The lighter Americanized guns featured barrels of up to four feet in length, often adorned with nicknames and personalized designs and inscriptions. The new guns were noted to be “long, graceful and accurate in both hunting and warfare.”

This gun and its close relatives saw action in the French and Indian Wars, the American Indian Wars, the American Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Texas War of Independence, and in countless long-forgotten battles with lethal animal predators. It fed America, freed it from tyranny, and set it on a course toward astonishing growth and prosperity.

The American longrifle was also known as “the Kentucky rifle”—as Kentucky was once the catch-all word used to describe much of the little-known Western wilderness of the Appalachians and beyond—and “the Pennsylvania rifle,” as Lancaster and other Pennsylvania towns were a “Silicon Valley” of innovation and creativity for gun designers in the 1700s.

In his 1924 book The Kentucky Rifle, John Dillin traced its evolution as a kind of rhapsody: “From a flat bar of soft iron, hand forged into a gun barrel; laboriously bored and rifled with crude tools; fitted with a stock hewn from a maple tree in the neighboring forest; and supplied with a lock hammered to shape on the anvil; an unknown smith, in a shop long since silent, fashioned a rifle which changed the whole course of world history; made possible the settlement of a continent; and ultimately freed our country of foreign domination. Light in weight; graceful in line; economical in consumption of powder and lead; fatally precise; distinctly American; it sprang into immediate popularity; and for a hundred years was a model often slightly varied but never radically changed.”

The next time you feel especially proud to be an American, you might like to take a minute to think of a rifle commander named Daniel Morgan, who was Sgt. Tim Murphy’s commanding officer that day on at Saratoga, and his squads of riflemen from the villages and backwoods of Pennsylvania, Virginia, Kentucky and elsewhere on the frontier. And you might like to say a private word of thanks to them, because they were vitally important in the creation of the United States.

I feel connected to Dan Morgan and his riflemen for another reason, too. My seventh great-grandfather on my father’s side, a fellow from Virginia named Samuel Houston, was reported by his own son to have been one of Morgan’s riflemen, and at least one account places him with Morgan and Murphy at Saratoga, as an officer and paymaster. As paymaster, I’d wager he was popular among the troops! I served in the Iraq War as a U.S. Navy SEAL sniper, and if these accounts of Sam Houston’s service are true, it turns out I’ve got sniper’s blood in me going way back to the Revolutionary War. (Believe it or not, I didn’t find out about this until I was researching this book.)

Dan Morgan was a big, ornery, professional wagon-driver with a strong taste for liquor, gambling, getting into fights and pre-marital sex. He set up house with a gal named Abigail Curry “without benefit of clergy,” as they said back in those days, who bore him two daughters before finally marrying her in 1774. He was also one of the greatest marksmen in Colonial America. Remember, this was a country of sharpshooters on the frontier, a country where every week, from Maine to Georgia, shooting contests were held where civilian riflemen attempted to snuff out the light of a distant candle without damaging the wick or candle.

The American longrifle brandished by Morgan and his riflemen was not the main infantry arm of the rebellious Colonists, not by a long shot. Less than 10 percent of the American troops carried them. The most common infantry gun for both sides in the Revolutionary War was the European-style smoothbore flintlock musket, which had a shorter range than the longrifle but had the advantages of being faster to reload—15 seconds was a typical reload time, twice as fast as the longrifle—and unlike the longrifle, it could be fitted with a bayonet, which was very handy for close-quarter combat. And in the worst case, you could swing a musket like a club and do some damage. Not so with the longrifle. If you tried to clobber someone with a longrifle, chances are it would snap into pieces.

I’ve been in some hairy combat scrapes myself, but it’s difficult to picture how tough it would have been to work an American longrifle on the battlefield. After you fired one round, you had to stand up and fiddle with pouring an exact measurement of dry powder into the muzzle, plus lead ball, and push it in with a long wooden rod, all the while praying to God to save you from the wind blowing your powder all over your boots, or the rain gumming up the mechanism, or an all-too-common misfire, or getting shot while standing up fully exposed out in the open for 30 seconds. No wonder so many riflemen hid behind trees whenever they could.

The longrifle’s lack of a bayonet occasionally proved tragic for the Americans. At Guan Heights during the Battle of Long Island on Aug. 20 and 21, 1776, Hessian mercenary troops armed with faster-loading, bayonet-tipped muskets overwhelmed troops of Gen. John Sullivan’s rifle battalion while the Americans were trying to reload. Many Americans were quickly slaughtered in macabre fashion. “The greater part of the riflemen,” recalled one Hessian officer, “were pierced with the bayonet to the trees.”

In fact, many of the great battles of the war did not feature American guerilla attacks from the woods. Instead, they were head-on, open-air shoot-outs, bayonet charges and slugfests featuring British troops often armed with Brown Bess muskets, facing Colonial troops armed with an assortment of European-sourced muskets and locally produced copies, with both sides supported by cavalry, artillery and other accoutrements of war, including sabers, some flintlock pistols and even tomahawks and hatchets.    

Following the logic of musket technology, and the traditions of European military tactics, musket firing on both sides was typically group-volley fire at enemy linear formations en masse at short ranges, rather than individually aimed fire at specific long-distance targets. Even the Revolutionaries’ legendary hit-and-run pursuit of British troops from Lexington and Concord through woods and country roads at the start of the war on April 19, 1775, was conducted by Colonial militia mostly armed with muskets and bird guns known as “fowling pieces,” not longrifles. The epic American defense of Bunker Hill and Breeds Hill two months later was fought mainly with muskets, too.

But American riflemen and their longrifles, which were originally designed not to kill British soldiers but to nail small-to-medium-sized game on the frontier—as well as hostile Indians—provided a powerful extra edge to the Revolutionaries in several critical moments of the war. The rifling of the longrifle’s barrel imparted spin on the ball as it flew out of the muzzle, greatly increasing its stability in flight and thereby its accuracy over the smoothbore musket.

Through the Revolutionary War, Gen. Washington periodically deployed companies of riflemen, such as Morgan and Murphy, as long-range scouts, rangers, skirmishers and snipers, and as a shock force that could, when they were available, provide a powerful overlay to Continental Army regulars and Colonial militia. And in several pivotal moments, the frontier-bred riflemen from places such Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia delivered spectacularly, and may even have affected the course of the war and sped the American victory.

Which brings us back to the battlefield at Saratoga, at around 11 a.m. on Oct. 7, 1777.

Sgt. Timothy Murphy’s third shot found its target. It squarely hit British Gen. Simon Fraser in his belly, who probably never dreamed he was in danger of being shot from so far away, at least not 300 yards. Murphy’s bullet created one of the most painful of battle injuries, a stomach wound. As he lay dying, Fraser spoke of seeing the American rifleman who shot him, far off in the distance.

When they saw their leader fall and get dragged off the battlefield, British troops panicked, broke ranks and soon fell back in retreat. The tide of battle was reversed. The loss of Gen. Fraser, explained his boss, Gen. Burgoyne, “helped to turn the fate of the day.” Ten days later, he and 6,000 British troops surrendered to the Americans, handing them a spectacular victory.