Wagon Train Weaponry:

Guns of the Wagon Trains

Firearms on a wagon train were some of the most
varied in history. Firearms technology advances most
during times of war, it’s been said. But in point of
fact, the greatest such period was the twenty years
between 1840 and 1860. No wars were in progress in the
U.S. But the gunmaker’s art progressed further in those
two decades than during any other comparable era.

Ever notice that we focus on “eras” and forget the times between them? The period 1840-1860 is a case in point. In the popular imagination, these 20 years practically do not exist. We jumped, it would seem, directly from the mountain man days right to the old wild west, with a minor stopover for that unpleasantness between the Northern and Southern states.

Such is not the case. Those two decades, give or take a few years on either end, formed America. Indeed, events of that period continue to shape the fabric of what and who we are.

It was a time of transition---socially, technologically, and economically. It’s taken as a truism that firearms technology usually leaps forward only in times of was. There was no major war during this inter-era period. Yet, firearms production progressed more radically between the end of the fur trade and the beginning of the War Between the States than in any other similar time period before or since. Ignition systems went from flintlock to percussion to pinfire to rim- and center-fire cartridge. Practical revolvers were introduced, as were repeating rifles and shotguns. Toward the end of this period, muzzleloading was all but replaced by breech loading systems.

The fur trade wound down and all but disappeared. Major financial events (the worldwide panic of 1835 on one hand and the post 1849 boom times on the other) drove people westward in the largest human migration ever experienced in such a short time. The mountain man had gone west to live with the land. The California boomers went west to exploit it. The Oregon emigrant trains using the wagon train went west to tame it.

All three types of these “pioneers” used the wagon train and came together, along with that new mixture of firearms, on the road west.

What was it like packing everything you owned in a wagon measuring but eleven feet long and thirty-two inches wide? For the men it was an adventure; for the women an upheaval. Men fantasized about what the trip west was like, even as they made it. Women had to cope with the important daily minutia of the trip itself. All this shows in their diaries. Men saw the Indian as a threat, for instance, a savage warrior who could attack at any moment. A nice, romantic image, but untrue. In the early days of the western migration, the most anyone had to fear from Indians was that they would steal livestock.

Always more practical, women saw the red man as a trading partner. Many a wagon train, in fact, depended on the Indians for food. The men, don’t forget, were farmers and city folk who had little experience with firearms before leaving on the migration. Depend on these men as hunters, and you’d likely go hungry. Nor, once the migrations really got going, was there much in the way of game to shoot anyway.

Contrary to the image created by Hollywood, the “trails” west weren’t actually pathways. They were, rather, a complex of routes, spread out, aimlessly, across the 20 mile width of the Platte River Valley. The Government Road, and the Oregon/California trails tended to follow the southern side of the river, while the Mormon Trail trended along the northern shore. This wide-spread traffic pattern fairly assured the absence of game in any numbers, making forage for any wagon train difficult to say the least.

Guns on the wagon trains really were an interesting phenomenon. Here were vast numbers of men who had never even fired a gun suddenly carrying two or three with them. What a great toy this was! Every wagon had a least one rifle, shotgun, or handgun. Many of them had quite a few long guns and a handgun or three besides.

And what were the emigrants doing with all this firepower? Mostly shooting themselves. Combine lack of firearms familiarity with crowded conditions and you have an accident waiting to happen. Accidental shootings were, after cholera, the number two single cause of death on a pre-Civil War wagon train. Pioneers would grab loaded weapons from the wagons and shoot themselves and each other with some regularity.

As Merrill Mattes points out in The Great Platte River Road, “The emigrants were walking arsenals, armed to the teeth with rifles, shotguns, and revolvers, supposedly used to hunt buffalo and defend themselves from Indians. More often what they managed to do was blast, wound, or annihilate themselves instead, and in alarming numbers.”

On a typical wagon train you might find a flintlock plains rifle in the hands of the guide, who, more than likely, had been a fur trapper. But it wasn’t just the old mountain men who preferred flintlocks. Major companies were building and selling them well into the 1860s to customers who felt you could always find a piece of flint, but if you ran out of percussion caps, you might as well have no gun. Indeed, it wasn’t until the widespread availability of repeating cartridge guns that flintlocks really fell into disuse.

The majority of rifles found on the wagon trains would have been percussion half-stocks purchased new in St. Louis or St. Joe as part of the outfit. Mixed in would be a bunch of European rifles and pistols, brought over by the emigrant himself, or inherited; a squirrel gun or two from the southern hills (many of which would have been flintlocks converted to percussion), and shotguns and revolvers by the score. In short, any extant firearm was likely to be found. Guidebooks insisted that firearms were necessary. In The Prairie Traveller, for example, Randolph Marcy says every man “should be armed with a rifle and revolver, and he should never, either in camp or out of it, lose sight of them.”

Cartridge guns, including the famed Henry Repeating Rifle, were introduced towards the end of this period. It’s doubtful, however, if many of them appeared at this time. They were expensive, and produced in small numbers.

After the Civil War, cartridge guns would have been a much more common sight on a wagon train. But, like flintlock rifles, the days of the emigrant trains were numbered, as railroads began stretching across the country.