Hawken Rifle

Origins

Jacob Hawken, a gunsmith trained in the Pennsylvania-Maryland tradition that produced the Kentucky Long Rifle, was working in St. Louis by the early 1820s, and his younger brother Samuel joined him in the shop on Washington Avenue by about 1825. St. Louis was the gateway to the fur trade of the upper Missouri and the Rocky Mountains, and the customers who came through the Hawken shop wanted something the graceful eastern long rifle could not give them. They rode rather than walked, they hunted buffalo and grizzly rather than deer and squirrel, and they fought at close quarters in a country where a rifle might have to stop a charging animal or a horseman at the first shot. The brothers' answer, refined over the 1830s, became the 'plains rifle', and 'Hawken' became the name the whole type was known by.

Design & Construction

The Hawken is a short, heavy, plain rifle. Its octagonal barrel, usually 34 to 38 inches long, is thick-walled wrought iron, which gave it the strength for heavy powder charges and the weight to steady a long shot. Bores were large, commonly around .53 caliber and sometimes up to .58, firing a patched round ball that could carry for two hundred yards and more with killing force. The stock is a half-stock: it stops partway down the barrel, which is held by a single wedge or key and a steel rib carrying the ramrod pipes, so the rifle was sturdier and easier to repair than a full-stocked one. Early Hawkens were flintlocks; from the 1830s nearly all were built or converted as percussion rifles, whose caps were far more reliable in the rain and wind of the mountains. Furniture was iron rather than brass, the stock was maple or walnut, and a finished rifle weighed ten to twelve pounds. Hawkens were made to order, so no two are quite alike, and the brothers did not number their work.

Combat Use

The Hawken was a civilian rifle, never an army arm, but it lived in a violent world. The trappers of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company and the American Fur Company carried plains rifles through the rendezvous era of the 1820s and 1830s, in a country where fights with Blackfeet, Crow and other nations were part of the trade; later the same rifles went west with emigrants on the Oregon and Santa Fe trails and with market hunters on the plains. Men such as Jim Bridger and Kit Carson are recorded as owning Hawken rifles, and the type's reputation for accuracy and stopping power spread by word of mouth across the frontier.

Legacy

Jacob Hawken died in 1849; Samuel carried on until he left the business around 1859, and by the early 1860s the shop had passed to John P. Gemmer, a gunsmith who had worked there, who went on making rifles under the Hawken stamp for decades. By then breechloaders and metallic cartridges were replacing the muzzleloader, and the Colt revolver, the Sharps and later the Colt Single Action Army carried the frontier's story forward. Authentic Hawken rifles are among the rarest and most valuable of American antique arms, and the plains rifle became the model for the modern 'Hawken-style' muzzleloader, built in kit and finished form, which kept black-powder shooting alive through the twentieth century and into the present.