Keeping Your Powder Dry

“Keep your powder dry” has been a military maxim for at least 400 years. But how was one to do this in an age when gunpowder had to be manually loaded into an unsteady firearm in a hurry?

Soldiers, hunters and marksmen carried a handy supply of the stuff in light, hollowed-out cow or ox horns, with a base and spout tamped in. They were ubiquitous among American colonists, so much so that they needed a way to identify their personal horns.

Which brings us to the artisans, cartographers or just bored guys with a knife who whiled and whittled away many an afternoon turning a utilitarian object into a personal work of folk art: the engraved powder horn.

The Library’s Geography and Map Division holds 10 brilliant pieces of these relics of frontier life, dating from the 1750s to early 1800s. The horns, like tens of thousands from the era, are carved with an array of images: maps, houses, cityscapes, trees, animals, birds, personalized motifs.

“ABEL CHAPMAN AND HIS HORN — MAID IN PROVIDENCE,” reads the inscription on a 1777 horn from Rhode Island, engraved with images of buildings, a church and roads.

Animal horns had been used for thousands of years, to blow signals or to store almost anything — ink, snuff, grease, water. Gunpowder was a natural addition, particularly as a horn could be easily made water and spark proof.

Since gunpowder was doled out from large kegs, a gunman needed a way to mark a horn as his. And so horn etchings, like their cousin scrimshaw art, began to move from the prosaic to the ornate. The outline typically was first penciled or penned onto the horn, then cut in with a needle, knife or graver.

Powder horns faded after paper and then metal cartridges were introduced. By the outbreak of the Civil War, they were history. But their long afterlife endures in museums and private collections, a reminder of who we used to be and how we used to live.