How the Kentucky Rifle Turned Frontier Deer Hunters into America’s First Snipers
BY Herschel Smith
1 month, 2 weeks ago
Why was the Kentucky rifle such a success? Probably because here, for the first time, was a firearm that evolved in direct response to America’s needs. Rifles brought over from Europe were of little value in the American wilderness. Loading was a slow, difficult job. The noise of hammering a tight-fitting ball down the length of the barrel often scared off game or attracted attention at the wrong time. Construction was ugly and ungainly; trigger guards were bulky yet frail; sights were useless in dark forests or in any spot where accuracy was vital; calibers were large; and the rifles as a whole were heavy and unreliable. Little wonder that for many years the smoothbores reigned supreme.
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No frontiersman wanted to carry a heavy weapon on his long treks in the wilderness. The weight was steadily reduced until the average Kentucky hunting rifle weighed between 9 and 10 pounds. (Those made for match shooting averaged about 19 pounds.) Similarly, using a large-caliber rifle meant that the lone pioneer had to carry a heavy load of bullets. So the caliber was reduced from the .65 and .70 common in Europe to about .45. The pound of lead that once yielded sixteen .70 bullets now gave forty-eight .45 balls — three times as many shots.
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George Washington had learned the value of Kentucky riflemen in the French and Indian War. When the Revolution began, he urged the Continental Congress to put in a call for them. So it happens that the first troops raised by a central government on this continent were companies of straight-shooting backwoodsmen — and this might be called the beginning of the U. S. Army!
From the far fringes of the frontier the colorful, independent hunters flocked to their meeting places. One group of ninety-six men, recruited in Virginia by Daniel Morgan, marched 600 miles in 21 days to join the army facing the British at Cambridge, Mass. And some of these tough customers had walked 200 miles through the wilderness in order to enlist!
The bulk of the fighting in the Revolution was done with smoothbore muskets, so inaccurate that nineteen shots out of twenty would miss an 18-foot-square target at 350 yards. This performance was so poor that Benjamin Franklin urged the authorities to equip the Continental Army with bows and arrows.
Like every other improvement in arms, from the longbow to the atom bomb, the rifle was denounced as barbarous and uncivilized — by the side that didn’t have it. After Bunker Hill, the British tried to alibi their heavy losses by charging that the Americans used rifles with slit bullets that broke in four parts when fired. As a matter of fact, the frontier riflemen hadn’t arrived at the time of Bunker Hill; according to a writer of the time, the New England farmers who fought there were armed with muskets, mostly without bayonets. But he adds: “They are almost all marksmen, being accustomed to sporting of one kind or another from their youth.”
Soon, however, the men with the Kentuckys were pouring northward, amazing townspeople with their marksmanship as well as with their outlandish garb and swaggering manners. Newspapers were filled with stories of their feats — many of which obviously gained in the telling. From Lancaster, Pa., a townsman wrote of seeing a man take a 5 x 7-inch piece of board and hold it between his knees while his brother put eight bullets through it in succession from a distance of 60 yards. Another chap offered to shoot an apple off a man’s head at the same range, but the timid spectators declined to watch any such fool stunt.
After they joined the army at Cambridge, the backwoodsmen made life miserable for the British. Their specialty was picking off officers and sentries. Soon a Philadelphia printer was writing to a friend in London: “This province has raised 1,000 riflemen, the worst of whom will put a ball into a man’s head at the distance of 150 or 200 yards. Therefore advise your officers who shall hereafter come out to America to settle their affairs in England before their departure.”
British General Howe is said to have offered a large reward for the capture of a Kentucky rifleman. When one finally was taken, Howe sent him to London to show what the redcoats were up against. A few demonstrations of his skill brought British enlistments practically to zero!
It sounds like the assault weapon of the revolutionary war. The British didn’t want the colonists to have rifled bores any more than your government wants you to have the weapons they have.
