The period of the Mountain Men and their signature firearms is short but outstanding: the golden age in the early 19th century. It was the return of Lewis and Clark to St. Louis in 1806 up to about 1820, when the peak was reached, the age of hardy-breed trappers and explorers venturing the untamed wild of the American West.
Necessity-made Mountain Men minimalists, with only the most basic tools for survival: flint and steel, knives, a tomahawk, but above all, a trusty rifle. As one cowboy said, “a man without a rifle was a corpse still walking.” The rifle was his lifeline, saving him from starvation and inimical dangers in that landscape.
The Corps of Discovery, under Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, issued the first examples of the Model 1803 Harper’s Ferry Musket, a .54 caliber flintlock with a rifled barrel. This rifled musket is quite accurate, showing a very strong influence on later Plains Rifles. The Corps soon realized that this round ball ammunition was very limited against the larger and more resistant game of the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains, especially the grizzly bears.
This realization spawned the legendary Hawken Rifle, created by the Hawken brothers in St. Louis as early as 1807. These .54 or .58 caliber long guns, with their shortened 33-34 inch barrels and heavy charges of black powder, became the Mountain Men’s rifle of choice. Accurate and hard-hitting, the Hawkens could reach out to 400 yards when needed.
While the Hawken represented the gold standard, Mountain Men also got by with other rifles, from refurbished Kentucky long rifles to Indian trade muskets. While seldom mentioned, pistols also had a place in the Mountain Man’s arsenal, providing an important backup when his single-shot rifles needed reloading.
They were covered with a vast number of knives for skinning and patching, and, of course, the almost universal Green River Works blades, which so soon became the synonym of frontier quality and lastingness; everything from butchering game to self-defense must be accomplished with them, though no Mountain Man ever used a knife at the first opportunity.