I'm not a Bell fan and there are a number of reasons for this.

1) He wrote his books many years after the events happened, not contemporaneously.
2) He wrote about himself, which like a politician is always open to exaggeration or distortion.
3) He found that when he could afford .318 rifles the 'inexplicable misses' he had with smaller calibres stopped happening. This is in his books. Did he miss ? or were the shots ineffective ?
4) Most of the common lore we know of Bell is regurgitated through popular print media.

I'm sure he had an interesting life, but so did a lot of other contemporaries who did not write books or obtain popularity in modern mass print media.