1792 Contract Rifle in Original Flintlock

[4575wcf]

The McCormick pistol is in the Smithsonian Institution, sorry to not have given the source. This is a good place to find some sleepers in my opinion. The presence of the Ketland lock on either the contract rifle lots of 1792-4 or 1807 is so obviously missing, even if the rifle size was ordered specifically for them, the contractors were not using them. Imported hardened locks were the norm, rather than the exception, but apparently not the Ketland. The Ketland 3/4 lock looks like a heck of a good solid lock to me, the geometry is correct, and they look like they would be good reliable sparkers. Lewis, as some have mentioned, was more than familiar with flintlocks and rifles. It certainly would have been in his interest to get outfitted with the best that was available, even if a bit more work was involved. To arrive at a common lock for most all the guns would have really simplified things. Lewis could be kind of brilliant in his moments. I think the modifications he ordered at Harper's Ferry were arrived at after considerably forethought by him, and were really a better mousetrap. I believe the M1803 was "inspired" by Lewis's rifle not the other way around. Where in the world did the half stock idea come from though? No muzzle-loading military rifles were half-stocked before or after.

 

[4575wcf]

Track of the Wolf is currently closing out their Rifle Shoppe McCormick pistol lock parts. A hundred dollars buys most of them, but I am sworn off any more "projects" til this LC Smith shotgun build is completed : ). I'll never grow up. "My" version of the L & C rifle would be unique--you gotta give it that.

 

[plmeek]

Tait found four contract rifles none of which have slings. These rifles were refitted with 1803 HF locks, but the locks are dated 1812, a year HF made no rifles. One of the four rifles, by Dickert, originally had a patch box cover nearly identical to that on the later 1803 rifles.

I find this very interesting! Thank you for mentioning this!!!!

One needs to be careful about some of the claims made in print about surviving 1792 Contract Rifles.

Tait published his articles in 1999.

Moller published his Vol. 2 of American Military Shoulder Arms in 2011. In it Moller writes, "Although a total of 3,476 1792 U.S. contract rifles were procured, there are no known examples that can be attributed to these U.S. contracts [emphasis added]." Moller was well aware of Tait's article and his claims, and Moller acknowledges the possibility "that some 1792 U.S. contract rifles may have been issued to the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1803." But he obviously did not recognize the four rifles that Tait identified as 1792 U.S. contract rifles.

There are other collectors and students of arms with similar doubts. Richard A. Holt wrote in ASAC Bulletin 47 (Fall, 1982), article titled "Pre-1814 U.S. Martial Contract Rifles",

But the most amazing single item in the saga of the Model [sic] 1792 Contract Rifle is that while the "to date," but assuredly incomplete, documented delivery of arms totals 3,261, with over half of the total production years unreported, there remains NOT ONE KNOWN example of this rifle today.

Richard Holt has some illustrations of rifles in his article. The first two pages of illustrations have the photo captions backwards. In the linked ASAC article, page 47/12 (Bulletin 47/page 12) shows a Jacob Dickert 1807 Contract Rifle with a patch box very similar to a Harper's Ferry M1803 patch box. The rifle on page 47/13 which is captioned as the Dickert rifle is obviously the M1803 rifle. I don't have a copy of Tait's article, but suspect this may be the same Dickert rifle or a very similar 1807 Contract Rifle he is erroneously calling a 1792 Contract Rifle.

In ASAC Bulletin 97 (Spring, 2008), Edward Flanagan presents what he believes is a 1792 Contract Rifle made by Jacob Demuth. Flanagan states the rifle has been restocked in an stock architecture common in the 1830s and was likely converted to percussion at that time. He identifies it by a "US" stamp on the barrel and "Jacob Demuth" engraved in script on the top barrel flat. How much of this rifle, other than possibly the barrel, is from a 1792 Contract Rifle is debatable.

 

[4575wcf]

I, for one, am convinced that the 1792 rifle brought forth by Flanagan is the real deal. The 42 " full octagon barrel is slightly modified, but present and slightly swamped, the US mark is (was) present. The rifle has no proof marks. "Jacob Demuth" does not exist as a 1792 contractor, but Johannes DeMuth does, he delivered 8 rifles and was paid. The barrel is signed J. Demuth as near as I can tell from the rather crummy picture. Martin Fry III was listed as an active lockmaker by trade at this time, and I believe he made the barrel marked MF. As for the parts, they are all pretty much as we would expect them to be from descriptions we have, except of course for the percussion conversion which happened to the most of the flntlock working guns. There for sure has been some work done on this rifle, but enough of it remains to make a pretty bullet proof ID.

