Chapter 6

I worked steadily on my rifle when time permitted, but made sure not to neglect my smithing and farrier work. Noah occasionally checked my work to ensure that my standards were as high as his own.

He also looked at the progress I was making on the rifle, and finally asked what I thought I was doing. He brought over his Pennsylvania long rifle so that I could compare my work with his, and to explain why he didn’t like mine. “You’re making a cannon, Jake! My rifle is .40 caliber, yours looks to be a full half inch across at the muzzle! And that stock you’re building! It’s walnut, Lad, not curly maple!”

“Mine is designed more like the Hawken,” I explained. “It’s .54 caliber and the barrel is shorter, but still accurate, and unlike yours, mine will fetch a buffalo when I’m done with it. I also plan on using iron furnishings instead of brass. I’ll grant that yours looks better, but when I’m done I expect mine will shoot better!” That set the cat among the mockingbirds for fair! Noah wouldn’t speak to me for three days, and after that it was mostly about business. I was grateful for all he’d taught, but a man has to go his own way at some point and I was stubborn enough to figure I had the right of things.

Time to time after that, I heard Noah out back, banging away with his rifle. Practicing, I figured. I grinned and kept on working.

His rifle had a regular single-trigger lock, but mine would have the newer set-triggers. A Pennsylvania-style trigger was easier to make, but if the Hawken brothers could make set-triggers, I reckoned I could too. A body could shoot in a hurry by a hard pull on that front trigger, but if he had time, squeezing the rear trigger set up the front one to fire the piece if a fellow breathed hard on it!

It helped that I had taken one of their rifles with a ruined barrel in trade. I took that rifle apart and studied all the lock parts before starting on mine.

The tapered octagonal barrel blank was easy enough to forge and cutting the grooves for the rifling was simple, even though it took work to get it right. I spent as much time scraping out those rifling grooves as I had done when forging the barrel blank itself! Making the percussion lock with its complicated sear, ratchet, pawl, and springs also took time, but I got it done. Hot-filing small parts is fussy work! The next step was to rough-in the half-stock and inlet it to hold the barrel, lock, and triggers where they were supposed to be. When I was satisfied with the fit, I carved a beavertail cheek rest on the stock.

It was starting to look like a rifle, but there was more to be done. Before doing the final smoothing, I chiseled out two mortises, one near the butt for patches, a smaller one in front that would hold two dozen percussion caps. Unlike flints for the older-style locks, I wouldn’t be able to make new caps if I ran out.

The raw wood I finished with a mixture of beeswax dissolved in hot tallow, and the iron furnishings were browned like the barrel and lock. I had made friends among the townspeople, doing a favor now and then when help was needed. So it was that my chickens showed up to roost just before my rifle was finished; one of the men I’d helped to build a cabin made me a scrimshawed powder horn, and a widow I’d helped in a different way sewed me a calfskin possibles-bag for the shot-mold and other things I would need.

One day, when I knowed that she was short of food for her son and two daughters, I’d taken a musket I’d just repaired out to the woods and killed a pig. She had tears in her eyes when I showed up with the meat and insisted on cooking up a proper meal for me. I enjoyed the meal, and when she asked me to stay on for breakfast I was happy to oblige.

Nice lady; she got married three weeks later to a man who’d lost his wife to a fever. I made new hinges for her cabin door, the old ones having rusted, and gave them to the couple as a wedding present. He moved in with her and folks later on allowed that he didn’t waste much time, their baby boy arriving a tad earlier than expected.

Her husband set up shop as a wheelwright, and when he needed tires for a set of new wheels we went down to a wrecked ship that had been driven inland during a storm. Five miles from the sea it was, and the wood had rotted away except for the pitch-pine stumps of the masts. The iron we salvaged was rusty, but usable after I reworked it, and it served well as tires for the Alcalde’s new buggy.

The next day, I finished my rifle. I aligned the sights, shot it a few times, and tapped on the dovetailed sight a bit until it shot true. But Noah didn’t seem interested in a shoot-off, despite the practicing he’d done, so I let the matter drop.

A week later, Jean-Louis got back to town. He came by to say howdy and we talked about where he’d been. “I tell you, Jake, fortunes are being made out there! We already speak Spanish, so all we would have to do is swear to become Catholics and register with the nearest alcalde! As soon as we do that we can take up land for ourselves, but we need to do it before it’s all claimed by Germans!”

“Germans?” I asked.

“Aye, Germans. One or two came in with Steven Austin and since then, there have been more! They’re coming in by the shipload, way I hear it, because the Mexican government likes having them here. They figure that they’re less troublesome than Americans!” So that afternoon, we looked up the alcalde, told him in Spanish what we had in mind, and walked away as Mexican citizens.

Noah had made up his mind to move west too, so when I told him I was leaving we went our separate ways as friends. He headed north to where Steven F. Austin had settled, and we got ready for our own move. Some of what I’d need to set up as a blacksmith I already owned, the rest I’d bought from Noah.

We loaded it into our new-bought wagon and the next morning, hitched up our team. We headed northwest, planning to strike the westbound road toward the town of Gonzales that had been rebuilt southeast of San Antonio de Bexar.

The Old San Antonio Road, it was called, although it was more trail than road. Before that it had been the Camino Real, a way for Spaniards to start out from the Rio Grande, pass through San Antonio de Bexar and parallel the coast all the way to Nacogdoches. East of there, it crossed the Sabine river and went on to Natchitoches in Louisiana. Here and there, trails branched off. Wagon trains followed the road, carrying supplies to the missions and when they came to a cutoff, one or two wagons would turn off and head to the mission.

Most were also fortified Presidios that housed a few soldiers. More’n likely, the soldiers who had killed my uncle and cousins had come from one. The missions were having a hard time of it, what with hostile Indians stealing their stock and protestants sneaking across the border. My uncle and cousins had done a fair amount of the sneaking until that Mexican patrol caught up with us, though religion played no part in what we were doing.

Jean-Louis added more details as we rolled westward behind our team of mules.

“The Guadalupe River country has only a few settlers right now, but more will come. The government intends to dredge the sandbanks along the lower river and as soon as they do, ships will start bringing in cargoes. They’ll need people that know about ships to guide the first ones in, people like us. There’s already a sizable town on the river at Victoria. De León’s colony got there back in 1824 so the best land has been claimed, but Gonzales is still only about two years old. The original town was abandoned after two Indian attacks, not that it was much of a town to start with. The new one is a mile or so south, on the Guadalupe River where the San Marcos flows in.”

“We must look around, pick out good land with river access, and take up claims like we talked about doing before. You can set up a smithy and gun-repair shop in the town if you’re a mind to, and I’ll file a land claim and start rounding up mustangs. Your shop will bring in money until our horse business starts paying off.”