousands of years.

Eight hours a day, six days a week he can be found hunkered over a pine work table crafting the bows and attaching real goose feathers to his handmade arrows.

Made First Bow at 7

He doesn’t have to work any more. He and his wife have enough money to get by comfortably, but for Robison this work is anything but labor.

“If I retired I’d probably die in two weeks,” said Robison while hand polishing a long, narrow maplewood bow with fine-grain sandpaper. Robison opened the workshop in the two-room shack in 1945 after dreaming for half a lifetime of making a living crafting the bows. He made his first bow at age 7 and later spent a two-year apprenticeship at a Los Angeles archery shop.

Robison, who seems as fascinated with the folklore that surrounds bows and arrows as the craft, claims that his bows are as good as any made in the world.

Unlike the popular “compound” bows of today with pulleys on both ends that make them easy to draw back, Robison’s bows are extremely difficult to draw.

Turks Were Best Archers

Medieval archers developed the strength to shoot the bows as boys by being forced to hunt for their own food, he said.

“A regular guy nowadays couldn’t even string one, never mind pull it back,” he said. Robison’s interest in the craft has made him something of an expert on world history.

“All things considered, the Turks of the Medieval period were the best archers of all time,” he said. “They would have conquered the whole damn world if the glue in their bows hadn’t come undone in the rain.”

He said the Turks made the mistake of using animal fat to glue their bows together.

‘They’d Go Through Armor’

“Winston Churchill said there wasn’t any artillery in the world that could stop that silent weapon,” he said. “When you’ve got 5,000 or 6,000 archers shooting 10 arrows a minute from 80-pound bows at 225 yards they’d go through armor.

“Even Ben Franklin said the bow is a weapon that was not wisely laid aside.”

Robison said the bow was the forerunner to all string musical instruments.

“What happened was this guy was probably monkeying around on duty, fiddling with the bow and discovered it made music,” he said with a straight face.

Tenth-Century Mongol leader Genghis Khan conquered the entire known world with a band of nomadic horsemen equipped with bows and arrows, Robison explained as he formed the fletching on an arrow using duck feathers.

Khan, obviously a hero of the craftsman, was the greatest leader of all time, he said. Khan was a man Robison would have been “damn happy to meet.”

Recalling the Buffalo

“He conquered more land than Hitler or any of them,” Robison said.

But the Wild West, when the American Indian roamed the Great Plains in search of buffalo, is the old sage’s favorite jumping-off point for conversation.

“The buffalo was a wonderful animal before the white man killed them off,” he said.

He ponders what it would have been like to be an Indian then, hunting buffalo in the open prairie “Indian style,” taking only as many bison as needed to feed the tribe, using every inch of the animal for food or tools and wasting nothing.