 

[Einsiedler]

Thank you Phil!

 

[4575wcf]

from eslewhere:

"Using Gunsmiths of York County by James Whisker as a reference, I'd consider the rifle pictured by Jacob Doll on page 145. It is a good example of a govt. contract rifle of which I consider to be called a "short rifle" coinciding with Lewis & Clark time period a a little later as well. According to info provided, Doll, Jacob Leather, Henry Pickel and Martin Fry received a contract for 100 rifles. The pictured example scales out to be at close to 36"s, has sling attachments,...."

I thought I had that York County book here, but apparently not. Look up Martin Fry in that book, and the contract rifle mentioned above and see if that does anything for you

Thus my hopes for the academy rifle. Martin Fry shows up as a barrel maker in the Flanigan Rifle? He has no other presence outside of this post here, except he was working for Jacob Leather, who was a contractor for the rifles. It is plain, plain Kentuckies are SCARCE in the 1800 time frame, it has swivels. If everything is original back from the sword bayonet, it could be the deal. Mostly the patchbox bothers me as not typical, but if you have a cheap contract, you have a patchbox that otherwise answers the criteria--you use it.

 

[plmeek]

"Jacob Demuth" does not exist as a 1792 contractor, but Johannes DeMuth does, he delivered 8 rifles and was paid. The barrel is signed J. Demuth as near as I can tell from the rather crummy picture. Martin Fry III was listed as an active lockmaker by trade at this time, and I believe he made the barrel marked MF. As for the parts, they are all pretty much as we would expect them to be from descriptions we have, except of course for the percussion conversion which happened to the most of the flntlock working guns. There for sure has been some work done on this rifle, but enough of it remains to make a pretty bullet proof ID.

Actually "Jacob Demuth" is Flanagan's error that I repeated in that post. He first says, "The following description is based on a recently discovered 1792 contract rifle by Jacob Demuth." Later he has a section headed, "1792 CONTRACT RIFLE BY JOHN DEMUTH" and also gives a little history a John Demuth as a gunsmith. The barrel is signed "J. Demuth", so that's my own error.

Flanagan dedicates a whole paragraph explaining the trigger guard with the long bow. Granted there are other rifles with long bows, but this one looks really odd to me. It may just be a poor re-stocking job, but the whole gun looks like a "parts" gun to me. Of course, that's just my opinion.

 

[4575wcf]

I get your train of thought on the "parts gun" theory. I really do. However, there are some pretty obvious clues going on here. Flanagan notes that 3/4 inch of the original breech is removed, which coincides with the remaining barrel length. A groove in the barrel bottom to clear the front lock screw was required, and another groove exists exactly 3/4 inch further forward. The replaced tumbler and internals now cover the front lock screw hole, but the hole in the plate still exists. Original lockplate.
About has to be. The triggerguard, could be replaced alright, but the question you got to ask, is it typical available representation of Lancaster? No, I think this rifle restocked by a person of only average ability with the original components. I see everything but the stock as a $12 basic rifle, which is what it was.

 

[fireman1]

