Rifle Making
National Park Service
Charles S. Grossman
Of all the special tasks in the Great Smoky Mountains, rifle making was perhaps the most intricate and the most intriguing. From the forging of the barrel to the filing of the double trigger and the carving of the stock, the construction of the “long rifle” proved to be a process both painstaking and exciting. After the barrel was shaped on the anvil, its bore was cleaned to a glass-like finish by inserting and turning an iron rod with steel cutters. When the rod could cut no more, the shavings from the bore were removed. The rifling of the barrel, or cutting the necessary twists into the bore, required a 3-meters-long (10-foot) assembly, complete with barrel, cutting rod, and rifling guide. The 1.5-meter (5-foot) wooden guide, whose parallel twists had been carefully cut into it with a knife, could be turned by a man pushing it through the spiral-edged hole of a stationary “head block.” The resulting force and spin drove the cutting rod and its tiny saw into the barrel, guiding its movement as it “rifled” the gun.
Most of the rifles in the Smokies had an average spin or twist of about one turn in 122 centimeters (48 inches), the ordinary original length of the barrel. A later step—“dressing out” the barrel with a greased hickory stick and a finishing saw—usually took a day and a half to be done right. Likewise, the making of a maple or walnut rifle stock, or the forging of the bullet mold, led gunsmiths to adopt the long view of time and the passing of days in the Great Smoky Mountains. Two such gunsmiths were Matt Ownby and Wiley Gibson. Ownby ([far left]) fits a barrel to an unfinished stock as the process of rifle making nears its end. Gibson ([below]), the last of four generations of famous Smoky Mountain gunsmiths, works at his forge in Sevier County, Tennessee. Over the years Gibson lived in several places in Sevier County, and in each one he set up a gun shop. As he tested one of his finished products ([left]), Gibson commented: “I can knock a squirrel pine blank out of a tree at 60 yards.”
Walini was among the Cherokees living on the Qualla Reservation in North Carolina when James Mooney visited in 1888.
Smithsonian Institution