Captain John Dillin's book, The Kentucky Rifle well if you haven't read it you don't know nuthin' real about Kentucky rifles.
I really do not want to know this, but someone otta ask.
Since I was 10 years old I have assumed that if a rifle was pictured in Dillin then that rifle must be a Real Honest Antique Kentucky Rifle. After all, "new" made rifles, and/or flat out fakes are a contemporary phenomenon.
Aren't they?
Hmmm . . . decade or two back whilst at Collectors Firearms, Houston, I looked at a very fine flintlock rifle. They said it had been made in the early 20th century, so was not exactly being sold as an antique. Nice gun, though.
In 2005 at the MAAC show I chose to "get in touch with the ten-year old in me" I bought rifle #3 in Plates 93 & 94, pages 83-84, from the St. John Collection. Been in Michigan since the 1950's, verbal history. Seems to be an upper Susquehanna rifle. Near new condition, no indication it is other than a Real Rifle. Well, the barrel is smoothbore about .44 caliber. And although the gun is in very fine condition, the lock has been shot so much the hammer (frizzen, to some) required to be refaced by brazing on a new bit of steel. Oh well, this is one of the rifles I have drooled over since Dad let me read his Dillin one hot Pennsylvania summer when HST was givin' them h--. So I'm sure since this rifle is in the Honored Dillin it must be correct.
Right? ? ? ?
Now I see that Thomaston Place Auction Galleries, 51 Atlantic Hwy, Thomaston, Maine Lot 303 is rifle #3, Plate 14 of Dillin. "From the collection of John Laidacker, via Paul C. Boehret."
The buttstock has been stretched, Thomaston says "with oak and bone filler", the trigger guard looks like mid-19th century Midwest, e.g. Ohio, and it has a CAP box, not a patchbox. Well, in Dillin there is only a hole where the capbox had been, now it has a nice mid-19th century brass capbox inserted. Were this rifle not in Dillin we'd all pick it apart as made up from a couple different rifles.
But its in Dillin, man!
Wonder just how long people have been making up Kentuckies? Might be a good idea NOT to do as I did, accepting anything from this 1924 bible as The Real Thing?
Does anyone really want to know?