These are all very speculative thoughts for us to consider. Unfortunately all we have is some documentation and very little to tie it together. Also as a thought exercise, we have the benefit of 230 years of improvements to fog up our thought exercise. What we do know is that Lewis was familiar with rifles. While Lewis was in Philadelphia before he went to Harper's Ferry, he studied all the available journals that would indicate the fauna he would encounter on the great plains. He was aware of the "white" (grizzly) bears, the herds of buffalo and the other large animals such as elk that he would find while the Corps traveled to the west coast. He would have known that the 49 caliber 1792/1794 rifles were inadequate for use on the plains and further west. Depending on the size of the barrels, the gunmakers would have known that the 1792/1794 rifles would have been difficult to modify for the interchangeable locks and after boring the barrel out to 54 caliber may not have been able to stand up to the loads needed in a 54 caliber rifle for buffalo and grizzly bears and elk. We do know that Dearborn studied and made suggestions for improvement of the prototype 1803 rifle that was sent to him prior to approval of the contract for the 4000 1803 rifles. That rifle was 54 caliber. Lewis had the more or less nonspecific orders from Jefferson to Harper's Ferry to build what he wanted. It is not out of the realm of our thought experiment to believe that Lewis had seen and handled one of the 1803 prototypes. These had the advantage of being designed for the interchangeable locks that he knew he would need while the Corps of Discovery. Lewis wasn't the only person to have believed that the most significant part of a flint lock rifle is the lock based on his experience as part of a rifle company and with the use those rifles would have on the plains, Rocky Mountains and the Oregon / Washington forests the locks would be likely to fail at some point in time. Then, it is pure speculation that since those rifles were not authorized for production, the manufacture of the 15 rifles would have been kept discrete and the production would have been under the table so to speak. As to why Lewis, who was so enamored of the frame for his metal framed boat, would have not recorded his thoughts for the requirements for a rifle for the Corps is perplexing to say the least. But there are no descriptions of any of the rifles (or muskets) other than Clark's Small rifle and the air gun and the air gun's description is woefully inadequate. For that matter was Clark's Small rifle made by Small or was it of small caliber or both. I believe that there are some references to the rifle using balls of 100 to the pound or approximately 36 caliber.

The USA's first "black ops" mission?

Earlier in the thread someone posted about a quantity of 500 M1803? rifles ordered but 515 delivered or paid for? I wonder if the extra 15 were the ones delivered to L&C unofficially.

I'm probably wrong.

 

[kansas_volunteer]

Things have gotten deep. I'm having trouble keeping up. A couple of recent mentions caught my eye. First, speculation Lewis had a hand in designing a prototype 1803 rifle. HF didn't receive the written order to begin a prototype 1803 until well after Lewis departed. He may have suggested 54 caliber, but he couldn't have done anything more hands on. The 1803 has a couple of similarities to the 1792. The apparent shape of the patchbox and the patch box release.

Second, as for the magic number 54. Forty-nine caliber 1792 rifles probably could have been bored out to 54. The Flanagan article give the dimension of the swampped barrel of his subject piece as just a hair under one-inch at the breech. We have many current examples of 54 caliber rifles with 15/16ths barrels.

I'm having trouble with Tait's writing. My eyes aren't up to it. I need a decent magnifier. It would be nice if I had a way to post a copy on line as a pdf. Any thoughts.

 

[4575wcf]

You could lay in one of those big lighted desktop magnifying rings. I worked in a shop that had a good one and it was a lifesaver for detailed lathe tool grinds. My eyes are fine but my arms are getting shorter.

 

[plmeek]

As a suggestion, you need to think .49 caliber and .54 caliber in nominal terms. Back then, they referred to bore size in terms of the number of balls per pound that the gun or rifle could carry. The American Fur Company ordered 95% of their rifles for the Western trade from 40 balls-to-the-pound to 32 balls-to-the-pound.

Depending on the type of gun, one needs to add "windage" to the ball diameter to arrive at the actual bore size. The windage was necessary to give space for the patch (cloth or paper) and fouling build-up. Rifles were normally given less windage than and smoothbores and civilian smoothbores usually had less windage than military muskets.

The diameter of a ball that took 40 to weigh a pound is 0.488 inches. Adding 0.010 inches for windage in a rifle gives a bore of 0.498 inches or a nominal .50 caliber, rounding up. Similarly, 32 balls-to-the-pound results in a ball with a diameter of 0.526 inches. Adding the same 10 thousandths of an inch yields a 0.536 inch bore or a nominal .54 caliber, rounding up.

When they were contracting for Army rifle in 1792, General Hand sent Secretary of War Knox a sample rifle that carried 45 balls per pound to examine. In a letter back to General Hand dated February 4th, 1792, Knox wrote, "...the bore is rather too small--it seems to be the result, that a bore carrying balls of thirty-two to the pound would be the most philosophical, and the best in practice, as less liable to foul than a smaller bore--but as prejudices are formed by the frontier people in favor of small bores, it has been decided, that the standard should carry balls forty to the pound."

So Knox settled on a nominal .50 caliber for the 1792 Contract rifle, but the barrel makers of the day probably didn't hold the tolerances of the barrels to an exact figure. The bore of the barrels could have easily varied from .49 caliber to .51 caliber.

