Missouri State Firearm: Hawken Rifle

In 1815, a young German-American gunsmith named Jacob Hawken opened a shop in St. Louis — the last major city before the American frontier dissolved into unmapped territory. His brother Samuel joined him, and together they began building rifles for a very specific customer: the Mountain Man, the trapper, the explorer heading into country where a rifle malfunction was a death sentence.

The Hawken brothers were craftsmen of rare precision. Their rifles were not the long, elegant Pennsylvania-style flintlocks of the eastern frontier. They were heavier, shorter, built for the demands of mounted travel, extreme weather, and encounters with animals — grizzly bears and bison — that the lighter eastern rifles simply could not reliably stop. Each rifle was made to order, hand-fitted, test-fired, and adjusted until it met the exacting standards the Hawken name demanded.

Over approximately 40 years of production, the Hawken shop produced an estimated 1,000 original rifles. This was not mass production — it was artisan manufacture at its finest. A Hawken rifle was the most expensive and most coveted personal firearm on the American frontier. Owning one was a statement of serious intent — not unlike the 1847 Colt Walker pistol, which Texas Rangers carried as their own irreplaceable frontier weapon. The Mountain Men who headed west from St. Louis knew exactly what they were carrying.

Senate Bill 139 was signed into law by Governor Mike Parson on July 6, 2023, with an effective date of August 28, 2023. The designation made Missouri one of the most recent states to join the national trend of official firearm designations — and the first to honor a weapon so directly tied to the state's identity as the Gateway to the West, a narrative also visible on the Missouri state flag.

The driving force behind the legislation was not a politician but a gunsmith. Greg Grimes, a Missouri firearms craftsman and Hawken enthusiast, spent years lobbying state legislators to recognize the Hawken Rifle's unique claim to Missouri's heritage. His argument was simple: no other firearm is more inseparable from Missouri's history. The rifle was made in Missouri, sold in Missouri, and carried west by men who departed from Missouri. St. Louis was where the frontier began, and the Hawken was what you carried when you crossed it, with civic framing close to the Missouri state motto.

The bill was sponsored in the House by Representative Mazzie Boyd and in the Senate by Senator Jason Bean. Its passage marked the culmination of years of advocacy by Grimes and the Missouri firearms community — correcting what many historians considered a long-overdue oversight. Most rival websites still reference earlier failed attempts or misattribute the bill's sponsorship; SB 139 and its July 2023 signing date is the definitive legal record.

The Hawken Rifle is often called the 'Rocky Mountain Rifle' or the 'Plains Rifle' — and these names carry technical meaning, not just geography. The Hawken was a deliberate redesign of the Kentucky Long Rifle for an entirely different environment. Where the Kentucky rifle was optimized for the wooded Eastern forests — long barrel for accuracy, lighter caliber for small game — the Hawken was engineered for the open plains and the Rocky Mountain wilderness.

The most critical differences were barrel length, caliber, and ignition system. The Hawken's barrel was shorter (34–36 inches versus 40+ inches for a typical Kentucky rifle) — essential for a weapon used on horseback, where a 48-inch barrel becomes a hazard in the saddle. The caliber was larger: .50 to .54, compared to the Kentucky's typical .40–.45. When your target might be a 1,500-pound bison or a charging grizzly bear, stopping power is not a luxury.

Perhaps most importantly, the Hawken transitioned from flintlock to percussion cap ignition — the technological advancement that made mountain use practical. Flintlocks are sensitive to wet conditions; the frizzen and flint must be kept dry for reliable ignition. In the mountain wilderness, with river crossings, rain, and morning condensation, a flintlock's reliability was a genuine liability. The percussion cap — a small copper cap struck by the hammer — works in nearly all weather conditions, giving the Hawken a critical edge over older designs in the field.

The Hawken Rifle was not merely popular among Mountain Men — it was the weapon of the legends who defined the Mountain Man era. Kit Carson, the most celebrated scout and trapper in American frontier history, is closely associated with the Hawken. Jim Bridger, who discovered the Great Salt Lake and established Fort Bridger, carried one. William Henry Ashley, the fur trade entrepreneur whose annual Rocky Mountain Rendezvous defined trapper culture in the 1820s, outfitted his men through St. Louis — often through the Hawken shop directly.

The rifle's cultural legacy survived the Mountain Man era through a remarkable revival in popular consciousness. In 1972, Sydney Pollack directed 'Jeremiah Johnson' — a film starring Robert Redford as a fur trapper in the Rocky Mountain wilderness. The film's central image of a lone mountain man with his Hawken rifle introduced the weapon to a generation that had never heard of it. The movie sparked a wave of Hawken reproductions, muzzleloader clubs, and historical interest that continues today. The Jeremiah Johnson Hawken is arguably the most recognized depiction of the rifle in modern popular culture.

Missouri's Hawken Rifle and West Virginia's Hall Model 1819 represent the two opposing philosophies of early 19th-century American firearms manufacturing — and they were built just 200 miles apart, in the same era, for entirely different visions of what a rifle should be.

Original Hawken rifles — produced at the St. Louis shop between approximately 1815 and 1859 — are among the most sought-after American frontier firearms in existence. With an estimated 1,000 total produced over four decades and nearly two centuries of attrition, verified originals are rare, valuable, and concentrated in a handful of major collections.