Coral Snake's Firearms History - American Dangerous Game Rifles of the 18th and 19th Centuries By Coral Snake
When we think of American Shoulder fired firearms in the 18th and 19th Centuries we usually think of muskets of various types because they were the weapons of the various such as the Revolution, War of 1812, the Mexican War and the Civil War. However the 18th ad 19th Centuries was more than a time of war. They were also a time of contenental exploration as well. Some of this exploration was formal government exploration such as that of the Corps of Discovery headed by Lewis and Clark. Most of it however was related to the business of fur trapping and trading, and bison (buffalo) hunting. It is from this private exploration we get the names, backwoosdman, mountain man and buffalo scout for these early private explorers. For these explorers the weapon of neccessity was a proper hunting and defense RIFLE and this type of rifle generally passed through three steps of development in the 18th and 19th centuries.
The Backwoodsmen and the Pennsylvania/Kentucky Long Rifle
The first American backwoodsmen of note were Daniel Boone and David Crockett. Boon was active toward the end of the 18th century in the then wilderness of Kentucky and Crockett in the earliest 19th century in the then equally wild Tenessee. These territories were the home of the black bear, probably the most dangerous animal European North Americans met up to that time, the puma (mountain lion) and the Wolf. Against creatures like these a smoothbore musket or shotgun was rather useless so the gunsmiths of Penssylvania began building rifles designed to deal with such game. Basically they took the sporting Jeagar Rigle from England and redesigned it for the Kentucky/Tenessee wilderness. As all guns of this time were flintlocks the new Americanized Jeagar was too.
However backwoodsmen did not ride horses at this time and therefore had to carry their rifle at all times. Therefore this new American sporting rifle had to be made lighter and therefore of lighter caliber than a musket of Jeagar rifle. It was also given a longer barrel as that was supposed to give more accuracy and stopping power to the smaller .45 caliber ball it employed as its projectile. This at first gave the name Long Rifle or Pennsylvania Rifle to this new generation of American designed Flintlocks. However they were soon to be called Kentucky Rifles because of their use by Kentucky millitiamen in the Battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812. Kentucky rifles became America's first indiginous dangerous game rifles and amongst the first artistic treasures of inginious American firearms design as well. However as explorers went west of the Mississipi River as a result of the Louisiana Territory the Kentucky Rifle became obsolete and New types of Rifles had to be devised.
The Lewis and Clark Expedition and The Mountain Men, The Harper's Ferry Rifle, Hawken Rifle and the lesser Plains/Trade Rifles
When Thomas Jefferson as President made the Louisiana Purchase one of the first things he did was order up an exploratory militia known as the "Corps of Discovery" led by Merriweather Lewis and William Clark. He also ordered the Harper's Ferry Arsonal to build a special rifle and pistol as the standard issue firearms for this expedition. Not knowing what kinds of animals would be found in this new western territory of the United States the Harper's Ferry Arsonal went back to the heavy .54 caliber ball and heavy powder charge Jeagar design but with an American military style flintlock and only a half stock rather than the full stock (Al the way to the end of the barrel) design of earlier rifles and muskets. The ram rod was secured to these guns by ram rod retention rings attacjed to the barrel itself as well as the stock to make up for the loss of half the barrel stock. The pistols were built in much the same way and used the same 54 caliber ball as the rifles albeit with a lighter powder charge. Jefferson felt these powerful early elephant gun like rifles were needed for such an expedition because he believed in the possibility that the extinct American elephants the Mastodon and Woolly Mammoth might still be alive in the new unknown territories he had added to the United States.
