Wayne - you are correct - the Bogle rifle is the rifle that Ron Borron did the drawing of and Myron copied the hardware for. There are strong characteristics shared with some Virginia work - John Davidson in particular. There are actually two versions of the drawing floating around - Ron's first one has the original lock and the original drop in the buttstock. I believe he did a second version of the drawing with a Durs Egg lock and a little less drop to update the plans a bit to suit modern builders/shooters. However, in the times I have handled the original I never noticed that it was difficult to shoulder - seemed like it held really well actually.
Myron always said that he regretted not copying the triggers for that rifle - they are very unique.
Jerry Noble's Volume 3 (I think) shows at least one - maybe two - other Bogle attributed rifles. Wayne - correct me if I am wrong, as I am not positive if these are attributed to the same Jos Bogle maker of the McTeer rifle, or the later nephew. I also know of one other in a private collection. All have similar architecture and mounts. Bogle died in 1811, and there is little evidence that he was making rifles in the latter years of his life, so that puts a firm end date on his rifles and suggests that the rifles we have to examine might date as early as the 1790s.
Some other early Tennessee rifles with a similar early feel include some of the early work of John Bull - such as the "John Bull for Isaac Guess rifle; or the Stephen Crain rilfe, also retains a similar early feel. As does this rifle (not necessarily from TN - Virginia and North Carolina have also nbeen suggested):
http://americanlongrifles.org/forum/index.php?topic=14832.0The Bogle rifle does predate surviving examples of what most think of as the classic Tennessee “Bean” style rifles referred to referred to in the first post. In addition to timeframes, we need to keep in mind that the Bean rifles were from a slightly different area of the Tennessee mountains - up in the corner closer to where TN/ VA and NC meet, whereas Bogle worked over on the west side of the Smokies - more than 50 miles southwest of the "upper east Tennessee area.
Russell Bean appears to have been working in East Tennessee by the late 1780s - by the time Joseph Bogle arrived in what is now Blount County. What Russell’s rifles made in that era looked like we do not know. So we really don't know how early the characteristics of the "Bean" style mountain rifle started to appear. It is tempting to assume that there was a clean orderly evolution from the more “conventional” looking rifles - like the Bogle - that exhibit characteristics traceable to the documented gunmaking styles brought in from east of the mountains - to the later, more highly stylized rifles we associate with the Bean family and other moutain gunsmiths. While it is possible that pieces like the Bogle rifle reflect a first stage in the transition from the eastern styles brought into the region in the 18th century toward what we think of as the later mountain rifle, we should also consider the possibility that the Beans and other early mountain gunmakers might have already established the beginnings of a general style that was evolving in parallel to, and separate from the general styles we see on guns from the more well documeted gunmaking areas in the 1780s – rather than directly from them. So it is possible that even some of the early gunmakers like Joseph Bogle were influenced by a growing local gunsmith style and customer preference that was already there when they arrived, and adapted their work to suit.
GM
