Shipping receipts from as early as 1831 show that percussion caps were very available and a hot item in in San Felipe. Matter of fact several cans of caps have shown up in archaeological excavations at the townsite in the locations of at least one of the merchants.
I don’t know why everyone immediately has to brings up Hawken rifles instead of discussing the infinitely many other types of rifles that were used west of the mississippi. Even tho Hawken rifles were a fine rifle and to many the benchmark of the mountain rifle, they were not that many actually produced considering the number of people going west.
A truer rifle would have been the cheaper Pennsylvania built trade rifles produced by such makers as Deringer, Tryon, Leman, Dickert, and a dozen other makers. These rifles were made literally by the thousands, for the government, trade companies, and assorted merchant houses. Cheap yet of decent quality that the average man could afford. I imagine the bulk of these rifles were flintlocks. Speaking with site manager at Ft. McKavett he stated he ran across a note in ressarch of an old settler of the area that was still using his flintlock ( circa 1855) due to the difficulty in obtaining percussion caps in their locale. Long drive to town! 🤣
Smithwick, mentions that it was a full time job for him to keep some rifles in adequate working condition for extremely poor folks moving into Texas. He made mention and I paraphrase, that had he seen some of these guns laying in the ditch along the road, he would have left them be!
I would think that a Hawken Rifle would have been pretty rare and hard to come by on the TX Frontier. Every novice that ever watched Redford in Jeremiah Johnson think the Hawken was what everyone had. 🤪
"Allways speak the truth and you will never have to remember what you said before..." Sam Houston Texans, "We say Grace, We Say Mam, If You Don't Like it, We Don't Give a Damn!"
