Howard Hill

He set the record for winning the most consecutive bow and arrow field tournaments, a total of 196. Hill also served as a supporting actor, trick-shot performer, and archery technical consultant for Hollywood short and feature films.

He also produced and directed documentaries and educational films about bowhunting and published two books on the subject in the 1950s, Hunting the Hard Way and Wild Adventure.

Early life and career

Lemuel Howard Hill was born in 1899 in Wilsonville, Alabama, the youngest of nine children born to Mary E. (née Crumpton) and John F. Hill. Howard grew up on a cotton farm and learned how to use various tools and weapons of all kinds, including bows and arrows, which his father made for him and his four older brothers. At the age of four, he began using a bow, and at the age of six, he received his own homemade archery set, which he used for shooting and hunting in the woods surrounding his family's property. Later, while attending high school in nearby Columbiana, Howard proved himself to be an exceptional athlete in a variety of other sports, including baseball, basketball, football, and golf. On September 12, 1918, during World War I, he enlisted in the U.S. military, but the war ended just two months later, so he never joined the service. On his draft card, he signed his name "Howard H. Hill," indicating that he had changed his full name, added a middle "H," and dropped his first name, Lemuel, as documented in the 1910 federal census.

After graduating from high school, Hill enrolled at Auburn Polytechnic Institute (now Auburn University) at the age of 19, where he continued to play baseball, football, and basketball. He completed two years of study at Auburn, paying his tuition and living expenses with money he earned teaching archery during summers. Later, after they married in 1922, Hill and his wife moved to Florida. There, he found employment as a machinist for a division of the Hughes Tool Company and also played semi-professional baseball on the side. When his interest in a possible career in baseball waned, he considered playing golf professionally, but he returned to his childhood passion for archery. Hill became a regular competitor in field events for the longbow; and by 1930, he identified himself professionally as a "maker" of archery equipment, or "tackle," in Opa-locka, located north of Miami. His growing involvement in Hollywood films as an archer, stuntman, and consultant soon led the Hills to move to Los Angeles, California, where they owned a house at 12007 Saticoy Street in 1940.

Earlier, in 1937, Hill had appeared for Spectrum Pictures in the western *The Singing Buckaroo*, portraying the character Maneeto, a Native American friend of film star Fred Scott. The following year, he demonstrated his skill with a bow in *Follow the Arrow*, a short film featuring a skeet-shooting contest between Hill and a marksman armed with a shotgun. In 1938, he also performed all the bow-and-arrow stunts for Errol Flynn's Technicolor *swashbuckler* The Adventures of Robin Hood, portraying *Owain the Welshman* in the archery tournament, followed by additional stunts and trick shots for other films with Flynn, including *The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex*, *Dodge City*, and *Virginia City*.

Achievements and honors

Among his many archery accomplishments, Howard Hill set a new world record for the longest recorded flying shot with a bow and arrow in 1928, at 391 yards (358 m). That same year, he won his 196th consecutive field archery competition. In addition to being one of the most decorated archers in the modern era of target shooting, hunting, and competitive archery, Hill was also an acclaimed author and producer. During his career, he produced 23 films about archery for Warner Bros. He also produced 10 different films of his own and served as a technical consultant on many more, lending his expertise in the field. As a bowhunter, he harvested over 2,000 animals with his longbow, including a 10,000-pound African bull elephant, making him the first white man to kill such an animal with an arrow. To accomplish this feat, he used a 41-inch (100 cm) arrow while drawing a 115-pound bow.

Numerous local, state, and national organizations dedicated to archery have honored Hill. He was inducted into the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame in Birmingham in 1971, the Archery Hall of Fame in Springfield, Missouri, in 1972, and the Bowhunters Hall of Fame in Squaw Valley, California, in 1975. His remarkable achievements have been highly regarded internationally and in the United States. In Canada, for example, Archery Toronto currently recognizes Hill as "one of the three greatest archers of the last century." The other two, according to this organization, are the legendary Japanese Zen archer Awa Kenzō and Alabama native Byron Ferguson, like Hill.

performance

Hill enjoyed the challenge of performing remarkably difficult trick shots, such as shooting an apple or cutting someone's head off from 60 feet away. He would then perform the same bow-and-arrow stunt with an even smaller object from a greater distance. He produced several short documentaries highlighting other difficult trick shots. Some others included hitting a small coin that was launched into the air and splitting a wooden ball in half while it was rolled along the ground. He also performed difficult shots while standing on one leg or lying on the ground, holding the bow with his feet.

