What put an end to American fur trading in the 1840s?

"The experienced mountaineer is never without his burglarize, even in camp. Ongoing from club to guild to visit his comrades, he takes it with him. On seating himself in a lodge, he lays it abreast him, ready to be snatched upwardly: when he goes out he takes it up… as a citizen would his walking staff. His rifle is his constant friend and protector."

— Washington Irving

That rifle the mount man was never without? It was always a Hawken, right? Accept no substitutes….

Nope.

The Hawken was a fine rifle, and make no mistake. Merely Jake and Sam Hawken were only one of the many makers of rifles in the early on nineteen^th Century, and their small St. Louis store could only supply so many rifles in a given year. Too, in the golden years of the height of the Rocky Mountain Fur Merchandise, their rifles didn't look similar the classic heavy, half-stock percussion lock Hawken nosotros think of when we recall "Mount Man." That came later, in the 1840s, when many of the greats, including Jim Bridger and Kit Carson did, in fact, order upwardly a Hawken Rifle.

A Track of the Wolf reproduction of the early Hawken Rifle — full-stocked, flintlock ignition. A fine rifle, simply not a whole lot different from similar rifles of the menstruum.

The classic Hawken style — a Rails of the Wolf reproduction of Kit Carson's rifle from the 1840s.

Carson's actual rifle. The Hawken was a beefy piece, weighing in at about 10 pounds.

During the elevation of the Mountain Man Era — call it 1808-1840 (only a small role of the broader North American Fur Merchandise) — the primary Mountain Man rifle was pretty much the same rifle the Long Hunters carried beyond the Appalachians: some variant of the flintlock, Lancaster-style long rifle. By this fourth dimension information technology was widely called the "Kentucky Rifle."

A "late menstruum" Lancaster reproduction by Tennessee Valley Muzzleloading. Here's your typical Mountain Human being rifle.

Early Mountain Men like John Colter — who served on the Lewis & Clark Trek — might well have carried the 1792 military contract rifle — substantially a Yard.I. Kentucky Rifle. (For years information technology was causeless that the Corps of Discovery Rifle was the 1803 Harpers Ferry, a half-stock military burglarize. Experts are now pretty certain information technology was the 1792 Contract Burglarize. Run across a detailed article here). The French-Shawnee George Drouillard, who served as hunter, scout and interpreter for the Corps of Discovery, seems to have carried his ain civilian Kaintuck — but he was a civilian contractor, not an enlisted soldier every bit were most of the Corps of Discovery men.

The M.I. 1792 Contract Rifle.

The J.J. Henry rifle was a working man's rifle, congenital in a couple of patterns — the English, which resembled an English military arm, and the Lancaster style. Henry Leman built a classic plains rifle, and Henry Deringer (of pocket pistol fame) also built sturdy rifles for the Fur Trade. (What's with all these "Henrys"?).

The flintlock ignition system remained the dominant 1 for the period, with percussion rifles simply making it on the scene in the tardily 1830s. The Mountain Men were not quick to prefer the new-fangled percussion lock, despite its superior reliability. They were used to their flinters and stuck with them until culture had advanced far enough to provide a reliable source of percussion caps. Again, that archetype Hawken (or Leman) percussion rifle is more than of an 1840s Plains Rifle than a proper Mountain Man's rifle of the golden age.

Leman Rifle by TVM. Percussion rifles like this started showing up in the late 1830s and weren't widely adopted by the remaining Mountain Men until the 1840s. They would persist well into the era of the cartridge rifle.

The picturesque California hunter and trapper Seth Kinman used a heavy long-burglarize of a southern "poor male child" type well into the 1860s. Kinman visited President Abraham Lincoln in Washington, D.C. in 1864. From True West Magazine: "Afterwards the nimrod presented the elkhorn chair he had made to President Lincoln, Honest Abe gave him a pull of Bourbon in the East Room of the White Business firm. Kinman cradles the Kentucky rifle he called 'Old Cottonblossom,' which the President handled, saying, 'Seth, that's the kind of arms I was raised on.'" The hole in the stock was for tallow to grease patches.

While the burglarize might be the classic Mount Man weapon-of-selection, he wouldn't accept turned upward his nose at a smoothbore. Northwest Trade Guns were ubiquitous in the Fur Merchandise era — mostly going to Indians in exchange for furs, but many ending up in the hands of Mountain Men. At that place were as well plenty of smoothbore armed forces surplus muskets banging around. The long guns could readily be cut down to a length that could exist easily handled horseback or in a canoe. A cut-downwardly merchandise gun was an excellent option for running buffalo on horseback.

The smoothbore is essentially a shotgun. At close range, a accuse of buck and ball — i large ball packed together with a scattering of smaller shot — was devastating.