I had the opportunity to visit James Gordon’s Casa Escuela Museum and view his private collection of firearms and historical objects this past weekend.
The collection is housed in an old school house.
Jim’s collection is difficult to describe as it is all encompassing from Spanish exploration to early colonial to fur trade to western expansion and finally old west. It may be best just to show some photos of a few of the rooms in the old school house.
As you can see, just about every square inch of wall space and much of the floor space is covered with guns and artifacts.
Jim’s latest book is
Weapons In Early American History. Below is a description of the book and ordering information for anyone interested.
On page 135 of the book is a very interesting rifle. In modern terms, one might be tempted to call it a sporterized military firearm. A more accurate description is a repurposing of military rifle parts. The rifle appears to have been built using Harpers Ferry 1803 lock and furniture.
After seeing the rifle in the book, it was one of my primary objectives while visiting the museum to see the rifle in person and examine and photograph it, if possible.
It was possible. And the rifle turned out to be as it appeared in the book, but with a few unexpected characteristics.
The lock and much of the furniture on the rifle is from a HF 1803. The lock is dated 1806.
I had a little movement of the camera on the photo above which caused it to be a little blurry, but I think you can make everything out.
You can easily see where the forward lock bolt hole has been plugged. There is another plug in the lock plate just above the rear tip of the frizzen spring. I'm not sure what hole this might have been unless it had something to do with a previous main spring stud.
The trigger guard is not from HF 1803, but rather typical of a Lancaster trade rifle. The lock is held on with only one lock bolt, and it had a small escutcheon almost tear dropped shape. Note the wrist was checkered but now almost worn smooth.
As seen in the photo above, the steel ramrod, lower entry pipe, and brass nose band are from a HF 1803. I didn’t inspect the underrib close enough to determine its source. Obviously, the barrel key escutcheon is not.
The beaver tail cheekpiece is paneled. Some Hawken rifles had this treatment on the cheekpiece. John Baird attributed those guns with paneled cheekpiece to Tristam Campbell. With the passing years, additional J&S Hawken rifles have come to light since Baird wrote his books. At least one of these, the Atchison Hawken, has a paneled cheekpiece and was built before Campbell started working in the Hawken shop. It is dated 1836. It’s apparent now that a paneled cheekpiece does not date a Hawken rifle. They can be found on early J&S Hawken as well as later S Hawken rifles.
The caption with the pictures in Gordon’s book gives the barrel length as 32" long. I measured the barrel diameter to be 1.05" at the breech, 1.03" at the nose band, and 1.02" at the muzzle. The measurements indicate that the barrel has a very slight taper, but three hundreds of an inch over 32" is hardly perceptible to the eye.
The ID of the bore at the muzzle was .67" with no apparent rifling. This could be due to rod wear. We did not drop a bore light down the bore, so I don't know if it had any rifling further down or if it was a smoothbore.
All in all, this is a very interesting gun. Jim Gordon didn't remember, off the top of his head, any history on the gun. We don't know when it was built or by whom. Some time after 1806 and before the end of the flintlock era.
Still the fact that someone during the flintlock era chose to build a half stock, flintlock rifle based on a HF 1803 means that the Hawken brothers could have come up with the idea, too.
The re-stocker pretty well followed the lines of the original HF 1803 stock except for the cheekpiece.
The beaver tail cheekpiece is the most intriguing aspect of this gun. Compare it to the cheekpiece on these two early J&S Hawken marked rifles. And notice the first one, the Atchison Hawken, has a checkered wrist similar to the subject rifle.
This rifle is only a step or two away from a classic J&S Hawken mountain rifle.
