American Rifle: A Biography

Book by Rose Alexander

Chapter One


The Mystery of Washington's Rifle

George Washington, never exactly a cheerful or chipper soul, was today even more glum than usual. It was May 21, 1772, and all day he had been posing for his portrait motionless, awkwardly dressed in an antique uniform originally tailored for a younger, slimmer man. The painter—an up-and-coming artist by the name of Charles Willson Peale—was certainly taking his time about it.

And then, at last, Washington was allowed to see the result. There he was, looking suspiciously more youthful (Peale knew how to flatter his subjects) than his forty years might suggest, but otherwise the likeness was most accurate. There he stood, Colonel George Washington of the defunct Virginia Regiment, officer, gentleman, loyal servant of His Majesty, and veteran of the French and Indian War.

Peale's portrait of Washington—the earliest authentic likeness of the man that is known to exist—is distinguished from hundreds of other pictures of eighteenth-century soldiers hanging in the world's museums in one remarkable respect. It's easy to overlook, but, subtly protruding from behind Washington's left shoulder, is the muzzle of an American rifle.

This particular arm had probably been commissioned two years before, in early 1770. In March of that year Washington was staying with his friend Robert Alexander, and according to his diary, they often "went out a hunting" foxes; but he one day rode to "George Town" (then a small place eight miles upstream from Alexandria, Virginia) to pick up "my rifle" from the gunsmith John Jost (or Yost) for £6 and 10 shillings. (An exact conversion to today's dollars is extremely difficult to determine, but $1,400 is a very rough approximation.) Gratifyingly, the cost of the firearm was partly offset by Washington's winning of £1 and 5 shillings from his host at cards, while its fineness can be gauged by the fact that during the Revolution Jost would make rifles for American troops invoiced at £4 and 15 shillings each—and this after prices had already soared owing to inflation. Washington may well have paid more than a 100 percent premium for the privilege of owning a custom-made Jost.

Few but Washington would have instructed their portraitists to add such a weapon. Rifles, at the time, were rarities among common soldiers and were carried by officers only in the field—the hunting field, that is, for the noble pursuit of shooting game, not the battlefield. Among civilians, many Americans weren't even sure what exactly a rifle was. As late as June 1775 John Adams mentioned to Abigail that he had recently heard about this "peculiar kind of musket, called a rifle" which had "grooves within the barrel, and carries a ball with great exactness to great distances."

All of which makes Washington's insistence on including one of these "peculiar" firearms in his portrait all the more mysterious. Indeed, a man who wished to use an object as an emblem of rank might have brandished it openly, but he didn't. The rifle is instead discreetly tucked away in the background, serving, it seems, as a reassuring symbol, for those in the know, that this individual, dressed in a uniform last donned two decades before, is one of them. So what was Washington telling his fellow Americans? The answer lies hidden somewhere amid the vast, remote American wilderness, an unconquered territory densely thicketed by forests, rumpled by towering mountain ranges, and watered by unbridgeable rivers. For newcomers to this land, it was a terrifying place such as had not existed in Europe since the dark and cold days of the Neanderthals. It was the frontier.
The great Spanish conquests did not hinge on firearms. Columbus brought with him just one for his infantry—a gun weighing about thirty pounds aptly named the "hand-cannon"—on his voyage to the New World in 1492. This type of weapon, which consisted of an inch-or-so-wide iron tube mounted on a broomstick-sized pole, could be lethal up to a few dozen yards, but its noise, smoke, and flash were undoubtedly its scariest qualities. Thirty years later Hernan Cortes brought down King Montezuma and his mighty Aztec empire with 110 sailors and 508 soldiers, of whom only twelve carried guns.

Owing to the unwieldiness of guns, as well as the impossibility of obtaining extra supplies for them, the conquistadors preferred to use simple, low-tech weaponry and sheer will to carry the day. In 2004 in Peru archaeologists excavated the remains of a man thought to be the earliest known gunshot victim in the Americas. He was lying in a mass grave with five hundred-odd other victims—Inca Indians who had rebelled against the Spaniards in 1536—with a bullet wound to the head from a ball fired from a hundred feet away. Since then, several other skeletons have been found with similar injuries. However, the vast majority of those killed exhibit signs not of gunshot trauma but of wounds caused by violent crushing (by horses' hooves), impalement by pikes, or hacking, smashing, and tearing by other iron weapons. The Amerindian empires were undone not by European technological superiority but by their own internal dissension, germs, their leaders' indecision, the Spaniards' employment of Indian allies disaffected from their overlords, and the foreigners' use of war dogs and horses to cow foes.

