Because Shatner overacting is very suspicious.
Given the multiple other idiocies in Cooper’s novel not involving firearms that Twain excoriates, I’d say it was simply bad writing.
He lived all his early life in NJ and NY, except for a brief 2 year stint in the Navy. In the merchant marine, he went to Spain, England etc. His USN career was on a gun boat on lake Ontario and lake Champlain. That was frontier, mostly at the time.
Later he went to France, etc. .
I’ve never read Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, but I get the impression that they’re the 19th century equivalent of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Complaining about impossible rifle shots is akin to complaining about about the unrealistic powers of the Avengers. That’s the point of the stories. You know, the stupid stuff. I would’ve adored those stories when I was a kid.
What really got Twain’s goat were the literary gatekeepers that praised Cooper’s schlock.
To wit:
The Pathfinder" and “The Deerslayer” stand at the head of Cooper’s novels as artistic creations. There are others of his works which contain parts as perfect as are to be found in these, and scenes even more thrilling. Not one can be compared with either of them as a finished whole. The defects in both of these tales are comparatively slight. They were pure works of art.
–Professor LounsburyThe five tales reveal an extraordinary fullness of invention. … One of the very greatest characters in fiction, Natty Bumppo… The craft of the woodsman, the tricks of the trapper, all the delicate art of the forest were familiar to Cooper from his youth up.
–Professor MatthewsCooper is the greatest artist in the domain of romantic fiction in America.
–Wilkie CollinsIt seems to me that it was far from right for the Professor of English Literature at Yale, the Professor of English Literature in Columbia, and Wilkie Collins to deliver opinions on Cooper’s literature without having read some of it. It would have been much more decorous to keep silent and let persons talk who have read Cooper.
Cooper’s art has some defects. In one place in “Deerslayer,” and in the restricted space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 offenses against literary art out of a possible 115. It breaks the record.
By ridiculing Cooper’s work he was ridiculing those silly yankees and that Wilkie Collins guy.
It reminds me of Harold Bloom’s evisceration of J.K. Rowling. It wasn’t so much the books that bothered Twain and Bloom, it was the praise from those who should know better.
This doesn’t happen much anymore with most people using cell phones but when someone was mad and talking in the phone, they’d slam the phone down to show their anger. Obviously that happened often but then they’d show the other party hold the phone away from their ear because somehow, slamming a phone down makes a louder disconnect than just gently replacing the receiver.