My muzzleloading adventures

Last week I discussed a little about my involvement with archery over the years. This week, I’ll tell you a little bit about my muzzleloading adventures. However, before I start that, don’t forget the Houston High School gun show at the Big Lake Lions Recreation Center in Big Lake starting tomorrow, April 21.

My muzzleloading involvement began in Illinois back in the mid-1960’s, when Illinois legalized muzzleloaders for deer hunting. My brother and I were both getting started deer hunting and neither of us wanted to use shotguns. Up until then, shotguns with slugs were the only legal firearms.

I bought a used 45-caliber percussion half-stock rifle and started shooting. We soon found the local muzzleloading club, which used the same range/gun club my dad had joined. We became members of the blackpowder club and began shooting with them, both to learn more about what we were doing and to compete in their monthly matches. My brother and I shared that rifle for a couple of years before he bought his own flintlock rifle. I upgraded to a custom-built Hawken rifle a year or so after my brother’s purchase.

We were both teenagers shooting against 30 to 60 plus-year-old guys and we regularly took first place in the various matches, or usually placed in the top three. Before I left for college in Alaska, we were shooting almost every weekend either in one of the several area clubs’ matches or practicing at the local shooting range. Some years later, I harvested my first two white-tailed deer with that custom Hawken muzzleloader.

During college and well into my working life, I wasn’t shooting much blackpowder for several years. After finally landing in the Valley, I got back into muzzleloading shooting on a more regular basis. When I started participating in the Alaska Territorial Matches, I acquired a few more muzzleloading firearms to shoot some of the different matches, e.g., smoothbore, rifled musket, sighted smoothbore, and flintlock, to name a few.

A few years ago, a friend gave me a barrel and unfinished and partially inletted stock in the Hawken rifle style. He had been given the items by a friend of his moving out of state and had no use for them. My friend shoots muzzleloaders, but his interests lie only in hunting, not the historical aspects of muzzleloading. I was the only “traditional” muzzleloader he knew, so he gave me the parts.

Another friend of mine who is a national-class muzzleloading rifle competitor (he recently tied a national record at a muzzleloading match in Arizona) had built a couple of rifles for himself and agreed to take the barrel and stock and see if he could assemble a complete gun. He took a while, but I picked up the completed rifle from him this past weekend. I am delighted and thrilled, to say the least, with how the rifle turned out!

My friend had to overcome some hurdles in finding parts that would fit the 90% inletted stock he began working with. The barrel had already been fitted with a hooked breach plug but the tang, which holds the barrel in the stock, was missing. We found one that fit the barrel dimensions and worked, but it was about 3/8-inch shorter than the inletting in the stock. My friend patched the stock to fill the void. He told me not to expect perfection. The gun isn’t perfect, but it’s close enough and the “imperfect” areas just add character to an already unique rifle.

The rifle barrel has a “rough” finish on the barrel flats under the browning, rather than smooth, polished flats, but that is closer to how the originals looked. I like it! The barrel is 34-inches long, which is about par for what the original Hawken rifles had. The unusual thing is the caliber. Original Hawken rifles usually were 52 to 60-caliber, with the majority running 52 to 58-caliber. This barrel, as best as I can determine, is 69-caliber. There’s no doubt the original owner wanted a moose and large bear hunting rifle!

My friend left the front sight unfinished, allowing me sufficient material to shape the sight and to get the rifle sighted in with the fixed rear sight. My next project is getting a shooting box with all the accessories needed to shoot the rifle put together. I’ll be ordering those gadgets and three different sizes of balls to confirm caliber and begin the sighting in process. There could be a moose in that rifle’s future!