The choice of more weight and power for the harper's Ferry Rifle was a good one however. Even without mammoths and mastodons the Northern part of the Louisiana Territory had its share of surviving dangerous animals whose size and deadliness exceeded that of even the black bear of the eastern backwoods states and territories. The era of the Lewis and Clark expedition and the mountain man brigades that succeded it was at the end of a time called the "Little Ice Age" climatologically, and like the major ice ages before it the cold did give an advantage to large mammals over smaller ones. Formost of these new dangerous animals was the Grizzly Bear. This animal at three times the size of the Eastern Black bear was virtually immune to the small ball and light powder charge of the Kentucky Rifle and many early mountain men that went west with the Kentucky Rifle did not survive encounters with this largest and deadliest of the American carnivors. Food animals like the Moose, Wapiti Elk and American Bison were also much larger than anything the Pennsylvanian gunsmiths had to deal with before in the production of their long rifles. The belief in surviving extinct animals in the Louisiana Territory thereby caused the Harper's Farry Rifle to be just the right rifle for the new territory and many of the beaver fur trappers and traders generally called mountain men carried it on their first forrays into the Rocky Mountain parts of the new territory. However with these private explorers the Harper's Ferry soon showed the defficiencies of a government designed product. One of these deficiancies was related to the fact that the Mountain Men were the first American explorers to use horese to any degree and the harper's ferry Rifle tended to be as long as the Kentucky Rifle and did not travel on a hores very well. Another was that even though they travelled in "brigades" to their trapping areas "Mountain Men" were loners in their actual trapping and food hunting operations usually forming no more than pairs one trapper and one hunter in these operations. While fine against Grizzly Bears and Bison in group situations the Harper's Ferry Rifle proved to be underpowered against such animals in individual situations. Therefore there was a demand for a shorter rifle that traveled on a horse reasonably well but with power even exceeding that of the harper's Ferry Rifle.
It would be the gunsmiths of the then fronteer town of Saint Louis that would take on the challenge of making America's second generation of private dangerous game rifles for the mountain man. These rifles are variously known by the names of Plains Rifles, Mountain Rifles and Trade Rifles but the Saint Louis gunsmith one pair of brothers would outshine all the others and would actually have his Plains/Mountain rifles "branded" much like modern popular products are. These gunsmithe were Jake and Sam Hawken and Plains/Mountain rifles of the type Jake Hawken designed would always be known as Hawken Rifles no matter who actually made them. This even includes modern replicas of such rifles designed for modern muzzle loading shooters. Hawken came to Saint Louis knowing exactly waht the mountain men beeded for their Rockey Mountain fur trapping ops firearms wise. The Hawken Rifle was basically designed by taking the Kentucky rifle back to its high powered Jeagar Roots basically being designed to fire the maximum powder charge the shoulder could tolerate behind the .54 caliber ball of the Harper's Ferry and Jeagar type rifles. Another distinct feature of not only the Hawken but all of the Plains/Mountain Rifles was the use of the Percussion cap lock rather than the flintlock. The design of the Hawken basically a thickend and heavier Kenkucy stock as a half stock like the Harper's Ferry Rifle with a shortened octigonal barrel of .54 caliber thick enough to withstand up to a 200 grain powder charge with ram rod rings replacing the missing part of the stock. However the feature that set the hawken apart from the Mountain/Plains rifles of most other New Orleans gunsmiths as the double "set" trigger. This essentially allowed the shooter to either squeeze the regular (second) trigger at its regualr "let off" weight when the rifle was used for defense or use the first trigger to set the second one to a lighter "hair trigger" pull when it was used for hunting. The Hawken and the other Mountain/Plains/Trade Rifles ruled the firearms world of the mountain men. Here finally was a rifle that in the hands of INDIVIDUALS could take down animals like the Grizzly Bear, the Bison, the Moose and the Elk. In fact whenever the mountain men used pistols at all they were built in the same rugged manner as these rifles for the same .54 caliber ball. Because of this the hawken's reign is Americas premere dangerous game rifle would last until 1870 even outlasting the mountain man/fur trapper era that created it.
