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By Root 1954 0

as ornery, uncouth backwoods folk; they instead occupied a plinth in the pantheon of American heroes. A major agent for this image turnaround was show business. In 1822, seven years after Jackson’s victory over the British, Noel Ludlow, a theatrical impresario, was performing at a New Orleans playhouse and decided to keep the locals entertained with a rousing song. Recently his brother had sent him a copy of “The Hunters of Kentucky,” a patriotic broadside written by Samuel Woodworth (now better known for his pretty poem “The Old Oaken Bucket”). Ludlow thought it perfect for his audience and set it to the music of “Miss Baily,” a catchy tune from a comic opera, Love Laughs at Locksmiths.71 As Ludlow remembered:

I dressed myself in a buckskin hunting-shirt and leggins . . . and with moccasins on my feet, and an old slouched hat on my head, and a rifle on my shoulder, I presented myself before the audience. I was saluted with loud applause of hands and feet, and a prolonged whoop, or howl, such as Indians give when they are especially pleased. I sang the first verse, and these extraordinary manifestations of delight were louder and longer than before; but when I came to the following lines:

“But Jackson he was wide awake, and

wasn’t scared with trifles,

For well he knew what aim we take

with our Kentucky rifles;

So he marched us down to Cypress Swamp;

The ground was low and mucky;

There stood John Bull, in martial pomp,

But here was old Kentucky.”

As I delivered the last five words, I took my old hat off my head, threw it upon the ground, and brought my rifle to the position of taking aim. At that instant came a shout and an Indian yell from the inmates of the pit, and a tremendous applause from other portions of the house, the whole lasting for nearly a minute . . . I had to sing the song three times that night before they would let me off.72

Quite a show-stopper, made all the more remarkable by what appears to be the first use in print of the term “Kentucky rifle.” (In 1828 the song was such a national hit that it was adopted as Andrew Jackson’s presidential-election anthem, sometimes amended to “The Voters of Kentucky.”)

James Fenimore Cooper, the best-selling novelist, also played a major role in fixing the rifle in the American mind in the 1820s. Between 1823 and 1827 three volumes—The Pioneers, The Last of the Mohicans, and The Prairie—appeared, recording the exploits of hardy frontiersman Natty Bumppo.

In The Last of the Mohicans Bumppo is forced to abandon not only the women accompanying him but also Killdeer (his treasured rifle) to capture by the Indians. “He gave Cora an affectionate shake of the hand,” Cooper wrote, “lifted his rifle, and after regarding it a moment with melancholy solitude, laid it carefully aside.” Natty is, evidently, a great deal more concerned about Killdeer than Cora falling into the enemy’s hands. The Indians, led by the deceitful Magua, also seem more interested in the rifle than in the woman: “‘La Longue Carabine! La Longue Carabine!’ passed from mouth to mouth, until the whole band appeared to be collected around a trophy, which would seem to announce the death of its formidable owner.”

Killdeer itself “was a little longer [in the barrel] than usual, and had evidently been turned out from the workshops of some manufacturer of a superior order. It had a few silver ornaments, though, on the whole, it would have been deemed a plain piece by most frontier men, its great merit consisting in the accuracy of its bore, the perfection of the details, and the excellence of the metal.” Indeed, when Bumppo first sees Killdeer he exclaims, “This is a lordly piece, and would make a steady hand and quick eye the King of the Woods!” And so it eventually does.73

Cock-a-hoop about the impending death of Bumppo, the Indians (rather unrealistically, but Cooper needed a plot point) leave the vaunted firearm unguarded, which allows Natty to recapture it. Such was Killdeer’s value to him that, before he rescues the girl, Bumppo spends precious minutes “examining into the state of his