In addition to Hill's great skills in trick shooting and hitting stationary targets, he demonstrated amazing skill in hunting game, especially with his traditional longbow. Several of his magnificent adventures have been filmed or documented, including Howard Hill vs. Lion and Howard Hill vs. Elephant. The accuracy and daring Hill displays in these two films in particular illustrate why many archers consider him one of the greatest hunters of all time.

Feature films and documentaries

The Last Wilderness (1935) - Himself

The Singing Buckaroo (1937) - Maneeto - Grant's Indian friend

The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) – Owain the Welshman (credited)

San Antonio (1945) - Henchman (uncredited) (final film role)

Tembo (1951, documentary) - Himself

Deep Sea Fishing (1952, short documentary) - Himself

Short Subjects (Warner Bros.)

Swordfishing (October 21, 1939) "Adventures with Bow and Arrow"

Wild Boar Hunt (January 21, 1940) “Adventure with Bow and Arrow”

Shark Hunt (November 9, 1940) “Adventures with Bow and Arrow”

Hunting the Hard Way (May 17, 1941) "Adventures with Bow and Arrow"

Points on Arrows (December 27, 1941) "Hollywood Novelties"

King of the Archers (February 6, 1943) "Hollywood Novelties"

The Man Killers (May 29, 1943) “Broadway Brevities” (20 minutes)

Hunt for the Devil Cat (December 18, 1943) "Hollywood Novelties"

Philippine Sports Parade (June 17, 1944) Technicolor "Sports Parade"

Outdoor Life (November 4, 1944) "Warner / Vitaphone Novelties"

Masters of the Future (November 18, 1944) Technicolor "Sports Parade"

Cavalcade of Archery (January 12, 1946) Technicolor "Sports Parade"

The Lazy Hunter (October 26, 1946) Technicolor "Sports Parade"

Battle of the Champs (January 18, 1947) Technicolor "Sports Parade"

Art of Archery (October 6, 1951) Technicolor "Sports Parade"

Cruise on the Zaca (December 6, 1952) "Technicolor Special" (20 minutes, filmed 1946-47)

Technical advisor and archery instructor

Across the Wide Missouri (1951)

The Bandit of Sherwood Forest (1946)

Buffalo Bill (1944)

The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)

Split-the-Arrow shot

While appearing as an archer in "The Adventures of Robin Hood" (with Errol Flynn), Hill made perhaps the most iconic bow-and-arrow shot in American film history: Robin Hood shot his own arrow to split a competitor's already embedded arrow at a distant target. In 2006, the cast of the Australian-American television series MythBusters was unable to replicate the end-to-end split of an arrow, leading them to conclude that Hill likely used a bamboo shaft, not wood, for the famous shot.

Forked Arrow from The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)

Byron Ferguson, himself a renowned bowhunter and trick-shot expert, was able to perfectly split an arrow lengthwise using a modern laminated longbow, a shot filmed for the television special Extreme Marksmen and broadcast on the History Channel in 2008. However, Byron Ferguson didn't split a wooden arrow; instead, he telescoped one modern aluminum arrow into another. The aluminum and carbon fiber arrow shafts used by modern archers are more consistent and straighter than wooden arrows, producing more consistent shots. This makes Hill's feat truly impressive, given that he used only cedar arrows. Hill had designed and used custom-made aluminum shafts to hunt African elephants for his feature-length color film Tembo (1951).

The splitting-the-arrow scene in The Adventures of Robin Hood is explained by Hollywood stuntman Buster Wiles in his 1988 book, My Days With Errol Flynn. In it, Wiles reveals that despite splitting the end of several arrows, Hill was unable to split the arrow exactly as described in the script (from end to end). Instead, a specially designed arrow with a large blade tip was used and shot along a concealed wire toward the target arrow. Despite this, Hill's accuracy was otherwise so precise that he routinely hit extremely small targets in both live and filmed demonstrations.

Source: Wikipedia