When Secretary of War Knox was writing to Perkins at Harper's Ferry in 1803 about the new rifle he wanted them to make, he wrote, "The Barrels of theus [sic] should not exceed two feet nine inches in length and should be calculated for carrying a ball of one thirtieth of a pound weight..."

Knox is specifying that the new M1803 should be a nominal .55 caliber assuming a windage 0.01 inches. I don't know if there is some other correspondence that indicated the bore be reduced to 32 balls-to-the-pound or a nominal .54 caliber. That seems to be the caliber I see mentioned in the literature most often for the HF 1803.

I'm not sure that enlarging the bore of a 1792 Contract rifle barrel from an nominal .50 caliber to a nominal .54 caliber would be an issue. I could see the Armory proofing the .50 caliber barrels first to eliminate any with defects, boring them out to .54 and rifling them, then proofing them again to make sure they held up. If they encountered too many burst barrels during the second proof, they probably would have stopped trying to bore out the barrels.

 

[Artificer]

OK, so as not to confuse anyone any more unnecessarily, I wish to state the purpose of this post is track what happened to the majority of 1792 rifles of the first issue sent to Fort Pitt (The Town) and stored at Fort Lafayette (The new Fort inside the Town of Fort Pitt) in 1792 and then tracking what may/probably happened to them by information on the units to which they were issued.

As per the information Phil (plmeek) provided from Moller, the majority of the first issue of 1792 rifles were sent to Fort Pitt (The Town) in 1792. So first let’s see how they were issued.

“The Act of March 5, 1792, gave the army a new organization, with the title of "Legion of the United States." The Legion provided for a total strength of 5120 officers and men and was divided into four "sub-legions," each of which was composed of one troop of dragoons, one company of artillery, two battalions of infantry and one of riflemen, each battalion having four companies. The [Old] First Infantry was merged into the First Sub-legion.”

Now I don’t have the actual numbers of men in each unit in each Sub-legion, but for our purposes it is important to know there were Four Companies of Riflemen (in the Rifle Bn) authorized in each of the Four Sub-legions. That makes for a total of 16 Rifle Companies authorized for the entire Legion. This explains why they needed so many 1792 rifles.

General “Mad Anthony” Wayne took command of the Legion in either November or December of 1792 (different dates from different sources), but the truly remarkable thing he did was establish what we would call the first Recruit Training of the U.S. Army. (It’s true General von Stueben did the same thing earlier at Valley Forge, but that was the “Continental Army” before there officially was a United States.) Wayne drilled and trained them incessantly and established discipline in the Army during the Winter and Spring of 1793. IOW, Wayne turned them into professional soldiers or “Regulars,” before they began the campaign against the NA’s.

The final battle of that campaign is described next:

“The Legion participated in the Battle of the Maumee Rapids under General Wayne, August 20, 1794, in which the Indians were utterly defeated and disheartened.”

Following the battle, Wayne used Fort Defiance as a base of operations, ordering his troops to destroy Native American crops and villages within a radius of 50 miles (80 km) around the fort. Wayne then continued to Kekionga marching down the Maumee River, writing to Henry Knox that his troops were "laying waste [to] the villages and corn-fields" of evacuating natives. After arriving at Kekionga, Wayne oversaw the construction of Fort Wayne. [In what is now Fort Wayne, Indiana.]

Wayne then negotiated the Treaty of Greenville between the tribal confederacy — which had experienced a difficult winter – and the United States, which was signed on August 3, 1795. The treaty gave most of Ohio to the United States and cleared the way for the state to enter the Union in 1803. At the meetings, Wayne promised the land of "Indiana", the remaining land to the west, to remain Indian forever. In the subsequent decades, settlers would continue pushing natives further westward, with the Miami people later saying that fewer than one-hundred adults survived twenty years after the treaty. Wayne died of complications from gout on December 15, 1796, during a return trip to Pennsylvania from a military post in Detroit.

