Wallace has a take on a lighter colored stain and finish all in one and I'm sure he's accurate as to what was done on some of this stuff when new. Certainly, on heavily carved pieces, that last thing anyone really wants to do is hit them with anything water based.
Since the Marshall rifle was mentioned, I will chime in and say that I don't see it as being particularly light but it does have a great golden-amber-light brown color. It's been photographed multiple times and it seems to look different depending upon the lighting, and it looks different in person too. It's also heavily worn as it was heavily used. My *speculation* is that originally, it probably was given a light wash of something - be it aquafortis or something else - to darken the white wood a bit, and then it was finished with a darker oil varnish probably tinted somewhere in the red-brown spectrum. #42 was done this way, I think one or two of the Oerter's at least were done this way. They seem to have remnants of an oil finish that has a dark red in it. 42 certainly has something dark red added in the thin finish, not the underlying stain. I would suspect that the Marshall gun probably had a darker colored varnish on it at one time but it's all been scrubbed away at this point, and now the gun looks considerably lighter because the wood was not stained dark to begin with.
You can see this approach all over NH county, some of the earliest Moll rifles particularly which utilize overall various colors of oil varnishes (mostly reds and yellow-amber) over otherwise light colored wood staining/coloring. This was all done with resins or precipitated iron oxides, or both.
Just some thoughts. I don't personally like lighter colored maple until it's been used and aged a bit and has darkened somewhat.
The Jack Brooks rifle Bob illustrated is a great color.
