Imagine you're going out beyond the frontier into complete wilderness you're doing this
with five or six men for months at a time hunting day in day out preparing animals
you're fighting the elements you're worried about your health you're worried about being
attacked by hostile forces. This is the plight of the longhunter in the 1760s and 1770s.
So Simeon, when you're think about the Long Hunter what pops into your mind?
I think the first thing that pops into my mind is some of the early guys that we don't often
hear their names very much part of a a bigger group that we going out to get that Virginia
Red Deer and and by Virginia Red Deer you know I understand that the it's the summer hide that's
sort of reddish and that's what they're calling it. I think historically what everybody seems
to to be drawn to is Daniel Boone and Boon does go on a long hunt he goes on several but winds
up uh losing his plunder almost every time. Do you think they were Savory characters?
You know uh I know some truckers who I would sort of relate to a Long Hunter you know you leave the
house you're gone you do what you need to do you come back it's obviously a shorter period of time
but they were colorful guys you know Daniel Boone was always wanting to create distance from the
settlements and where he wanted to be. Very soon after the creation of Fort Boonesboro they start
having game laws because when you set up a camp like this you know the deer start to spread out
and so you've got to move around. They go out they set up a Station Camp is what they call
it so that's where their main body is and that's probably where the hide scraping and fleshing and
all that you have Camp tenders that are going out just to do that portion of the camp. They would
have little finger camps just like what you have here. Two guys would go out you know different
directions and then they'd hunt until the deer got scarce then they'd move to another Camp.
How dangerous do you think it was? Very, you're out here there's no support
you're out here all by yourself if you don't come back your family misses you but that's it there's
no life insurance you know nothing like that. And there's uh there's people out here that
are hunting the same deer that you are. In the reading I've done it it's always
amazing to think about that very difficult environment they have to work with and how
dangerous it would be and how hard they had to work to get their job done and stay alive.
Where I come from in in South Central Kentucky there's a historical account
where it was 1,100 deer skins and it's carved into a tree 1100 deer skins ruination by God
and what happened was they they left camp for a specific period of time and they had,
I believe it was Buffalo robes over the top, and those had blown off or whatever had happened but
those deer skins months worth at least uh for multiple people for an entire Camp ruined. If
that's an entire Year's worth of someone's salary you know that's going down the tube in an instant.
What the long Hunters, Scouts, spies, surveyors, are taking out with them is crucial to their
survival. The flint lock of course but even all the way down to your blanket if you can't depend
on your blanket in cold weather to survive you may die from just the elements. 18th century militia
law requires any able bodied man 16 years old up to 60 sometimes a little bit older sometimes a
little bit younger depends on the state or Colony requires you to have a gun, pound of powder,
the lead to shoot, a knife, a tomahawk, or a sword or a bayonet depending on where you're at
and what time period it is. These things you're required to have because you're in the Army.
This is my Powder Horn and this is my hunting pouch. Lead balls, bar oil to maintain the gun I
have my my tow worm and extra flints this is a tin with patches that's my patching that's a ball sewn
inside a patch they were doing that historically and that is to load quickly should you need to.
Sharpening stone, box compass and because this doesn't leave my side uh first off this is the
powder measure and I have a clasp knife in here and last is a very important piece of my kit is
a small fire starting kit I've got a bigger kit in my pack but I've got one on me at all times
and this is what I carry in my pouch. But the most important piece of the kit is the flint lock and
maintaining that is equally as important. The gun one of the most important parts
of anybody's attire in the 18th century out west of the uh the settlements if it
doesn't work if it's not maintained properly you've got a big heavy club. And so what I'm
going to do do is break down the gun a little bit to uh to show you how I clean it how they
would have cleaned it historically. The first thing we're going to do is remove the lock.
This is a turn screw that I have that's been filed down to fit the pins and of course the other end
is a screwdriver but uh just so you can see how easy this is these are metal screws they're lock
screws but they're going through wood and if you overtighten these the wood expands and contracts
when you're out in different weather and so that can adjust or unadjust your lock in ways that
you don't want it can cause things to not work. Once we have the lock removed we can remove the
barrel and that is a as hard as one screw and several pins may depend on your gun. We know
that they were removing their barrels in the field because Samuel hildr records uh at Fort
Frye which is up in Ohio the scout were all in one cabin and they had unbreached their barrels all of
their guns were unbreached and they had come under attack and all of the scouts had to put their guns
back together at the same time in order to go out and fight. So I would imagine you know from
that account what did they learn we're all going to clean our guns at different times. So I just
use my ball pullers to take these pins out okay you have to be very careful at this stage because
there's nothing holding the barrel into the stock. I'm taking careful to hold everything together but
this is simply going to come out like this and what it's going to hold up on a little bit is the
breach plug and so I've got the barrel completely out now. So the reason I take the barrel out is to
check the underneath side and and as you can see there's really nothing hairy down here and this is
really what I'm looking at there's there's some that will wipe off here and the reason for that
is is because I've used deer tallow and coated the underneath side of my Barrel so that it won't
rust. And you see that evident here you see where the light is on the bottom side and what's sort
of uh got a a finish on it is on the top. This Barrel is about uh 10 years old and it didn't have
any bluing on it didn't have any charcoal Bluing anything it was it was all bright and me with just
keeping the the hairy rust off of it you know the needs for me in a historical setting are for my
gun to look like their gun would have if I were out and so you get just a little bit of rust on
this you don't have to get upset you can see that most of this will just come right off but should
I need a little bit of abrasion like I say right there what they're using is simply ashes, wood
ashes out of a fire, and I'm just going to take and wet my linen rag pick up a little bit of ashes
and as you can see that is gone. The Woodsman setting uh to me is using the
ashes because it's readily available but if I were military reenacting you could just as
easily use brick dust we know that they were using brick dust you take a chunk of a brick
and pound it and make dust out of it and that can be your abrasion. Next what we're going
to do is remove the breech plug and take a look at it and see uh historically they
would be doing this to see if it's got any gunk caked up on the bottom of it.
