John Moses Browning was 10, going on 11, when he created his first gun.
Using parts he found on the trash heap in his father's gun shop in Ogden, he concocted the firearm using an old smoothbore barrel with a stock hacked from a slab of wood with a hatchet. A piece of tin nailed to the stock served as the flashpan, mounted alongside the flashhole of the wired-on barrel.Then he and his smaller brother went out to hunt, Matt swinging a perforated bucket to keep some coals alive. When they spotted a covey of sage hens, John jerked the homemade rifle up, shouting "Now!" Matt dipped a long stick into his coals, quickly blew a little flame into life and - narrowly missing John's ear in the process - attempted to touch off the powder-and-shot mixture in the flashpan. Nothing. But on the second try, when the explosion was over, one sage hen was dead, two hens were so disoriented that Matt could catch them, and John was "down hard on my hunkers."
The boys returned home triumphant, but expecting a second explosion from their father, Jonathan, who didn't look kindly on anyone taking things from his shop without permission.
The next morning, with Jonathan digging into a breakfast of sage hen pie, the boys faced the music. Looking over young John's jerry-rigged rifle, the crusty old pioneer of 1852 made his assessment. "John Mose, you're going on 11. Can't you make a better gun than that?"
So John did. Over a lifetime devoted to improving firearms, he obtained 128 patents for 80 new models and improvements. His guns ranged from .22-caliber to 47-millimeter. Through four wars - Spanish-American, World Wars I and II and the Korean episode - millions of American fighting men carried a Browning firearm into battle. Thousands of sports gunmen did and do carry guns bearing his name. At his death in 1926, John M. Browning had contributed more to the advancement of firearms than anyone to that date, and probably since.
His inventive genius probably was a heritage from his father, an early Mormon pioneer who set up gun shops in several Midwestern locations as the Saints were hounded from community to community. One of his assignments was to make guns, such as slide repeating and cylinder repeating rifles, for pioneers preparing to go West. As the main body of the LDS Church set out for the Great Basin, Browning stayed in Iowa for several years to help outfit others.
John Moses was born on a crisp winter morning, Jan. 23, 1855, when Ogden had about 1,500 pioneering residents.
Jonathan spent considerable time away from home helping in the settlement of the frontier community. He had his boys working in his gun shop when they were very small. Young John "cut his teeth on a rifle" and was happiest when tinkering around the shop.
For a time, the Brownings operated a tannery, and young John had the job of keeping the family horse, "Old Button," traveling in a circle to power the tannery machinery. Occasionally, the young rider would go to sleep and the horse would halt, bringing industry to a standstill. When his mother objected that the work was too hard for a 7-year-old, his father relented and let him go to school for a while. He continued to study sporadically, in the usual pioneer pattern, until he was 15, when the teacher admitted that the boy knew more than the instructor. He could recite the names of the parts of a gun mechanism before he could recite the alphabet, according to a biography, "John M. Browning, American Gunmaker."
When he was 23, the young man made his first commercially successful gun, the Winchester Single Shot Model 1885. How an inventor in the relative obscurity of Ogden, Utah Territory, came to be associated with the famed gun manufacturer is the beginning of the Browning success story.
Winchester salesman Andrew McCausland was traveling in the West in 1883 when he happened upon one of the Browning rifles, marked with a Browning Bros. title and serial number 463. McCausland bought it from the owner for $15 and sent it to the Winchester factory in the East. The rifle created such a stir at the plant that within a week, T.G. Bennett, vice president and general manager, was en route to Ogden with the board's permission to buy all the rights to the gun.
When Bennett walked into the Browning factory, (touted as "the largest gun shop between Omaha and the Pacific Coast"), one of several Brownings at work making guns advised him, "That's him. Third vise down." A business relationship lasting 19 years and making Browning a significant name in the gun industry was about to be born.
Winchester bought the rights to Browning's gun for $8,000, considerably less than Bennett had been authorized to pay, but "a very big $8,000" from Browning's viewpoint. A raw frontiersman from a business perspective, Browning asked for no royalties and received none.
His ignorance of business almost got him in trouble when he continued to create and sell the rifle after entering the deal with Winchester. A sharply toned letter from the company gave him a quick education in that aspect of business.
The first time Browning actually saw his rifle as produced by Winchester was in a store window in Georgia, where he was serving an LDS mission. He and his companion rushed into the store, and young John was demonstrating the mechanism with a hand moved by intimate acquaintance before the shopkeeper knew what was happening. He quickly took the firearm from Browning and returned it to the store window.
For the rest of his life, Browning was continuously working on a new model or a refinement of one already in use. His style was casual. He made no blueprints and often made notes on bits of paper or empty cartridge boxes as ideas caught him in midstep. He seldom used his micrometer to make the fine measurements needed to fit delicate gun mechanisms. Often, he was found rooting through the junk pile for a "little piece about this size and shaped like this."
Asked in later years how he did it, Browning said, "I found a good starting place, a fixed point - like the North Star, for example - from which I could make exact calculations. Then I calculated."
Winchester bought the patents for 44 of Browning's guns. Some were never produced, but the manufacturer didn't want them in the hands of competitors. When the relationship ended, Browning became associated with Fabrique Nationale in Belgium, a company with a long history in arms-making.
During the Boxer Rebellion in China, the Colt Peacemaker Model 1895 was credited with saving the foreign legions in Peking. It was in use in France again at the beginning of World War I.
At the outset of the latter war, Browning made a significant contribution to America's military, selling the government one of his latest weapons for $750,000. On the open market, the gun would have earned an estimated $12.7 million in royalties. His rationale: "If we (he and his brothers) were 15 or 20 years younger, we'd be over there in the mud."
A grateful Secretary of War Newton D. Baker sent a letter thanking Browning for "a very distinct service to this country in inventions (that) contributed to the strength and effectiveness of our armies."
Many honors have been accorded the Utah inventor, including having a portrait in the Inventors Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution. In 1914, King Albert of Belgium presented The Cross of Knighthood of the Order of Leopold to the tall, slim man from Ogden, titling him Sir John Moses Browning, Gunsmith. In 1952, in Liege, Belgium, a life-size memorial plaque was unveiled, hailing Browning as the greatest firearm inventor the world has ever known.
At Thanksgiving time in 1926, Browning was in Belgium working on yet another gun, a superposed shotgun. It was his 61st and last trip across the Atlantic. While visiting the Belgian plant, he became ill and within a short time was dead of a heart attack.
He once questioned his own compulsion to make guns that would shoot faster and further. If the effort was not really worthwhile, he said, "then this progress we brag about is just a crazy, blind racing past the things we are looking for and haven't the sense to recognize. And in the matter of guns, that makes me crazier than most."