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Gun violence is much in the news these days.
The unfortunate fact seems to be that the United States has an overabundance of firearms due to our historic decision to make sure every farmer had the means to fend off tyranny.
Guns of all kinds have been such a tradition in America that gun-derived terms have entered everyday language. When someone says they’re selling out lock, stock, and barrel, they probably don’t realize they’re referring to the three major parts of a flintlock rifle or musket. Hair trigger, misfire, quick on the trigger, ramrod straight, keep your powder dry, keep your sights set, and other such terms all hark back to the days when, we are told, everyone kept a loaded musket behind the door in the cabin to guard against marauding Indians.
The very first European settlers in North America brought crude matchlock firearms with them. To fire them, the weaponeer had to light a slow-burning length of fuse, called a slow match, the smoldering end of which was gripped in the jaws of the weapon’s hammer. After loading the matchlock, the trigger was pulled, which pressed the lighted end of the match into the gunpowder causing the weapon to fire. Needless to say, a bit of rain or wind pretty much eliminated any gunfighting.
Matchlocks were replaced by wheellocks, which used a spring-driven wheel that spun a bit of flint against a piece of high-carbon steel to create sparks that ignited the weapon’s gunpowder. Wheellocks were better and more dependable than matchlocks, but their complicated actions made wheellocks very expensive.
Then some bright person invented the flintlock. The first flintlock was called the snaphaunce. Although the name’s Dutch in origin, it’s unclear whether the Dutch invented the snaphaunce, which featured a hammer that held a small piece of flint in its jaws that, when the trigger was pulled, rotated against a piece of high-carbon steel called the frizzen, creating sparks that fell into a small open pan filled with finely ground gunpowder to set off the gun’s charge. The Achilles heel of the snaphaunce was that open pan, a defect corrected when the true flintlock was developed.
“Flintlock” refers to the mechanism that caused the ignition of a weapon’s gunpowder. Similar to the snaphaunce, the flintlock included a hammer with jaws gripping a piece of flint, a priming pan, and a frizzen against which the flint struck, causing sparks. The hammer was spring driven, snapping forward when the trigger was pulled. The flint in the hammer jaws struck hard against the frizzen, creating sparks. The frizzen was driven forward by the force of the flint scraping against it, uncovering the priming pan (the covered pan was the improvement that made the flintlock so much more dependable than the snaphaunce), in which a pinch of very finely ground gunpowder had been placed. The sparks created were directed into the pan by the curved face of the frizzen, setting off the priming powder.
Part of the resulting flame went through the touchhole into the weapon’s barrel, where it set off the main powder charge.
At least that was the plan.
With such a complicated chain of events, misfires were common. If it was raining, wet priming powder wouldn’t set off the weapon, and if it was particularly windy, the wind might blow the powder out of the pan before it could ignite. Or the touchhole might be clogged.
And a musket or rifle had to be loaded just right in order to fire, too. The powder had to be measured and poured into the barrel, and then if it was a musket (smooth barreled), the musket ball was simply dropped down the barrel, followed by a bit of paper wadding to hold the ball in place. After loading the priming pan received its bit of gunpowder, and the frizzen was closed, the hammer cocked, aim was taken, and the trigger pulled. If all went well, the gun fired.
Smooth-bored muskets were the favored arm of the militaries of the 16th, 17th, 18th, and the first half of the 19th centuries. They were easy to load and could be fired relatively rapidly. Rifled arms were made popular by the German Jaegers (hunters) who accompanied European armies as scouts.
Over here in the New World, Pennsylvania German gunsmiths modified the jaeger rifle, which was short and usually of large caliber (.69 was popular), into what today is misnamed the Kentucky rifle. These slim, graceful, accurate rifles were long, about five feet, and had relatively small bores of .36 to .45 caliber. They were made famous during the Revolutionary War by small units of riflemen who earned far bigger reputations than their numbers justified.
The regular military was slow to adopt the rifle because early rifles had octagon shaped barrels that prevented fitting bayonets, and bayonets were important weapons in the days of single shot firearms. But in 1803, the U.S. Army finally adopted, for limited use, the Harper’s Ferry rifle. Although muskets were still favored for the regular Army, Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery was outfitted with Harper’s Ferry rifles.
When the first settlers arrived here in Kendall County, not all of them were armed. The ones who were often brought surplus smoothbore flintlock muskets of War of 1812 vintage. Flintlocks had the advantage of being able to double as fire-starters—they could just as easily set fire to a wad of tow or shredded grass as priming powder. Surprisingly few early settlers were armed. During the Black Hawk War of 1832, when more than 120 settlers from Will and Kendall counties fled to Walker’s Grove—now Plainfield—for mutual safety, they took inventory and found they only had four firearms among them.
The frontier era in Kendall County lasted less than 10 years, during which a relatively small number of residents owned firearms. It may seem odd to those of us raised on Westerns and historical fiction, but it’s probably safe to say that county residents, on a per capita basis, are better armed today than they were in 1832.
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