A Mountain Man's Rifle

I pulled the set trigger on a replica .50 caliber Hawken rifle.  Now a tap on the forward trigger would fire the rifle.  With its dual triggers and percussion cap firing system, a Hawken would have been a top-of-the-line rifle in 1833.  A mountain man would have been lucky to have one.  I breathed deeply, let out half the breath, set my cheek firmly against the stock, and shut my left eye.

I remember one evening back in Georgia when I climbed up into my treestand with my usual rifle.  I had just gotten comfortable in the stand and leaned my rifle in the corner when I saw hogs feeding on the edge of a swamp.  Ten to twelve of them, way in the distance – scattered between 400 and 500 yards away.  A very long shot.  But my rifle was a good one, a Browning bolt action in .308 with a 3-9x scope on it, I was shooting high-quality ammunition, and I had just gotten off the shooting range.  I was confident.  I picked up the rifle, rested the foregrip on the edge of the stand, centered the crosshairs a few inches above a fat hog’s back, and fired.  I missed, but the hogs were so far away that they didn’t spook at the sound of the rifle.  I lifted the bolt handle, pulled it back, pushed it forward, then pressed it down.  The rifle was ready to fire again.  This time I held a little higher.  I squeezed the trigger.  The report of the rifle broke the stillness again, and about a half-second later, I heard the thwack of a bullet striking flesh.  A hog fell.  I worked the bolt and fired again.  I shot eight times in the span of a few minutes.  I killed five hogs.

After I tramped across the swamp, I rolled the hogs over to see where the bullets had hit and where they’d exited.  I was shooting premium cartridges, loaded with conical bullets that were designed to expand when they hit the target, but to stop expanding before the bullet disintegrated so that the bullet retained its mass and penetrated deep into the target.  Or if the bullet was moving relatively slowly when it hit the target – as these bullets were, since the hogs were so far away – the bullets were designed to expand very little to ensure adequate penetration.  Most of my shots had been good ones, striking the hogs in the shoulders and passing through the vitals, and in four of the hogs, the bullets had passed all the way through.  At this range – about a quarter mile – that was excellent performance by my scope, rifle, and cartridges.  And, frankly, damn good shooting on my part.

Hogs in the truck bed; my rifle lying on top.

A cross-section of the Barnes MRX, the bullet that I prefer in my .308.  The bullet on the right shows what happens after the bullet strikes its target -- the plastic tip disintegrates, then the notched copper peels back, causing the bullet to expand if it hits its target while traveling fast enough.  Under no conditions, however, will it expand further than the bullet on the right.  Such limited expansion ensures adequate penetration.  A good balance between expansion and penetration is crucial for a clean kill.

I squinted down the barrel of the replica Hawken.  It had no scope, of course, so instead of centering crosshairs on a target that appears in the same visual plane as the crosshairs, I had to line up the rifle’s rear sight, front sight, and target, all which appear in different planes because they’re at different distances from your eye.  The front sight was a tiny metal bead that the shooter places on top of the target.  The shooter then adjusts the rifle so that the target and bead are centered in the V-notch cut into the rear sight.  When all three are aligned – the target, bead, and V-notch – then the shooter should fire.  My target was a sheet of notebook paper stapled to a cardboard box 50 yards away.  I had marked a dot in the middle of the paper for a more precise target, but that had turned out to be foolish since the front bead sight covered up most of the sheet.  I couldn’t come anywhere close to seeing the dot, so I just covered up the middle section of the paper with the bead, then held the bead in the V-notch.  I touched the trigger and, with a roar and a burst of smoke, the rifle fired.

I laid the rifle down and walked toward the box.  The trappers’ armament and my .308 bolt action rifle were worlds apart.  Compared to most modern cartridges, the round I favor – the .308 Winchester – was a heavy, slow-moving bullet.  Even so, the bullet with which I’d killed the hogs left the muzzle at about 2600 feet per second, and it was a sharply-pointed conical bullet designed to cut through air with minimum resistance.  The ball I was firing out of the Hawken, in contrast, left the muzzle at 1900 fps and wasn’t designed for aerodynamics at all – it was a lead sphere.  So the Hawken’s ball started slower, and lost velocity faster, than my .308 bullets.  The net result is this: if I adjust the sights on my .308 so that the bullet will strike my point of aim at 100 yards, then the bullet will be 0.1 inches high at 50 yards and about 25 inches low at 400 yards.  If I adjust the sights the same way on the Hawken – that is to say, “sight it in” at 100 yards – the bullet will strike 1.7 inches high at 50 yards and a whopping 7 feet low at 400 yards.  In practical terms, that means the Hawken is a short-range weapon.  The shots I made on those five hogs wouldn’t have been possible with a Hawken.  Not even close.  At least for someone of my proficiency, the Hawken is a 100-yard gun.

The replica Hawken, built by my Uncle Dennis from a kit in the '70s or '80s.  Near the corner of the table are the lead balls that the rifle fires.

I walked up to the cardboard box and squatted in front of it.  I was “sighting the rifle in” – that is, adjusting the sights until the point where the sights indicated was the point where the ball struck.  That means you aim, shoot, adjust the sights, then aim, shoot, adjust the sights, and repeat the process until the ball strikes true.  I hadn’t even hit the paper.  There was a hole in the cardboard, though, about two inches above the paper and a few inches to the right of center.  That would require significant adjustment.  I walked back to the rifle, picked up a screwdriver, and adjusted the rear sight.

Hopefully the next ball would strike true.  I swiped the bore clean, measured 85 grains of black powder, poured the powder down the barrel, centered a precut cloth patch on the muzzle, pressed a ball onto the patch, started the patch and ball down the barrel with the ball starter, rammed the patch and ball down to the powder with the ramrod, picked up the gun, cocked the hammer, and placed a percussion cap onto the nipple under the hammer.  Now, when I pulled the set trigger, the gun would be ready to fire.  It took a couple minutes.  If you were a mountain man, I thought, you’d want to load your gun before you saw the grizzly.



And even then it would take a well-placed ball to kill a grizzly with a muzzleloader.  Because in addition to being slow-moving and aerodynamically inefficient, a lead ball departing from the muzzle of a Hawken does not penetrate game reliably.  As compared to the bullets I shoot in my .308, a lead ball is soft.  When it hits flesh, it tends to disintegrate.  That disintegration is fine if you’re shooting into the side of a relatively small animal, like a deer, because the bullet doesn’t need to penetrate deeply before it reaches the lungs and heart.  But if you’re shooting into something large – e.g., a grizzly bear, buffalo, elk, or even a deer from an angle other than broadside – then you’d want more penetration so that your bullet will reach the animal’s vital organs.  Otherwise, you can’t be sure of inflicting a mortal wound.  And if the lead ball strikes bone before reaching an animal’s vitals – if, e.g., you hit the shoulder bone on a broadside shot – then the ball may never reach the vitals.  In the case of a deer, elk, or buffalo, the animal will probably escape, since you will probably not be able to reload quickly enough for a second shot.  In the case of a grizzly bear, you may have only pissed him off.  That’s not good.

I lifted the rifle to my cheek, pulled the set trigger, and squinted along the barrel at the piece of paper.  The Hawken is fun to shoot, but I’m glad it’s not my meal ticket and protector.