I've finally looked through my various books, magazines, and catalogs and found a number of references to the Santa Fe Hawken and the Jedediah Smith Commemorative rifles that document their development.
Since I have already given some quotes from this source, I thought I would start out with excerpts from Dixie Gun Works' BLACK POWDER ANNUAL – 1981 SHOOTERS EDITION, copyrighted 1980. The section on the Jed Smith Commemorative starts about midway down the first column.
Next is the earliest advertisement I could find for the Santa Fe Hawken and the Jedediah Smith Commemorative rifles from the May-Jun 1978 issue of Muzzleloader magazine. This appears to be announcing both versions of the rifle as well as the commemorative pistol discussed else where in the BLACK POWDER ANNUAL article.
This ad was continued in every remaining issue of the magazine for the rest of the year and into 1979. Considering the common practice in the firearms industry to start advertising prior to the availability of the actual firearms to create some pent-up demand, I suspect the issue date for both rifles was 1979. The development of the rifle probably started much earlier such as 1977.
Allen Firearms, formerly Western Arms, went out of business in 1987, so that is likely the end of the run of the Commemorative rifle, though, Old-West Gun Co., now Cimarron F.A., may have continued to sell some of the rifles as they bought the remaining inventory of Allen Firearms. Cimarron F.A. continued to market the Santa Fe Hawken for a number of years under their own name. In fact, they still list it on their web page, but it is currently manufactured by Pedersoli. I don't know when Uberti quit making the Santa Fe Hawken, but it may have been in 1994. They re-issued it in the early 2000's, but apparently discontinued it again in recent years. The run for the Jed Smith Commemorative may have reached the full 1000 rifles. Here is a picture of SN #965 that sold at an auction in October 2011.
Next I found references to the Santa Fe Hawken by Western Arms offered in Track of the Wolf's Catalog #8, copyrighted 1981. They sold the rifle as a kit.
TOTW continued to offer a fully assembled kit of the rifle in their Catalog #9.
Please note the enlarged section below that is probably the best source for the lineage of the Uberti Hawkens.
I have a version of the Santa Fe Hawken that's in-the-white, similar to the listing in the TOTW's Catalog #9 except the barrel is stamped with “CIMARRON ARMS – HOUSTON, TEXAS”. I haven't tried to interchange the parts with an Ithaca Hawken I have, but the lock plate, butt plate, trigger bar, and German silver nosecap look identical and may well interchange. I suspect that Navy Arms, who had bought the rights to the Ithaca Hawken about this time, had arranged for Uberti to copy the Ithaca Hawken and start manufacturing it for them, which they ultimately did.
I was aware that Western Arms and Uberti had been working to build an exact replica of a J&S Hawken rifle. What I didn't realize until I did this literature search is that the J&S Hawken reproduction, sometimes referred to as the Baird-Webber version, was being developed by Uberti about the same time as the Santa Fe Hawken. This is an excerpt from the November 1979 issue of BuckSkin Report describing this effort.
You will note that in the initial ad and announcement of the Santa Fe and Jed Smith Commemorative rifles that Leonard Allen alluded to “the first of many models, duplicating the variations of the Hawken brothers in fullstock, flintlock, different calibers and woods. Each model will be submitted to acknowledged contemporary authorities for their inspection, testing and critical comments...” I interpret this to mean that they were working on the Baird-Webber J&S Hawken and the Santa Fe Hawken at the same time and that Allen had plans to sell both of them. Unfortunately, this was not to be. I've read several opinions as to why the Baird-Webber J&S Hawken never went into full production. I doubt that anyone living really knows.
One factor that I haven't seen mentioned is the economic situation at the time. The end of the 1970's and beginning of the 1980's saw double digit inflation. The country suffered from recessions in 1973-75, again in 1980, and another one in 1981-82. This roller coaster ride in the economy would have made it very challenging for Uberti and Western Arms to introduce another new rifle into the market and likely contributed to the decision not to go into full production of the J&S Hawken replica.
How did the stories get started that the Santa Fe and Jed Smith Commemorative Hawken rifles were exact copies of Kit Carson's last Hawken and Jedediah Smith's last Hawken? The name “Santa Fe” may have been the source for the association with Kit Carson's last Hawken, since it was exhibited in the Masonic Lodge in Santa Fe and a lot of people were/are familiar with it. The notion that the Commemorative rifle is an exact copy of Jed Smith's last Hawken may be more convoluted.
Hungry Horse in a post on Hawken Barrels (
http://americanlongrifles.org/forum/index.php?topic=20764.0) states that, “Jed Smith's [rifle] is in the Palace of the Governors, in Santa Fe.”
There were, at one time, two Hawken rifles in the New Mexico State Museum housed in the old Governors Palace in Santa Fe. J.W. “Doc” Carlson published an article in the May-Jun 1979 issue of Muzzleloader magazine describing these rifles.
It is interesting that Carlson didn't recognize the first rifle as an original fullstock Hawken that had been cut to halfstock on the frontier. The Tennessee cheek piece, fixed patent breech, pewter nosecap, and wooden underrib are obvious giveaways.
Neither of these rifles are attributed to Jed Smith. In fact, the second one is marked S. Hawken and the first one is likely a S. Hawken rifle, both of which would have been made well after Jed Smith's death.
Western Arms had one or more Uberti prototypes of the Baird-Webber J&S Hawken made. These rifles could have been seen at rendezvous as part of Western Arms marketing effort. It would have been easy for someone who had seen them or heard of them to associate them with one of the rifles in the Governors Palace.
Such is the nature of modern muzzleloading lore to elaborate the story in retelling it. The documentation that I've found doesn't support the notion that the Santa Fe is an exact copy of the Carson Hawken, but I bet we will continue to see it posted on this and other forums for years to come. As John Ford apply demonstrated, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
How similar is Western Arms' Santa Fe Hawken to Kit Carson's last Hawken?
The Santa Fe, like the Ithaca Hawken that preceded it, is representative of Sam Hawken's rifles made in the 1850's. It has features similar to a number of Sam's rifles such as Plate No. 61 in Baird's first book, including the German silver nosecap. The butt plate is like the ones shown in Plate Nos. 66, 69, and 74. The lock resembles rifles from both the J&S and Sam periods. The trigger guard scroll, on the other had, isn't right for any Sam Hawken rifle in that it has too much curl in the scroll.
The Kit Carson Hawken is the evolutionary peak of the late Sam Hawken rifle. This is most obvious in the relationship and fit of the hammer to the fence of the tang and the snail on the breech plug. The Hawken shop had started using cast butt plates, trigger guards, and nosecaps by the time that the Carson Hawken was built. These cast parts defined certain lines of the rifle as they guided how the stock was shaped between the parts. The use of these cast parts established a certain pattern with less of the variations that earlier rifles exhibited when each metal part was hand forged. (See James Gordon's book for pictures of several rifles that used these cast parts and follow this specific pattern.) Primarily because the Santa Fe Hawken doesn't use exact replicas of these cast parts, it doesn't follow the pattern. Being of a different pattern, it can't be considered a copy of the Carson Hawken. Had Uberti faithfully followed the blue prints marketed by Wayne Robidoux, drawn from a late Sam Hawken rifle that was built with these cast parts, it would have resulted in a rifle that more closely followed the Carson pattern.
