The frontier history and westward expansion of this country are closely linked to the development and use of American firearms. Beginning with the Kentucky Rifle in the East during the 18th century and continuing on with the firearms made by Colt, Henry, Remington, Sharps, Winchester, Marlin, Smith & Wesson, etc., American gunmakers have been among the most innovative and productive in the world. During the nineteenth century, they indeed designed and produced the "Guns that Won the West."

The modern rifles and pistols in use today fire a metallic cartridge, each of which contains four basic components: a primer to ignite the propellant; a propellant - gunpowder; a projectile - the bullet and a case to hold the other three components. This is a very efficient and convenient package. We know, of course, that such cartridges were not always available. During the pioneer and westward migration periods of our history, muzzle-loading weapons were used wherein the gunpowder and bullets (lead balls) were separate. They were carried in individual containers and had to be loaded into the barrel, one at a time - powder first, then the bullet - prior to each firing. This was a time-consuming and rather inefficient procedure. Wind and rain could often prevent it entirely and then the firearm was rendered useless. Another characteristic of the muzzleloaders was that they were virtually all single-shot. There were some later exceptions, of course, particularly among the pistols, but the long guns, the rifles, usually had only one shot and then they had to be reloaded. For this reason, most of the frontiersmen often carried one or more pistols in addition to a rifle.

The history of the firearm is a long one. For good or bad, man has been interested in making more effective weapons for a very long time. In those earliest centuries, firearm development was also the cutting-edge of technology, in general, with considerable spin-offs in metallurgy, machine tools, chemistry, etc.

Just to get to our frontier muzzleloader, however, took some five hundred years of trial and error. Before any type of gun was possible, however, an explosive propellant - gunpowder was required. The discovery of gunpowder is usually ascribed to the Chinese; sometime around the 12th century. That knowledge subsequently moved westward with time and, by the next century, was known in Europe. It was used there in some of the earliest cannons - large, primitive devices to hold a charge of powder that, when detonated by a hand-held burning match, would explode and hurl a projectile at the enemy. Eventually, such cannons were made smaller and more portable. Expectably, that process would lead, by the end of the 14th century, to a "hand cannon" that could be carried by a single man - the first firearm.

The discharge of a firearm, i.e., shooting it, involves the operation of three basic components - a primer, a gunpowder charge and a bullet. The primer serves to ignite the charge whose subsequent detonation then propels the bullet through the gun barrel and out towards the target. Note that, in popular usage, the terms, "bullet" and "cartridge" are each used in two different ways. The "bullet" is properly the "projectile," made mostly of lead. However, the term is also used to denote the entire primer-powder-bullet unit. A cartridge is the "case" that holds the primer, powder and bullet, bit it, too, is used to refer to the entire unit. Military and law enforcement personnel use the term "round" for that unit. Hereinafter we will follow that practice.

From the earliest "gun" to the familiar muzzleloader of the American frontier took three centuries of persistent design and development by individuals all over the globe. About 1620 the French produced a muzzleloader that was eventually to become known as the "flintlock." In that basic design, pulling the trigger caused the ignition of a small primer charge by a flint spark. That resulted, in turn, in the detonation if the propellant charge of gunpowder. In this country, the "Kentucky rifle" appeared between 1725 and 1728. It was originally developed by Swiss and German gunmakers in eastern frontier villages, especially in Lancaster, Pennsylvania area and really should've gone down in history as the "Pennsylvania rifle." However, its use and exploits in Kentucky in the 1760s received the most attention and hence the name. It was the first truly American rifle, and it was designed for frontier use in this country. It was long and graceful in appearance compared to the shorter, heavier European firearms of the period. Its lighter weight and smaller caliber bullets were adapted to the colonist needs for portability over long distances of travel and economy of use because, on the frontier, lead was very costly. The flintlock would be the weapon of choice for the next two centuries - it was carried by the Lewis and Clark Expedition into the Louisiana Purchase and beyond during the early 1800s.

When the Mountain Men began their extensive explorations of the Rocky Mountain West they found the small caliber flintlocks inadequate for dealing with the large, dangerous animals, e.g., buffaloes and grizzlies, encountered in that region. For use on the western frontier, a "Plains rifle" was developed that essentially reversed the Kentucky rifle design. The gun became shorter and sturdier and the caliber larger to shoot bullets that were powerful enough to deal effectively with the larger animals encountered.

The next major firearm development was the "percussion system," by Alexander Forsyth, a Scottish minister and chemist, and other gunmakers in England, the U.S. and France, in the early 1800s. Percussion uses an explosion of a small amount of fulminate of mercury compound, rather than a flint-derived spark on priming gunpowder, to ignite the larger gunpowder charge used to propel the bullet. While percussion was much more efficient and reliable, firearms were still muzzleloaders. Other disadvantages of the muzzleloader were that reloading required the shooter to stand upright during the process - a definite disadvantage when someone was shooting back at you - and the cloud of white smoke that accompanied each shot and temporarily obscured the shooter's view of his target.

One of the earliest successful attempts at something very different in firearm design was made by Swiss gunmaker, Johannes Pauly, in 1812. His invention contained the two most characteristic elements of the modern firearm - breech-loading and a self-contained cartridge. Pauly's breechloader had a hinge arrangement between the breech - the mechanism at the rear of the barrel, attached to the gunstock - and the barrel itself. For the first time, the rifle came "apart", i.e., into two, hinged pieces - a breech and a barrel. His "cartridge" used a paper-tube to hold the cap on one end, the bullet on the other with the gunpowder charge inside the tube. Improvement was rapid from this stage onward until the mid-1800s when successful breech-loading rifles were widely used by the militaries of several European countries. Note that the breechloader did not require the shooter to stand upright during reloading - a real advantage.

With development of the breechloader in process, the final step toward modern firearms was improvement of the cartridge material itself. The basic design was at hand, and it was just a matter of time until the cartridge's weak unit, the paper tube, was replaced with a material that was stronger and more durable. This evolution initially came through the percussion "cap" that was already in use - a small, brass cylinder holding the fulminate of mercury detonator. Flobert, a Frenchman, in 1849 put as small lead ball in the mouth of a cap - a "BB Cap" for Bulleted Breech Cap - thereby creating a self-contained round. Horace Smith and Daniel Wesson patented a .22 Short round in 1860 that was larger and therefore more effective than the BB Cap.

The .22 Short was the first, true metallic cartridge. The stage was now set for the development of the famous repeating rifles that figured so prominently in the westward expansion of this country. In 1860, the Henry Repeating Rifle , the immediate predecessor to the 1866 "Yellow Boy" Winchester, made its appearance. It used a .44 Caliber (inch) round that was basically a scaled-up .22 Short but was still an important and major advance. Both the .22 and the .44 were rimfire rounds, i.e., the primer was distributed inside a rim at the base of the cartridge. Such rims were also very useful in the extraction of the spent round. Larger caliber rimfires rapidly became obsolete as they were intrinsically not strong enough for the larger gunpowder charge being used. From about 1873 onwards, the centerfire round (primer in the center of the cartridge base) with a solid head and a reloadable case has been used. Improvements have, however, been made along the way in terms of increased case strength and in the use of non-corrosive primers.

All rifles, regardless of manufacturer, continue to use that basic metallic cartridge design in a breech-loading firearm. Thus, the need and impetus of this country's westward growth fostered a development of firearms that was unequaled at any prior time. The extraordinary strides they made in advancing that technology are now a documented part of our history.