True St Louis Hawken Rifles

Anyone have any pictures of true St louis Hawken to compare to the Triditions St Louis Hwken kit rifle?

Google "St Louis Hawken" and look at the images, You will see both of the rifles you mentioned.

+1

Try Google images

The biggest problem with using Google's pictures of Hawken rifles is unless you know what to look for you will be looking at a bunch of modern Italian "Hawken" rifles.

Try using "Plains rifles" in your search for a better representation of the original guns.

Some of the basic things to look for is, the real Plains rifles almost never had brass trigger guards or butt plates.

They usually had two barrel wedges to hold the barrel onto the stock.

The rear loop on the trigger guard was usually a oval shape, not a round shape.

Most of them were made out of plain wood, often walnut so they didn't often have curly wood with stripes.

The bottom or belly of the stock was straight from the wrist down to the butt plate. It was not a "perch belly" shape like the Lyman Great Plains rifle.

Google J&S Hawken Rifles. Look at the rifles offered by Don Stith, WEB Selb, and the Hawken shop.

You will see as Zonie stated, iron mounted, walnut stocked plain rifles. The Plains versions have a barrel that tapers from about 1 1/8" across the flats to just under 1" at the muzzle. Caliber will be in the 52 to 56 caliber range.

The Traditions rifles will be brass mounted, plain maple or hardwood stocks and a straight barrel of 50 caliber with some 45 and a very few 54 caliber versions. To be fair to Traditions, their rifles look like the rifles that the Hawken brothers built for the local trade or rifles that Dimmick built for the local Missouri deer hunting sport.

A J&S Hawken built for the plains is very different from the rifle offered by Traditions.

This picture of a rifle marked S Hawkens is well documented and is classic of most "real" Hawkens rifles I have seen. Plain, functional and rugged. https://www.fieldandstream.com/blast-from-past-jeremiah-johnsons-hawken

I read somewhere the stocks were mostly plain maple. I have no idea if this is true or not, maybe I misread it.

Lot of ”˜this is the way it was’ statements about their guns. Many of the large bore heavy plains rifles were on plain maple, iron mounted, and sans patch box or having a decorative cap box.
Many were made with more. Silver mounted curly maple stocks are seen. Brass mounted guns with large patch boxes. Early Hawken looked like similar to Maryland rifles. In Ohio Jacob made Ohio style guns. The great halfstock plains rifles were just part of their product. Most of those went not beyond the pale but were used right in Missouri, Arkansas, Iowa and the western reaches of the old northwest.

If your wanting to know what a " Hawken Rifle " looks like you really need to know a little bit about the history and time lines of the Hawken brothers and those who had worked for them. Most know the Hawken rifle as a S.Hawken, post 1849. That's pretty much the pinnacle of the rifle's evolution.

Without risking into getting into the many evolution's and changes that rifle seen through the history of its production, I would invite you to view this sight.

http://grrw.org/

One of the members here on the forum, Mnt.Meek put the sight together and I'd definitely consider him a leading authority on the Hawken Rifle.

We correspond privately and he has taught me so much thus far.

Respectfully, Cowboy