A message from the Editor

If this is your first visit, welcome to the National Muzzle Loading Rifle Association’s (NMLRA) online version of its monthly magazine Muzzle Blasts. If you’ve been here before, welcome back.

Some of Muzzle Blasts Online’s features are previously unpublished works, while others articles have already appeared in another of the NMLRA’s publications. The parent magazine, Muzzle Blasts, is an eighty page monthly, received as a benefit of a $30 annual membership in the NMLRA.

Muzzle Blasts Online comes out about every two months, but with no specific schedule. As we get “staffed up” and gain more experience, we will evolve into a regular monthly presentation.

This issue of Muzzle Blasts Online offers a typical mix of topics. We have a very interesting article on one of the lesser know theaters of the American Civil War--Illinois. And our buckskinning readers will be surprised by the activity described in our article about this sport in Belgium.

Two of our regular reviewers, Susan Jennys and Chuck Hamsa, have book reviews in this issue, and joining them for the first time is Muzzle Blasts’ columnist Rick Hacker with “Hacker Hunting Lodge.”