American Rifle - Alexander Rose [11]
How accurate were Kentucky rifles? Compared to modern weapons, they were monstrously inaccurate, but at the time contemporaries regarded them as terrifyingly unerring instruments of death. A 1920s experiment pitted a grooved Kentucky rifle against a smoothbore musket by setting up man-sized targets at distances of 100, 200, and 300 yards. Each weapon was fired ten times at the three ranges. At 100 yards the rifle hit the target ten out of ten, as did the musket. At 200 the rifle retained its perfect score, but the musket plummeted to just four hits. At 300 the rifle hit five times, but the musket, a miserly once.68
The experimenters were expert shooters, firing a limited number of shots using modern gunpowder in ideal conditions. In reality, any number of factors could adversely affect accuracy, so firearms performance—even for rifles—was nowhere near as impressive in actual battle. The fault could lie with the gun itself: incorrect sight positioning, a barrel flaw, a faulty trigger pull, too wide a gap between bullet and bore, an overpowerful recoil, or barrel vibration. Or the gunpowder could be defective, owing to hurried measuring, mixed granulation, dampness, low quality, or indifferent ramming. The ammunition might also present a problem: weight and caliber deviation, rushed loading, or faulty casting, resulting in air pockets and spherical asymmetry. Finally, such external conditions as wind, temperature, air density, humidity, and sunlight all gently altered the flight of the bullet.
In battle soldiers would exhibit purely human defects, such as overloading their weapons multiple times, using old flints reluctant to spark, dropping the cartridges, experiencing burning smoke-blindness, becoming nauseous from the saltpeter in the gunpowder, bumping into the man reloading next to them, and even forgetting to withdraw the ramrod from the barrel so that it, along with the ball, was blown out of the muzzle. These errors could easily ruin even a shot fired at point-blank range. On dry days alone muskets misfired 15 percent of the time; on wet, one in four shots never left the barrel.69
With all these considerations taken into account, in the eighteenth century the British understandably insisted that shooters were exhibiting a “high degree of precision” when one of every five or six rounds they fired hit a three-foot-wide target at 100 yards. Even successful shots could be randomly dispersed, as demonstrated by a British test that fired ten rounds at a soldier-shaped target only 100 yards away. The result: six misses. Of the four successes, one thudded into the target’s breast, another into its knee, another into its mouth, and the last, its ear. As painful, and perhaps as fatal, as these wounds might have been, there was no predictability as to where they would hit.70
Given its undoubtedly superior accuracy, the rifle did not long remain confined to Lancaster. Word of this intriguing hybrid spread to the west and south, as did a younger generation of gunsmiths who had learned the trade from their emigrant fathers. In 1784 Jacob Ferree moved to Allegheny County—twenty-four miles up the Monongahela from Pittsburgh—where he and his wife (a fine shot; she was his product-tester) opened a powder mill and a gunsmith shop popular with the hunting trade.71 Other second- and third-generation sons like Henry Albright and Peter Resor joined him.72
As the frontier expanded, gunsmiths followed, making the identification of rifles with the American backcountry ever more inextricable. The Carolinas, the Ohio River country, Maryland, Kentucky, and Tennessee