How Hard Can It Be?

A bow is certainly more difficult to shoot accurately than a rifle, and a crossbow is somewhere in between.  The main reason archery hunting is allowed where firearm hunting is not allowed is that the range of an arrow is limited to about a hundred yards.  A rifle bullet can travel a mile or more beyond its intended target if it doesn't hit something before that.  Okay, that's the maximum range, not the maximum effective range.  Most reasonably competent bow hunters try to get within 30 yards of a deer before shooting at it.  A seasoned expert with state-of-the- art-equipment might stretch it to 50 yards, but that's about it.  A crossbow might be more accurate than a regular bow, but its range is about the same.  Medieval archers used to shoot much farther than modern hunters, but they were only trying to put an arrow over the castle wall, not in the lung area of a deer.  Like Uncle Ken once said, "When you're shooting fish in a barrel, all you've got to hit is the barrel."

Modern muzzle loaders can be accurate up to 200 yards, or so I have been told.  There is no place on my property where I can see over a hundred yards, and most of my shots at deer have averaged about 50 yards over the years.  The challenge of a muzzle loader is that you only have one shot, which is usually all you need.  My regular rifle is also a single shot, with the difference being that I can reload it in a matter of seconds, while the muzzle loader takes several minutes.  I have read that some frontiersmen in days of yore got it down to a minute or less, but they had a lot more practice than I will ever have.  

I'm not sure when the cap lock was invented, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't before the 19th Century, so Hawkeye most likely carried a flintlock.  I understand that, with those babies, there is a second or two delay between the time you pull the trigger and the ignition of the powder charge, which means you have to hold rock steady the whole time.  That's if the gun fires at all, which it often fails to do.  The cap lock was more reliable, and the modern firing pin primer is more reliable than that.