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Loading and Firing Flintlock Muskets: 12 “Easy” Steps

If you think modern weapons are complicated, think of the 17th and early 18th century frontiersman, whose survival often depended on his ability to quickly load and fire a flintlock rifle. Loading and firing a flintlock was a twelve-step process that was not always successful. (Flintlocks were notoriously unreliable when it came to shooting.) Since Daniel Boone had a reputation for being a crack shot with his Kentucky rifle, he must have been a world-class rifleman, because simply loading it up and priming it to fire, let alone hitting anything with it, it was a long and complicated process!

Here are the twelve steps required to load and fire a flintlock rifle or musket:

1. Bite down on the paper cartridge and open it with your teeth.

2. Push forward (called tremble) forward and for a small amount of powder in the flash tray.

The powder in the tray was intended to ignite the main powder charge within the firing chamber of the barrel, which would then propel the lead ball out of the barrel. However, the spark from the flint often caused a rapid explosion in the pan that failed to ignite the main charge. This is where we get our expression, a “flash in the pan”.

3. Push the tremble snap back into position to cover the flash tray.

4. Hold the musket with the muzzle pointing up.

5. For the rest of the gunpowder in the muzzle barrel.

6. Insert a lead ball into the barrel.

7. Push the cartridge paper into the cylinder (called “wadding”).

8. Remove the ramrod from its storage tube under the barrel and use it to push the filler and ball down the barrel.

This was easier to do with a musket than with a rifle. The musket barrel had a slightly larger diameter and its inner surface was polished smooth. One rifle had spiral grooves cut into the metal inside the barrel, causing the ball to spin as it exited the barrel, increasing the accuracy of its flight. The bullet fit inside the barrel had to be tighter to impart twist, so the grooves and smaller diameter made it difficult to push the filler and ball into the chamber.

Rifles would fire farther and more accurately, but their slower rate of fire was the main reason military units continued to use muskets until the late 19th century. In a battle, where time to reload and fire was a matter of life and death, rate of fire was an important consideration. The invention of metal cartridges and breech-loading (loading the bullet through an opening in the rear of the barrel near the chamber) finally ended the dominance of the musket in military use.

9. Replace the drumstick in the storage tube.

10. Raise the musket to firing position, resting the stock against your shoulder.

11. Pull back on the hammer.

12. Love and fire.

We’ve all seen scenes in movies where one of the intrepid early pioneers, pressed for time by imminent danger, simply left his ramrod in the barrel and fired, instead of taking the precious extra seconds to get it out of the barrel and back. to place it in the pipe storage. The ramrod then became part of the ammunition ejected from the barrel when the charge was fired.

In an extreme situation where those extra few seconds were a matter of life and death, this might as well have been done. But unless he had time to retrieve the ramrod from wherever it flew, the loss of it would render the weapon useless, and it would be difficult to find a replacement at the border, so it seems unlikely that the men of the border made a habit of the practice, unless they really I was a matter of life and death.

However, whatever became of the ramrod once it was used, it is clear from the steps above that loading and firing a flintlock pistol was far from a simple proposition. Daniel Boone with his Kentucky rifle and many other frontiersmen and soldiers who used flintlock weapons certainly deserve our admiration for being able to do so with such a high degree of skill and skill!

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