The
Archaeology of the American Longrifle
The flintlock longrifle is one of the most enduring symbols of American nationhood. In the film The Patriot, set during the American War of Independence, Mel Gibson has one constantly with him, and uses it to devastating effect against the British; in The Last of the Mohicans, set a generation earlier during the French and Indian War, Daniel Day-Lewis also has one. Both films exemplify the mythology of the longrifle, the faithful companion of Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett as they carved out the American frontier, the weapon that allowed American sharpshooters to pick off British redcoats with their inferior muskets and win freedom for the colonies. Today the longrifle is the symbol of the National Rifle Association, and no U.S. president leaves office without being given one. Their appeal, of course, lies in far more than their historical significance: to my eye they are the supreme product of the gunmaker’s art, and among the most distinctive and beautiful creations of colonial America.
I have always been fascinated by early firearms. I built the longrifle illustrated on this page over the course of a year, while I was writing my novel Crusader Gold. I began with a roughed-out stock of curly maple, and used reproduction metal parts. The rifle is based closely on an original made in York County, Pennsylvania, in the decade leading up to the outbreak of the American War of Independence in 1775. The shape of the lock and the sliding wooden patchbox on the butt are both features of German rifles of the early 18th century, and reflect the German heritage of many of the gunmakers in Pennsylvania at this period. But I also added some English features, including the extension of the wrist into the butt and the carved baroque volutes behind the cheekpiece. I imagined this rifle being made by a gunsmith influenced by the more English traditions of Virginia to the south, around 1765 – at a time when most American colonists still thought of themselves as resolutely British. The rifle is almost five feet long, and the barrel is 'swamped', tapering from the breech towards the forestock and then flaring out again at the muzzle, giving the gun excellent balance and handling. It shoots a 50 caliber lead roundball, rammed down from the muzzle over a lubricated patch above 60 or 70 grains of black powder, enough for deadly accuracy at 80 or 100 yards.
In the course of building and shooting this gun - now
in a private collection - I
became very interested in the archaeology of the American longrifle, both
in terms of its cultural significance and as an archaeological discovery.
I was intrigued to learn that longrifles have been found as grave goods in
Indian burials, and that their shape may owe much to the Indian trade.
Longrifles were above all hunting guns, used for taking deer and
fur-bearing animals in the forests of the frontier and beyond. By
the 1770s, much of Pennsylvania, Virginia and the other colonies that
produced the militias of 1775 had been cleared of forest and large game,
and many of those first farmers would have arrived at their mustering
points not armed with rifles, but with smoothbore shotguns or muskets –
more versatile tools on the farm than rifles, better able to take wildfowl
and small game.
Rifles were used by frontiersmen, many of them Indians or mixed blood – the type of men portrayed so well in The Last of the Mohicans. From the 17th century, both the French and the English had supplied the Indians with ‘trade guns’, long-barreled smoothbores of crude but functional manufacture. The length of American longrifles has always been puzzling, particularly as experiments show that shorter rifled barrels could be just as accurate. Imported German ‘jaeger’ rifles, the first rifles in the American colonies, were shorter-barreled. Many historians of the early rifle now believe that the Indians had become accustomed to the long barrels of their trade guns, and demanded the same when rifles became available to them. The legendary American frontiersman, clad in buckskins with a longrifle cradled in his arm, may thus have adopted not only his clothing from the Indians but also his gun.
Longrifles were more accurate than muskets, and would have been used to deadly effect in the skirmishes reconstructed so vividly in The Patriot. However, as that film also shows, rifles were less effective than muskets in the open field of battle, where soldiers faced each other in tight masses and rapidity of fire was more important than pinpoint accuracy. Rifles took a lot longer than muskets to load, requiring a tightly patched ball to engage the rifling effectively, and the rifling grooves in the barrel quickly fouled up and needed cleaning. The American War of Independence was won not by guerrilla tactics, but by the Continental Army forming itself up under Washington as an effective 18th century fighting force, able to stand up to the British in the attritional close-quarter contests which were the only way of deciding wars at the time. It was those farmers with their smoothbores, not the frontiersmen with their rifles, who ultimately won the American colonies their freedom.
None of this, of course, detracts from the romance of
the American longrifle as the frontiersman’s best friend, the tool that
helped push the frontier west towards the plains, up to the time when
flintlock muzzleloaders were becoming obsolete. Even as late as the Battle
of the Alamo in 1836, Davy Crockett went to his death shooting his beloved
York County flintlock longrifle – a weapon accurately portrayed in the
film The Alamo, with Billy Bob
Thornton. At about the same time, old longrifles were finding their way
north across the border to Canada, where much of Ontario was still dense
forest. The farm in Ontario where I do most of my writing was first
settled by a loyalist who came north from New Jersey in 1809, and fought
against the Americans in the War of 1812. Much of the property today
remains uncleared forest wetland, with deer, brush wolves, plentiful small game
and wildfowl just as it was when he first arrived, probably carrying a gun
not much different from the one shown in these pictures.
Photos copyright © 2006 D J L Gibbins