I started hunting with a borrowed KY rifle, round balls, and greased patches. You are right, that crap was a mess! Still, at the time I enjoyed it. Seemingly everyone was going to pyrodex at the time, and we did too for a while, but the old No. 11 caps didn't always make it go BANG, and hangfires were a constant pain too. Regular old, real Daniel Boone-type black powder would go bang a lot more often than pyrodex in all of my sidelock guns. But good grief, what a mess... My FIL had a .40 custom made for me when KR and I first got married. That gun is a tack driver with a huge bull barrel and scope mounted on top. That was before inlines became the norm, and a gun like that was a rare one. It shoots 200 yard groups, good ones, and you just couldn't get that out of most muzzys back then. I haven't shot it in years, and probably won't anytime in the near future, but it is a neat one!