Rose - American rifle: a biography

AMERICAN
RIFLE

Chapter 1

THE MYSTERY OF WASHINGTONS RIFLE

G eorge Washington, never exactly a cheerful or chipper soul, was today even more glum than usual.

And then, at last, Washington was allowed to see the result. There he was, looking suspiciously more youthful (Peale knew how to flatter his subjects) than his forty years might suggest, but otherwise the likeness was most accurate. There he stood, Colonel George Washington of the defunct Virginia Regiment, officer, gentleman, loyal servant of His Majesty, and veteran of the French and Indian War.

Peales portrait of Washingtonthe earliest authentic likeness of the man that is known to existis distinguished from hundreds of other pictures of eighteenth-century soldiers hanging in the worlds museums in one remarkable respect. Its easy to overlook, but, subtly protruding from behind Washingtons left shoulder, is the muzzle of an American rifle.

This particular arm had probably been commissioned two years before, in early 1770. In March of that year Washington was staying with his friend Robert Alexander, and according to his diary, they often went out a hunting foxes; but he one day rode to George Town (then a small place eight miles upstream from Alexandria, Virginia) to pick up my rifle from the gunsmith John Jost (or Yost) for 6 and 10 shillings. (An exact conversion to todays dollars is extremely difficult to determine, but $1,400 is a very rough approximation.) Gratifyingly, the cost of the firearm was partly offset by Washingtons winning of 1 and 5 shillings from his host at cards, while its fineness can be gauged by the fact that during the Revolution Jost would make rifles for American troops invoiced at 4 and 15 shillings eachand this after prices had already soared owing to inflation. Washington may well have paid more than a 100 percent premium for the privilege of owning a custom-made Jost.

Few but Washington would have instructed their portraitists to add such a weapon. Rifles, at the time, were rarities among common soldiers and were carried by officers only in the fieldthe hunting field, that is, for the noble pursuit of shooting game, not the battlefield.

All of which makes Washingtons insistence on including one of these peculiar firearms in his portrait all the more mysterious. Indeed, a man who wished to use an object as an emblem of rank might have brandished it openly, but he didnt. The rifle is instead discreetly tucked away in the background, serving, it seems, as a reassuring symbol, for those in the know, that this individual, dressed in a uniform last donned two decades before, is one of them. So what was Washington telling his fellow Americans? The answer lies hidden somewhere amid the vast, remote American wilderness, an unconquered territory densely thicketed by forests, rumpled by towering mountain ranges, and watered by unbridgeable rivers. For newcomers to this land, it was a terrifying place such as had not existed in Europe since the dark and cold days of the Neanderthals. It was the frontier.

The great Spanish conquests did not hinge on firearms. Columbus brought with him just one for his infantrya gun weighing about thirty pounds aptly named the hand-cannonon his voyage to the New World in 1492. This type of weapon, which consisted of an inch-or-so-wide iron tube mounted on a broomstick-sized pole, could be lethal up to a few dozen yards, but its noise, smoke, and flash were undoubtedly its scariest qualities.

Owing to the unwieldiness of guns, as well as the impossibility of obtaining extra supplies for them, the conquistadors preferred to use simple, low-tech weaponry and sheer will to carry the day.

Firearms genuinely came into their own only in the early seventeenth century: on July 30, 1609, to be exact, when Samuel de Champlain, the French explorer and fur trader, accompanied his sixty Montagnais and Huron allies on a raid near the Ticonderoga peninsula against their mutual enemies, the Mohawks. Just two volleys from a couple of muskets put to flight a numerically superior force of two hundred. Admittedly, however, Champlains shots had inflicted more damage to morale than to flesh and bone.