On November 18, 2025 at 12:57 am, Steve Miller said:
A lot of scoffers out there. I often advise those in WA my home state, concerned about various hazards among them Chinese troops at the Canadian border, we have 3 million hunters in WA and most if not all, are snipers. God Kith Kin AO in that order my friends
On November 18, 2025 at 7:44 am, mike said:
The best classification for American colonial period rifles of the mid-Atlantic is to refer to them as simply “American Longrifles”. That works because they were uniquely American and no one else in the world produced or used anything like them at the time. “Pennsylvania Longrifle” is a better term than “Kentucky” since most of the builders settled in that state and imported the skills from Germany and adopted the product to the local market. That term still falls short since it leaves out the rifles produced elsewhere in Appalachia. “Kentucky Rifle” is the worst term since that region of the modern state was unexplored and unsettled when these rifles came to prominence among Appalachian backwoodsmen. It is true that they were the principle tool used by the longhunters who explored that region, but the origin of the term probably stems from the old War of 1812 song about the Battle of New Orleans called “The Hunters of Kentucky”.
On November 20, 2025 at 12:46 pm, Jim Smith said:
The Prologue to ‘ The Long Rifle’ by Stewart Edward White is entitled The Grooved Barrel. It is a most interesting discussion of the development of the weapon we call the Kentucky Rifle. One quote stands out regarding the longer barrel: “For better sighting. The woods are dark, and if a man would hold true in the twilight, he must have his front sight far from his eye.”
On November 21, 2025 at 3:32 am, Georgiaboy61 said:
The presence of Kentucky and Pennsylvania rifles and the riflemen who used them were certainly a key part of the American victory in the War of Independence against Great Britain. But just as important were the tactics of unconventional & guerilla warfare used by the colonists. Many of these tactics and methods were evolved during the French and Indian Wars; others were learned surviving on the frontier.
Many of the American Indian tribes practiced hit-and-run warfare and other forms of raids, as well using terrain to their advantage and camouflage to disguise themselves. The colonists soon learned these methods as well, especially in light of the relative ineffectiveness of the line-and-column tactics used by European armies at the time. In remote places on the frontier, often there was no organized army anyway; militia and other informal or ad-hoc arrangements were the norm.
Francis Marion “The Swamp Fox” was perhaps the foremost practitioner of this art, but there were others also – and their methods made a large, even decisive, difference in the war effort particularly in the South. By refusing to fight when, where and how the British wished, the militia gave the Redcoats fits by forcing him to wage a form of war with which he was unfamiliar and untrained.
As far as the riflemen were concerned, in an era when boxes of infantry in closely-held ranks marched to within fifty yards of one another, sometimes closer still – before engaging one another with smooth-bore muskets, riflemen who could successfully engage individual targets at distances as great as 200-300 yards away were a revelation. And a skilled man behind a Kentucky or Pennsylvania rifle could hit groups of enemy soldiers and inflict casualties from farther away than that.
On November 21, 2025 at 3:48 am, Georgiaboy61 said:
@ Steve Miller
According to the statistics I have seen for 2018, 15.6 million hunting licenses were sold in that year. My cursory search didn’t turn up a more-recent year, but it doesn’t matter with regards to making my point, which is that if you consider each of those hunters de facto an irregular soldier or militiaman as he would have been considered in colonial times, you are looking at the largest “army” in the world by a considerable margin. No one in the world can approach those kinds of numbers, not even the Chinese. And many of those hunters are going to be skilled in the use of scoped high-powered rifles, and not simply shotguns.
Of course, technological changes in the conduct of warfare – such as the widespread availability of effective low-cost drones and UAVs, threatens to upend the advantage noted above, but at least for the time being, all of those armed citizens with hunting permits serve as a nice deterrent to have on hand against anyone contemplating mischief.
We ought not to be surprised, however, because in a very real sense, our republic was founded by the rifleman citizen-soldier. As Colonel Jeff Cooper noted the act of picking up a rifle changes you from “a subject to a citizen”…
On November 24, 2025 at 7:51 am, Van C. said:
I enjoyed reading this article, but I enjoyed and the comments even more. I have always wanted a “Pennsylvania Lone Rifle” of the type used in the American Revolution, but muzzle loading is one area of the American firearms culture I have not yet delved into.
On November 24, 2025 at 9:23 pm, Ozark Redneck said:
@Georgiaboy61
Spot on as usual! I particularly liked your reference to the “Swamp Fox’. Several years ago I picked up a used copy on eBay, “The Swamp Fox- How Francis Marion saved the American Revolution” by John Oller. An excellent read! Well worth it. Thank you Herschel, it is sites like yours that we can share our love of American history.