Firearms genuinely came into their own only in the early seventeenth century: on July 30, 1609, to be exact, when Samuel de Champlain, the French explorer and fur trader, accompanied his sixty Montagnais and Huron allies on a raid near the Ticonderoga against their mutual enemies, the Mohawks. Just two volleys from a couple of muskets put to flight a numerically superior force of two hundred. Admittedly, however, Champlain's shots had inflicted more damage to morale than to flesh and bone.

The Mohawks eventually recovered from their fear of the Europeans' thunder-making machines, but even then they and many other tribes were reluctant to dispense with their traditional weaponry. Being heavy, inaccurate, useless in the rain, instantly spottable at night, and based on iron and gunpowder (two elements requiring specialized production facilities), the early gun initially found few takers.

The increasing use of the serpentine, an idea borrowed from crossbows, began to change these attitudes. This was a freely pivoting, S-shaped metal arm attached to the breech—that part of the gun behind the barrel—that served simultaneously as a rudimentary trigger and as a clamp to hold the match, a lengthy wick that burned at an even rate. By suspending the match above the priming powder until the shooter pulled the trigger, the serpentine allowed the firer to hold the "matchlock" gun with both hands—unlike the old harquebus, which had to be steadied with one hand as the other manually applied the match to the powder. As a result, accuracy greatly improved, though the issue of long-glowing, slow-burning matches giving away one's position remained nettlesome.
With the arrival of the flintlock, which used flints to ignite sparks on demand, shooters could forever dispense with sputtering matches. While Europeans saw this new type of gun as merely a gentle evolutionary progression past the basic matchlock, Indians quickly realized that flintlocks comprised an entire replacement technology that rendered their bows and arrows obsolete. To them, the flintlock was a sudden, punctuated revolutionary leap forward.

At that point the Indian adoption of flintlock firearms became extraordinarily rapid. As early as 1628, wrote William Bradford, an early governor of Plymouth Colony, the moment the Wampanoags "saw the execution that a piece [musket] would do, and the benefit that might come by the same, they became mad (as it were) after them and would not stick to give any price." They reckoned "their bows and arrows but baubles in comparison to them." Exactly a century later the Indians used "nothing but firearms," remarked William Byrd, a Virginia lawyer who traveled the area widely. "Bows and arrows are grown into disuse, except only amongst their boys."

Purchasing firearms was one thing: as with most forms of technology (such as cars and computers), maintaining them in decent condition over the long term added considerably to their cost in time, effort, and cash. Needing not only spare parts to remain in working order, guns also required a constant supply of powder and ammunition. Neither the parts, nor the powder, nor the bullets, let alone skilled gunsmiths, were easy to come by.

The Indians were quick to learn how to make rudimentary repairs and basic lead ammunition. For parts, they cannibalized unsalvageable weapons. According to Bradford, they soon owned "moulds to make shot of all sorts, as musket bullets, pistol bullets, swan and goose shot, and of smaller shots," then moved on to forging "screw-plates to make screw-pins themselves when they want them." Given that settlers generally took their firearms to smiths if they were broken, the Indians' ability to take care of the bare essentials meant that they were soon "better fitted and furnished than the English themselves."

Still, performing a simple repair on a gun was a far cry from manufacturing one. Aware of the necessity of keeping certain forms of knowledge and technology out of Indian hands, in 1630 New England colonial governments forbade whites to teach any Indian how "to make or amend" firearms. A decade later gunsmiths were banned from repairing seriously damaged Indian-owned weapons; in reaction, Indians took up blacksmithing. In the 1650s, in a final effort at gun control, New Englanders outlawed the sale or distribution of key specialized parts, such as barrels and firelocks, that only experienced artisans could produce.

Not surprisingly, the talents of competent gunsmiths became highly prized&...