You are absolutely right, but the error was first made a long time ago. I like to read the frontier travel literature that was written in the 19th century, and you see "Hawkins" all the time in reference to these rifles. In fact, I don't recall ever reading "Hawken" in the period literature. The fascination with and loyalty to these rifles is nothing new, either. This is from Captain Randolph B. Marcy's
The Prairie Traveler (p. 22), first published in 1863:
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I don't know when the Hawken brothers started stamping their name on their rifles, but I think they were doing it by the 1830's, anyway. A lot of the people who wrote their memoirs back then were very literate fellows. Surely they could have simply read the name stamped on the barrels of the mountainers' rifles, but they called the rifles and their makers "Hawkins" anyway. That usage was so common, I sometimes think they applied the "Hawkins" moniker to any rifle that even looked like one, sort of like some folks call all blue jeans "Levis," or all tissues "Kleenex." I remember many years ago reading an article in one of my dad's gun magazines, in which the writer stated something like "
Kit Carson's Hawken was made by Benjamin Mills of Harrisburg, Kentucky." Even then, I knew it was wrong. Not too long ago, one of the big gun auction websites had a "Pedersoli Tryon Hawken" for sale. The beat goes on.
Notchy Bob