“The cessation of active Indian warfare, and the occupation of many remote stations, called for a simpler administrative organization, and, pursuant to Act of Congress May 30, 1796, the Legion was disbanded in November 1796, the President arranging and completing out, of the infantry of the sub-legions, four regiments of infantry.” (1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th U.S. Regiments of Infantry)

OK so how were the NEW Regiments different from the Sub-legions? “and the line of the military establishment was made to consist of the "Artillerists and Engineers," two companies of dragoons, and four regiments of infantry, the First Sub-legion resuming its old designation of the "First Regiment of Infantry." Notice what’s changed? There are NO Rifle Battalions or even Rifle Companies listed. This seems to be confirmation of my earlier speculation.

Now when there are no more Rifle Companies authorized, what happened to the Rifles? Well, now we are into almost total conjecture from the information presented so far and what I’ve been able to find. Informed speculation of period military procedures would strongly suggest that until the Regiments received enough Muskets for the Regiments, they would have retained the rifles. But once they received enough Muskets, they would have turned back in all or at least most of the Rifles and in whatever condition they were in at the time.

OK, so where would they have returned the Rifles? I very much agree with the speculation that Phil (plmeek) offered in that one would expect at least the SERVICEABLE rifles to be returned to Schuylkill Arsenal OR where ever they directed. After all, they were in charge of how weapons were issued and returned. I would also expect Schuylkill Arsenal to send UNSERVICEABLE rifles to Harpers Ferry or have them delivered there directly. The problem is we have no hard documentation on the disposition of the 1792 Rifles from Wayne’s Legion. There seems to be a bit of “teaser” information that Rifles were returned to storage at Sheperdstown and New London, but the way it was presented in Moller’s book, one really can’t be sure.

Now Schuylkill Arsenal had plenty of room to store the SERVICEABLE rifles returned from Wayne’s Legion, but at the time period when Lewis was there, HF did not have that much available storage space. This is another reason why I speculated on only damaged/unserviceable rifles were stored at HF when Lewis got there.

The “New” 1st and 2nd U.S. Regiments that came from Wayne’s 1st and 2nd Sub-legions remained in the “Northwest Territory” for a few years beyond the time Lewis showed up at HF. The 3rd and 4th U.S. Regiments were disbanded on 1 June 1802, not quite a year before Lewis came to HF and both seem to have remained so until at least 1808. I have no idea what this may mean to returning 1792 rifles back to Schuylkill Arsenal or Harpers Ferry Armory at this time, other than informed conjecture they turned in all their Arms and Equipage as probably directed by Schuylkill Arsenal.

Gus

Much of the information I got on this post came from the following linked sources:

First Regiment of Infantry | The Army of the US Historical Sketches of Staff and Line with Portraits of Generals-in-Chief | U.S. Army Center of Military History

Second Regiment of Infantry | The Army of the US Historical Sketches of Staff and Line with Portraits of Generals-in-Chief | U.S. Army Center of Military History

Third Regiment of Infantry | The Army of the US Historical Sketches of Staff and Line with Portraits of Generals-in-Chief | U.S. Army Center of Military History

The Fourth Regiment of Infantry | The Army of the US Historical Sketches of Staff and Line with Portraits of Generals-in-Chief | U.S. Army Center of Military History

 

[plmeek]

kansas_volunteer was kind enough to send me a scan of the Frank Tait article from Man At Arms that kicked off the discussion on the 1792 Contract Rifle and Lewis & Clark. I am attaching two pdf files of it for those that would like to read it.

I had to upload as two separate files, part 1 and part 2, because of the size limitations that the forum software imposes on individual attachments.

 

[4575wcf]

I received the brochure from the Air Force Academy today. The picture is little clearer. What I took to be a rather strange shape at the front end of the patchbox may be attributed to a bruise or a discoloration of the wood. I would say the odds now stand at 50% that the gun has the standard contract rifle/HF1803 style patchbox. I see no sign of a release button in the upper tang of the buttplate. I see no sign of a front sight. I see no sign of any bayonet attaching rail on the exposed side of what appears to be a full octagonal muzzle. If that is not a 1795 musket rear swivel it ought to be. The lockwork looks like a typical contract rifle lock to me. I see a nosecap fitted to the shortened forend, and I see a trumpet shaped wooden? ramrod that would explain the extra exposed barrel at the muzzle. Martin Fry was building contract muskets in 1792, and if we cannot absolutely rule him out as a 1792 rifle contractor, then I am returning to my original position. I think we are looking at an original 1792 short rifle, and possibly we are looking at a Corp of Discovery rifle. I am not sure the short sword D guard Bowie goes with the rifle. I have never seen a bayonet that did not fit on the bottom or the right side. The ramrod precludes the bottom, and there seems no mounting hardware of any kind on the right side. All the guns are pictured with a blade, maybe this one got thrown in? Dunno about you fellows, but this looks to me like about what Lewis would have arrived at, and if Dearborn saw it, not much more of a stretch to the M1803.

