Summer Of The Hawken

It is the Summer of the Hawken Rifle.

Frontier Partisans are marking the 200th anniversary of the legendary rifle of the mountains and plains. Marking 1825 as the bicentennial is not totally arbitrary — 1825 was the year that Jake and Sam Hawken opened their gun shop in St. Louis, Missouri. However, both men were making rifles before that date.

Last weekend, the fourth and final Hawken Classic event was held in St. Charles, Missouri. There were exhibitions and lectures and a fine display of the firearm that has been designated Missouri’s official rifle.

We have explored the history of the Hawken Rifle several times in these pages, but it’s always worth revisiting, especially when observing a milestone. The Hawken has been much mythologized, but in recent decades its true place in history has been well lined out.

The Hawken used to be known as “The Mountain Man’s Rifle,” a mythologizing of history that held that every self-respecting Mountain Man carried a .50 caliber Hawken. The movie Jeremiah Johnson is largely responsible for that perception in the public mind, but the notion prevailed well before the movie’s 1972 premier — as evidenced by John Barsotti’s renowned painting Mountain Men and Hawken Rifles, which dates to the 1950s.

In fact, there weren’t all that many Hawken Rifles in the mountains during the rendezvous period, the Mountain Man’s heyday. As the Buffalo Bill Center of the West notes:

While the Hawken rifles are usually associated with the fur trade and the “mountain man” era, they were not universally carried in the Rockies as legend has it. Although Jacob Hawken would settle in St. Louis in 1818 and his brother Samuel would relocate there in 1822, the pair would not join forces until 1825, after the death of Jacob’s earlier partner, James Lakenan. During their association, coincident with the heyday of the famous annual rendezvous (1825 – 1840), the Hawken brothers produced only an estimated 1,000 rifles. While a portion of the annual production undoubtedly found their way to the “mountain men” in the Rockies, far more were purchased in the succeeding two decades by explorers, hunters, and immigrants crossing the plains for California and Oregon. In the two decades (1840 – 1860) that followed the end of the “rendezvous” system, the Hawken brothers (until Jacob’s death in 1849), and Samuel Hawken (later joined by his son William Stewart Hawken) produced about 2,000 additional rifles. Most were made in St. Louis, then the center of supply for the great western migration.

Mountain Men of the post-rendezvous era of the 1840s into the ’50s and ’60s did, indeed, favor the Hawken. Men like Tom Tobin:

Kit Carson and Jim Bridger both have documented Hawkens as part of their heritage — but they acquired them after their Mountain Man careers were over and they’d moved into scouting and guiding for a living. Southwesterner Mariano Medina had a fancy one he called Old Lady Hawkens.

The Hawken was a damned fine rifle — but it was not ubiquitous. For one thing, they were expensive and then, as now, men carried what they could afford.

American Mountain Man Doyle Reid laid all of this out in a detailed Hawken Classic lecture:

The lectures from the May 16-18 Hawken Classic are all being posted on Youtube, a great service to all of us.

As the Buffalo Bill Center of the West’s magnificent collection of Hawkens demonstrates, the classic half-stock Hawken Rifle was not a standardized production. There were full-stock Hawkens, and Hawkens with different furniture than we normally see, and the calibers ranged from small-bores up to +.60 caliber bear guns.

This one’s got the classic look, with exceptional wood.

This one is a beast, and has a pistol grip and was set up for a tang sight.

So, once again we give a nod to one of the great American firearms on the bicentennial of the J&S Hawken shop, and celebrate the Summer of the Hawken.