Outdoornews
January 6, 2021
Between the holidays, just before Ohio’s muzzleloader season, I hauled old First Blood down from its rack of prominence in my man-cave, and endeavored to check-sight it on my “back 40” range, a 50-yard benchrest affair.
The rifle is a 1980s vintage Thompson-Center .54 Hawken, a then-modern iteration of the classic, rugged, twin-trigger muzzleloader favored heavily by mountain-man trappers and wanderers of the Old West in the first half of the 19th century. They, like the original rifles built more than 200 years ago by the Hawken Brothers, of St. Louis, mostly have passed from the outdoors hunting scene, replaced by modern plastic and stainless steel and optics-equipped arms.