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Why resurrect the career of a writer whose work is unavailable except to collectors of vintage sporting magazines? Interest in shooting and collecting Stevens single-shots, and single-shots in general, which began to wane after WWI, has expanded enormously since Tedmon’s day. But absorbing as this may be to Stevens afficionados and small-game devotees, no less significant is his tireless, impassioned advocacy of good sportsmanship – the ethics, that is, of hunting – along with his seemingly obsessive concern with threats to the Second Amendment. Tedmon was not, of course, the only writer of the time to treat these subjects, but he was singular in his vehement insistence on them over a publishing career that commenced in 1914, if not earlier, and continued intermittently until 1959.

Champion of Stevens rifles, hunting ethicist, defender of the Second Amendement – Allyn H. Tedmon was all of these and more.

Allyn H. Tedmon Photo courtesy Jim Foral

“GANGLING PRODUCT OF THE WEST”

Local history collections in the Denver and Ft. Collins, Colorado, areas record almost nothing of the career of their nationally-known native son Allyn Tedmon but contain good deal of that of his entrepreneur father, Bolivar, who arrived in Ft. Collins in 1878. Perhaps it was Bolivar’s upbringing under the hardscrabble conditions of farm life in the unforgiving Adirondack Mountains of New York that fueled an un flagging desire to better himself, but for whatever reasons, he became a highly successful frontier businessman and civic leader, owning real estate, insurance, mining, and grocery interests as well as erecting northern Colorado’s earliest three-story brick building, the Tedmon House Hotel in Ft. Collins. After the latter property was sold in 1882 for a substantial profit, Bolivar’s political connections reportedly gained him appointment as Colorado’s Deputy Superintendent of Insurance, resulting in the family’s moving to Denver, where Allyn was born Nov. 11, 1884. Most of Bolivar’s business enterprises foundered in the Panic of 1893, compelling him in the late 1890s to accept a position with the Columbia Investment Co. of New York.