The Buffalo Scouts (hunters), The Sharps Cartridge Rifle and the "Big .50"
In the 1870s the American governmet changed its policies toward Native Americans from one of trade and non interfearance with their way of life as long as they did not interfear with European business and settlement that existed in most of the mountain man era to one of genocide or confinement to reservations. These new policies were carried out in two steps, First was a direct attack on the tribes themselves and the second was an equally genocidal attack on their prime food supply, the American Bison. At this time it was obvious due to the work during the Civil War of gunsmighs like Christian Sharps, Horace Smith, Daniel B. Wesson, Tyler Henry and opthers that the Hawken type would not be the Rifle needed to carry out the government's bison extinction campaign. These muzzle loaders were powerful enough to do the job but were just too slow. A genuine "buffalo" rifle would have to have the power of the Hawken but would have to be a breech loading design using a self contained cartridge. Of course such a cartridge would be too much for the repeating designs of the time so "buffalo" rifles would have to be single shot like their muzzle loading antecedents, the Hawkens albeit speeded up by breech loading and self contained cartridges. The first and main cartridge designed for bison and grizzly bear hunting would come to be known as the "Big 50" for its use of a .50 caliber conical bullet of the same weight as the older .54 caliber ball topping off a cartridge case loaded with enough powder to take down a bison, moose, elk or grizzly bear. with the "Big 50" a breech loading plains rifle capable of carrying out the mass extinction oriented bison hunts of the 1870s and 1880s could be made.
However the "Big 50" was also a cart before the horse classic. There was no firearms company, government arsonal or gunsmith shop making a rifle to chamber the new dangerous game cartridge. However as the cartridge became popular with the successers to the mountain men known as "Buffalo Scouts" because they did their hunting in conjunction with the army as a part of the bison extinction campaign gunsmith shops began to chamber single shot rifles for the "Big 50". The usual "targets" of such rechamberings were the Sharps Rifle Company cartridge rifles. The Sharps was in many ways the best cartridge rifle to replace the Hawken on the plains because in many ways it was essentially a falling block breech loading Hawken in design. The Sharps shared with the Hawken the side hammer, the double set triggers and a wooden forend designed to give a half stock appearance to the rifle. It was essentially the breech loader that would be the most familiar to a former Hawken user and because of this went into history as the definitive "Big 50" rifle even though Sharps never officially made a rifle for that cartridge.
With the "Big 50" and Sharps cartridge rifles to fire it massive slaughter of dangerous game began to rule the western plains with the grizzly bear being restricted to the high rocky mountains by the end of the 19th century and the bison being brough to virtual extinction just as the war criminals, William Tekumsah Sherman and Phillip Sheradan running the army (and thus the "Buffalo Scouts" that worked for it at the time) had planned but when the American bison herds were brought down ot only 70 animals an entertainment phenominon began that would create a demand for the animals and cause their private breeding and rebound from extinction. This was the "Wild West Shows" created ironically by one of the very "Buffalo Scouts" that was engaging in Sherman's and Sheradan's bison slaughters himself, William Cody or "Buffalo Bill".
The close of the 19th century saw the end of uniquely American dangerous game rifles as firearms companies went for the European Mauser and other Bolt actions as the basis for high powered rifles of all types both military and civilian. It was in the Mauser Bolt action that a repeating rifle could finally be designed to handle the powerful cartridges to tackle game like grizzly bears, bison, true buffalo and elephants. Therefore most American dangerous game rifles after from 1900 on were basically "sporterizations" of and imprrovements on the basic Mauser "turn bolt" design. Today you can find a "turn bolt" design for everything from paper "bullseye" targets to elephants and it is probably the most popular rifle design for all manner of hunting and target shooting.
However there ia also nostalgia for the old uniquely AMERICAN dangerous game rifles and we are seeing replicas of such guns as the "Big 50" Sharps, the Hawken, the Harper's Ferry and the Kentucky rifles becoming popular with shooters again. There are now even specialized "Muzzle Loading" and "Regular" rifle hunting seasons for animals that are still legal to hunt in several states. This is a testement to the sense of their unique history exploration of a whole continent and developing the firearms necessary to do it safely that Americans still possess.
Next, Single Shot Pistols and Revolvers.