So I've removed mine and it looks pretty good I've got a little bit of gunk on top of there
but it's not bad at all. This piece is highly important it's the only thing that's in between
you and the explosion that's going on inside the barrel and the reason that they need a plug at
all is when they're making the barrel they have to make a through hole they can't just
drill you know and and stop where the barrel is they have to drill all the way through to
to be able to Rifle it so they have to have a plug with threads in the back end of the
barrel to protect you and to make sure that the explosion goes out instead of the other direction.
If this really needed cleaning what it would have is cake buildup on the top of here black
powder residue uh and really what you would do to get that off is uh take something iron
you know I'm going to use my turn screw here and we're literally just scraping the end of
the plug to get some of that gunk off and you can see a little bit of the black pow
residue that's coming off of there and then once that is scraped just going to take some
more abrasive some more ashes so my threads are clean right now I can put this back in the gun.
I have some bear oil here in a container what I do is I put oil on anything that has threads so
that it can't rust and uh and be difficult to pull back apart there's bear Oil all over the frontier
and colonial America because bears especially in the cold weather season are fat and so you
render the fat down it makes oil it's very readily available. It's important when you're putting your
breach plug back together that you get it lined up with the bottom flat of your barrel and so you see
I'm just a little bit off there and I'm going to tighten that with my hand Vise so that that goes
back into its spot okay you can see that I'm in the middle of the two flats there and my corners
match up here. Next it's time to take the lock apart and clean it thoroughly it's got a little
bit of rust on it from being out in the weather the last few days there's there's one thing John
red leaves us a a great little tidbit of history when he says that a group of long Hunters were
carrying hand vise they were carrying a small Bellows some files and a screw plate to fix their
guns should they get out of fix. It's going to be very important for me to use because I'm going to
remove the main spring with this. Okay the first thing that we need to do is activate this put it
on full - and when I do that I'm automatically being very cautious not to trip the sear bar
'cause what that will do when I press up on that it's like pulling a trigger that goes forward that
makes that slam forward just like this and if I've got my hand in there I'm in trouble. I'm
being very cautious not to have my fingers in the way and this is going to go down and lightly clamp
down on the main spring and then I'm going to trip that sear throw that forward now all of the
tension is removed from the main spring as you can see
removing the screws from the tumbler
that's going to come off in one piece
as did the sear
just going to lightly tap on that screw so that the tumbler will come through
there's your main spring
the Tumblr has a little fly this little guy here everybody gets nervous about losing
that's the tumbler and aside from the frizzen and the sear spring our lock is completely taken apart
the thing that impresses me with these locks is the parts are mass-produced but when they're
assembled uh the parts may fit this lock but they may not fit the next five locks and so
it's a very personalized thing and and if this spring breaks me as a gunsmith I can make a new
spring for that and at that point then that spring is specifically made for this lock to
work and so out in the field if the Long Hunter you know loses a screw or your sear breaks or
something like that what John red is saying is they can make a new part to fit that lock
to get this gun back into service. If you've noticed that I haven't cleaned uh some of the
very small parts like the fly in the tumbler that is because I've kept them oiled to where
they don't get any rust any part inside the lock needs to be kept completely clean of any rust so
that it moves freely if you've got something like this little fly that won't move your gun
won't operate and so I've cleaned my lock to the point where they would clean it everything will
function again I can put it all back together and I'll have a good functioning lock, a quick lock.
I get asked a lot how often they were cleaning in a historical sense I can tell you what my
historical guess is that they're not cleaning until they feel difficulty in loading. So we
moderns feel the need to completely clean the gun after each shot and I'm not discouraging that
practice but I can tell you historically we know that there are lots of old guns that were on the
wall that when checked they were still loaded. When you live in a world where an unloaded gun
is useless then your gun is always loaded. And therefore you're not cleaning after every shot.
In the patch box I carry deer tallow and tow the reason that I use deer tallow is
it coats anything underneath the barrel and on the inside of the lock just so things
won't rust I use bear on moving parts and deer tallow on anything that's not really
moving that I don't want to rust the final step to cleaning the gun is inside the bore
so I have a tow worm here and I have some tow and the tow is what's left over from the linen
making process you've heard the term separate the wheat from the chaff this would be the
chaff portion it's very tough sometimes you even have to cut it but you pull it
apart and you weave it around the tow worm and that's what you scrub your board with.
Simeon thank you so much for bringing your equipment your knowledge the information tell
the audience out there about where they can find out more about you
First it's my pleasure you're welcome and uh
you can find me at simeonengland.com you can search me on Facebook and Instagram