Pedersoli

[Chris in TN]

My personal recommendation, since you obviously are not hung up on pure tradition, would be to find a used T/C Hawken or Renegade in .50 or .54 caliber. They are available in flint or percussion ignition for under $500 on GunBroker or other online sites and probably for less locally if you shop around. The T/Cs were high quality with Green Mtn barrels, good adjustable sights, and hooked breach for ease of cleaning. Weight is around 8 lbs. The percussion rifles can use Pyrodex or any of the other black powder substitutes and will shoot conicals or roundballs. I can't speak to the T/C flintlocks, the one I had years ago was percussion and that is what I would recommend. A .54 T/C with a conical will hammer an elk at the distance you can make an ethical shot with iron sights and either conical or patched roundball will work fine for deer.

Good hunting.

I have a couple of T/C Hawkens and have had several others - Hawkens in .45 and 50 and 54 caliber and Renegade in .50 and another Renegade rebored to 20 gauge smoothbore, and a Seneca in .45.

One of my Hawkens now wears a Green Mountain 1-28 'long range hunter' barrel, or whatever they called it when GM was selling them a decade or so ago. The other has the factory 1-48" barrel made by who-knows-who. The factory barrel shoots pretty decently inside of the ranges at which *I* am capable of reliably hitting stuff with open sights.

The actual history of T/C 'historic' guns, is as interesting to me, as the actual 1800's era guns themselves. Yes, I'm the guy that'll grab his T/C Hawken in the wintertime while rewatching Jeremiah Johnson for the 436th time.

Every winter I try to get one or more of them out and shoot them, for fun.