19th C. American Percussion Longrifle - Curly Maple Stock, Brass Tack Decor

North America, United States, Pennsylvania or Ohio Valley tradition. A full-stock American muzzle-loading percussion longrifle of the Pennsylvania (Kentucky) tradition, its slender octagonal barrel running the whole length of a curly maple stock whose tiger figure still lifts through the old oil finish. The form descends from the German Jaeger rifle carried to Pennsylvania by immigrant gunsmiths, then lengthened and lightened by American hands into a small-bore economy arm that spent little lead and less powder in country where both arrived by pack train. The lock fires through a drum at the breech, its plate keeping the ghost of a foliate border, and double-set triggers hang below, the choice of a marksman who expected to hit. Rows of brass tacks march along the buttstock and toe, the frontier's shared vocabulary of ornament, applied to guns that had earned regard. No maker signed this rifle, which is entirely ordinary for the type. The great majority of country rifles were assembled by rural smiths across the Pennsylvania, Ohio Valley, and Southern upland gunmaking belt, men who bought locks ready-made from Birmingham or Philadelphia jobbers and never stamped a name; their surviving work is anonymous by design rather than by loss. Guns of this pattern travelled west with their owners, and it is on that western road that a rifle acquired its second identity: the sheet-copper sleeve bound at the wrist and the brass tacks that now define its appearance are both additions made in service, far from the bench that produced it. The metals answer honestly to the period. The copper sheet at the wrist carries roughly half a percent of iron, lead, tin, and nickel, an impurity load absent from electrolytically refined stock since the 1890s, and the tacks are a leaded brass bearing bismuth well above modern tolerance, since fire refining removes that element poorly and electrolysis removes it entirely. Tack ornament belonged to the whole frontier, practiced by Native owners, traders, and settlers alike, and the empty seats among the surviving heads read as a record of long service. Item # 204460

Estimate:£983.76

View all items fromArtemis Fine ArtsorMedals, Arms & Armour