 

[4575wcf]

Also--
I gotta go out on a limb here. Ned Robert's book "The Muzzle Loading Caplock Rifle" gives a wealth of information on the freshening/recutting process as applied to black powder rifles. I contend that Lewis's rifles would have been freshed before the expedition to get new bores. For a barrel of 10 to 12 years age, if not rusted I would expect to remove something between .02 and .03 total to clean up. If someone were to hand me an original documented L & C short rifle, I would expect it to be around .53 caliber, taking a .520 or so ball.

 

[Artificer]

BTW, though totally outside the recent discussion in this thread, I found this link again and thought some folks who had not seen it might appreciate it.

"Journals of the Lewis & Clark Expedition:"

Home | Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition (unl.edu)

Gus

 

[kansas_volunteer]

Thanks for the link to the journals. I see the myth of the 1803 Harper's Ferry rifles even makes it into academic pieces.
https://lewisandclarkjournals.unl.edu/item/lc.jrn.1804-05-10#lc.jrn.1804-05-10.01

 

[4575wcf]

How about we start with some informed opinion about the rifle that PREVENTS it from being an example of a 1792 contract rifle? If a L & C example is ever uncovered it will be in a collection like this assembled during the time when even the informed experts were looking for a M1803. About that exposed barrel at the front--ramrods in your typical stocked to the muzzle muzzleloader can be a bit intricate to get out in a hurry. One solution is to have the ramrod stick out proud of the muzzle a bit, and that is a good way I to hang it up on something and break it. We see the same exposed barrel set up in the M1803, M1817, M1841 Mississippi, M1863 Zouave, and of course all of the socket bayoneted versions of the muskets and rifles. It allows a good two or three fingered grab when in a big hurry, such as an encounter in a river bottom with a shot, PO'ed version of a white bear. Lewis may have thought of that. I did. Oh and thanks everyone for the links to the contract rifles and the journals. I've been referring to the journal site for a long time, but the contract rifle site was new.

 

[Artificer]

Also--
I gotta go out on a limb here. Ned Robert's book "The Muzzle Loading Caplock Rifle" gives a wealth of information on the freshening/recutting process as applied to black powder rifles. I contend that Lewis's rifles would have been freshed before the expedition to get new bores. For a barrel of 10 to 12 years age, if not rusted I would expect to remove something between .02 and .03 total to clean up. If someone were to hand me an original documented L & C short rifle, I would expect it to be around .53 caliber, taking a .520 or so ball.

Here is a link that shows the tools they used to freshen rifling in the period and some info on how they did it.
Freshening a Rifle Barrel (flintriflesmith.com)

This link shows the tools for boring and reaming the barrels and info on how to use them.
Barrel_Making (flintriflesmith.com)

Prior to his untimely passing, I wrote to Gary and asked how accurately they were able to ream Iron barrels using these tools. His reply was they could easily keep the rear of the barrel no more than .003" larger at the breech than the muzzle and often less than that.

To give folks an idea of how good that was, the famous "Star Gauge" used on 03 Springfield rifle barrels after WWI in the 20th century only checked differences in those barrels at .001" increments.

There is no doubt in my mind that Harpers Ferry would have HAD to at least freshened all the barrels of 1792 rifles, had they been used.

My speculation is that HF would also have reamed all the barrels to as close to uniform size as possible to ensure the lands of the rifling were serviceable and to ensure there was no reason to have one bullet mold for each rifle that only fit that one barrel. IOW, it would have allowed them to make bullet molds as near to identical as possible. That way any mold that got damaged or lost on the trip would be not be a show stopper and that other molds would still allow them to cast balls for any rifle.

I think there is also the possibility, if not the probability that HF would have provided freshening cutting tools to the Expedition and that would really have only been practical had they reamed the bores and freshened the rifling of all the barrels.

Gus