Welcome to our Rifle Frock Department.
A “rifle frock” is a thigh or knee length civilian garment invented by professional deer hunters in the mid-1700s as a combination overcoat, blanket, raincoat, and ground cloth for deer hunting. Natty Bumpo, James Fenimore Cooper’s Deerslayer, wore one.
An early 1700s rinderpest plague in Europe had wiped out the cattle herds. Desperate for leather, traders soon turned to America. They hired the Indians to hunt the animals, paying for them with trade goods, and especially cloth, shirts, and guns. The eastern Buffalo herds went first, followed by the elk. Yes, elk. By that time, the settlers saw how profitable the trade was. However, a problem arose.
Shooting a deer in the side put a big hole in it and ruined the hide, so some genius used a special gun accurate enough to shoot the deer in the neck, which also killed the deer more quickly. Deer hunting was so profitable that a man could commission one of these custom guns, called a “rifle,” after just one hunting trip. By the mid-1700s, colonist deer hunting in the Appalachian Mountains were horning in on the Indians’ livelihood so much they sought to drive the colonists out, and resulted in the French and Indian War. The Indians weren’t fighting for land to hunt dinner; those hunting grounds were for the extensive hide trade. In 1770, two million hides were shipped out of Charleston, S.C.
When the war erupted in Boston in the Spring of 1775, about 300 of these professional deer hunters from Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania banded together and marched to Boston to tender their services to the Continent. Since Washington’s Army had no official uniform at the time, they were allowed to continue wearing their deer hunting clothes, best described by Samuel Houston (Sam’s father), an original officer in Daniel Morgan’s Rifle company, who recalled that they wore garments ‘of heavy linen, died brown with bark; they were open in front and made to extend down to near the knee and belted round the waist with dressed skin or woven girths. The sleeves were large, with a wrist band round the wrist and fringed over the upper part of the hand as far as the knuckles. Under the hunting shirt was a jacket made of finer materials…” Babbitt, Lawrence, Long, Obstinate and Bloody, p. 67.
Silas Deane, who saw some of the Pennsylvania riflemen in Philadelphia, described their hunting shirts in a letter of 3 June 1775 to his wife Elizabeth: “They take a piece of Ticklenburgh, or Tan Cloth that is stout and put it in a Tann Fatt, untill it has the shade of a dry, or fading Leaf, then they make a kind of Frock of it reaching down below the knee, open before, with a Large Cape, they wrapp it round them tight on a March, & tye it with their Belt in which hangs their Tomahawk” (Smith, Letters of Delegates, 1:436–38). Founders Online II. Letter Sent, 10–11 July 1775 (archives.gov) Footnote 13.
This civilian garment is now known as a “rifle frock.” At least one credible period image of a rifle frock exists, entitled “Amerikanischer Scharfschutz,” drawn by a Hessian prisoner in 1777.
