Hi guys
Thanks for tuning in to another video on Forgotten Weapons dot com. I'm Ian; I am here today at the Rock Island auction house
I'm taking a look at some of the guns they'll be selling there September of 2015 Premier auction
and I had one here that has, well,
its provenance directly to a rather famous American gun maker: A fellow named John Browning or J.M. Browning
Now, I figured this would be a cool time to talk about some of this guy's personal history and development
and you know some details of his personal life that a lot of people may not know
[John] Browning was actually born in 1805 in Tennessee
As he approached puberty he was an apprentice to a blacksmith and
showed his interest and skill for firearms actually very early. He was only 13 years old when he manufactured his first gun and
quickly went from being an apprentice to setting up his own shop. He moved to a little town called Quincy, Illinois in
1831 where he set himself up as a gunsmith and later expanded that business into blacksmithing and
locksmithing as well. Of course, all three of these are pretty similarly, pretty closely related fields (in the 1830s)
Now in Quincy,
Browning had had a chance to interact with a bunch of Mormons who were,
in the 1830s, in the process of being evicted from Missouri. They didn't get along so well with the
local Missouri natives and so they were coming across the border into, Illinois and Browning had the opportunity to
meet them, learn about them
It's not really known exactly what sort of contact he had, except that within a couple years by 1836
he actually moved up to a town called Nauvoo, Illinois, which was at that point basically a religious boom town full of Mormons
They thought they had a place where they could live outside of Missouri away from the old problems
It turned out they ended up not really getting along with the local folks
there either and ended up ejected and having to move west
Well, at that point, at some point within here, Browning had
converted to the Mormon faith, and he decided to go west to Utah with these Mormons
Along the way he set up shop a number of times
Progressively farther west. He would set up a gunsmithing business and work
Manufacture and repair guns for the various other Mormon settlers who were in the process of making this pretty significant trek west to Utah
So during this whole time, Browning wasn't just repairing guns. He was also designing his own guns and frankly he came up
He was responsible for some very early iterations of some pretty interesting designs
One of them being the harmonica rifle, or as he called it at the time, the slide bar repeating rifle
and that is what this gun is an example of.
Today, we would call this a harmonica rifle, and we say that because
it has what looks kind of like a harmonica of chambers; In this case five chambers
This is I believe a .54 caliber rifle. You would preload each of these chambers, and you have a five shot repeating rifle
We'll take a closer look at the rifle itself here in just a moment, but I want to finish off with some of Browning's personal story
So he'd invented this in the 1830s
He was making these, he was repairing guns, finally by 1852
He gets to what will be his final long term home in Ogden, Utah
He was one of the early polygamist Mormons; He had three wives and a total of 22 children
eventually in Ogden and
in fact one of his children (one of his sons) would go on to be very interested in firearms as well,
and apprentice to his father at a very early age and
showed a really quite remarkable talent for firearms
For those of you who maybe have been watching this a little bit confused by
John browning doing this sort of thing and being born in 1805
I should probably point out that the rather talented son was in fact John Moses browning
Who would go on to be the John Browning that we are all intimately familiar with today from the 1911 and the browning machine guns
and
frankly, by 1900 three-quarters of the sporting rifles on the market in the United States were John Browning's designs
The fellow who made this harmonica rifle was actually typically known as Jonathan Browning, and he was John Moses Browning's father, so
you know
the Browning that we typically think of
He did have an advantage in this that it ran in the family
So why don't we take a closer look at this example of Jonathan Browning's handiwork?
So the one marking on this rifle is right there: J.M. Browning , 1853
This would have been just after he had moved to Utah. This was certainly not the first harmonica rifle he had made,
but it would have been one of the first guns he made actually from Utah
Now if you take a look at Rock Island's catalog page they have some information on the provenance of this particular rifle, which is
pretty significant. It goes back through the Flayderman collection and also through the collection of an early
Indian Wars Medal of honor recipient who
owned it frankly not that long after Browning manufactured it
so if you're concerned about whether or not, this is actually the real deal and
frankly you should be with something that claims this sort of provenance, that's some good research to check into to satisfy your concerns
Now as a Harmonica rifle the idea is...
Lay this down here. We have five shots here. Let me go ahead and take the Harmonica out
So this is our magazine bar. Got space for five percussion caps, and we have five chambers in here
Now you'll notice all of the chambers are countersunk
There is a mechanism in the rifle that we'll see in just a minute that cams this block forward so that this countersink
presses into a recess in the barrel face thus acting as, more or less, a gas seal
So, right here the inside of the barrel face is beveled, and that's what your chamber countersink presses into
This is actually a very simple mechanical action. We have this
pivoting lever. When it is up in this position, you can see that this face is flat
That allows the Harmonica bar to move easily, and then when you rotate it down,
we have an extension that acts to push the bar inwards. So, I can put it up and then
drop my harmonica bar in place. I then line up one of the percussion caps,
push this down,
and that levers the magazine bar into place. I can then
fire that chamber, then I recock the gun. It's interesting to note that there is no half cock on this design. It is
Nothing and ready to fire. Now I push that lever
Whoops!
It's a little hard to do holding this thing up. This has a very heavy barrel.
Let's try that again
When the lever is up then I can move this to
the next position. This is all manually indexed
Then push it down
fire, lift up
Index to the next one, push down,
fire, and so on. Remember this was not intended to try and win any military
contracts or go into mass production. This was the product of an independent,
individual, gunsmith shop, and it was intended for folks who simply needed a rifle
And they wanted more than one shot at a time
So if you're using this as, say, a hunting rifle or a defensive rifle on the frontier,
you don't necessarily need to be out there being, you know, the super fastest
baddest gunslinger around with an automated indexing system,
especially given the cost that a system like that would have added to a gun like this
It was a lot cheaper to make something very simple that gave you 80% of the same effectiveness
by simply manually indexing
And, of course if you wanted more firepower, I'm sure Mr. Browning would be happy to sell you a couple extra magazine bars that you could
Keep loaded on your person
So this is a really cool piece of American firearms history
You know, in some ways it's even more interesting than having a piece made by John Moses Browning the famous legend
but to actually
recognize the contribution that his father had. His father was a very talented and
inventive gunsmith and manufacturer all in his own right
Although he has obviously been completely eclipsed by his son
So this piece is coming up for sale at Rock Island
here in September. If you are interested in it, you should check out the link in the text description
below. You can take a look at Rock Island's photographs, their description, their catalogue page on the gun, and
if you think this ought to be the centerpiece of your own firearms collection, you can place a bid online or
frankly, for a gun like this, you should come down here in person, check it out, and
participate in the auction live. Thanks for watching. I hope you guys enjoyed the video
I hope I didn't annoy anyone too much with my obfuscation of exactly who I was talking about at the beginning