Dear Dphariss, I am not sure you understand what I am getting at.
I am not saying the flintlock died over night. I am saying that it is odd for people to put a flintlock onto a late half stock percussion design, the same way it would be odd to put a late Vincent butt-plate and trigger guard onto an early Moravian design. They don't historically appear to belong together.
I also do not understand how speculation that "they didn't survive" and "that it seems only reasonable that some people would have stuck with flint because they trusted it" is historical evidence that they existed beyond a very few examples.
I believe that there are a very few original late half stocks built as flintlocks. I do not believe that there were thousands of these built by H. Leman and would be surprised if even one half stock Leman flinter could be documented much less a Hawken.
No body is forced to build historically correct pieces, and technically most new builds compromise historical accuracy one way or another, such as the tall sights that are the norm now. However each of us draws a compromise line, for instance few on this board would build their next Bedford with a stainless steel barrel in spite of all its good properties. The compromise that has an adverse effect on my panties is putting flintlocks on half stock Hawkens and Lemans because we like flintlocks so much.
I probably know better than you might think. I have been at this a long time and I know trying to apply absolutes to history is a mistake.
First off. The 1/2 stock Hawken was a modified, Americanized if you will, English sporting rifle which I am sure first appeared in St Louis as a flint since even in England the FL rifle hung on longer than in shotguns and exports to America where what ever was ordered. The American Fur Company was, for years, importing most of the rifles it sold. But they were fullstocked so far as the documentation states. 1/2 stock flintlocks were being make almost everywhere by 1820. People may want to think that the plains rifle was only made in the west and that it was the common rifle in the fur trade era. It was apparently not. Most of the rifles came from the east and for most of the Rendezvous era were flint. Its documented pretty well that the American Fur Company was specifically NOT ordering percussion rifles into the early 1830s. And these Henry rifles were apparently well respected in the West. So its impossible for there NOT to have been 1/2 FLs used in the American and likely made there as well. The problem arises when people give up on common sense and start demanding "proof". Its not our fault people did not write things down that we want to know about. Or that photography was not available in 1820. That the FL survived well into the 1840s in the West and elsewhere and in fact never went out of use in America cannot be refuted. But people want "proof". Has anyone here read the citation I listed above? How one could and then state that a 1/2 stocked FL rifle is incorrect is beyond me. Leman was still making flintlocks in the 1840s. The one I saw was unused and basically junk as many Lemans were, but it was a dated FL, yeah a fullstock but I don't consider that even a talking point. But people get into the "its gotta be documented" when in many cases the existing documentation is at best partial, out of context or MISUNDERSTOOD. Like some of the "studies" of estates that "prove" that few people in early America had firearms. Never mind the militia laws and people passing their guns on before their death, ect. ect.
People need to understand that people going west were often very conservative in their choices. Firearms was part of the choices made and as John Bidwell one of the leaders of an early party to California in 1841 is quoted in "Firearms of the American West 1806-1866" "..my gun was an old flint-lock rifle, but a good one. Old hunters told me to have nothing to do with cap or percussion locks, that they were unreliable, and if I caps or percussion wet I could not shoot, while if I lost my flint I could pickup another on the plains". I have done this a number of times over the years sometime picking up 2 or more pieces of agate or flint in a few minutes. By the mid-1830s the uniformity and reliability of the percussion cap was much improved it seems and they began to perhaps be in the majority in the west.
If someone can find a citation of Osborne Russell or some other writer of the time saying his rifle is a full or a half-stocked or specifically percussion in the late 1820s or early 1830s I would like to see it. That there were guns converted to percussion in the field is documented. Also that percussion "tubes" are reported to have "burst" with would be, and was, inconvenient.
All this aside GIVEN THE ATTITUDE of the time there HAD to be FL "plains" rifles made. Some surely by the Hawken brothers. I don't consider full or halfstocked to be important. They made rifles both ways and I can't see how they could not have made some 1/2 stocked. They HAD to know of the 1803 and it prototypes since Jake worked at HF from 1808 to 1818. Thinking he did not understand and know how to make 1/2 stocked FL rifles?
Now on the frontier the FS would be easier to make, cheaper and what many people would probably want. So this tilts the scale away from the 1/2 stock being made in 1820-25 St Louis area. But this did not stop them coming down the Ohio.
So I see no point in worrying about 1/2 or fullstocked since it cannot be CONCLUSIVELY proved yea or nay that NO ONE used a 1/2 stock FL west of St Louis in 1820-30-40 or even later.
Dan
