Mitch Yates Profile
I can’t tell you how often people have told me that their passion for muzzleloading was ignited by a movie or a television show. For most black powder shooters of my generation it was watching Fess Parker playing both Davey Crockett and Daniel Boone on television that made us long for flintlock rifles of our own. For a lot of younger people…well, relatively younger people…“The Last of the Mohicans” was the film that got them started. And, I suppose the day is soon coming where I will meet people who entered the world of muzzleloaders after watching “The Revenant.”
Gun maker Mitch Yates got his dose of celluloid inspiration as a 14-year-old boy on a rainy afternoon in Bedford, Pennsylvania when his father took him to see the Robert Redford movie, “Jeremiah Johnson.” That was all it took. Mitch was hooked. After seeing the movie, his father bought him a Thompson Center Hawken rifle, and Mitch officially entered the fraternity of soot shooters.
Thankfully for Mitch’s future as a gun builder, his early exposure to muzzleloading guns wasn’t limited to Thompson Center’s solid, but historically challenged, replica of a plains rifle. As a youngster Mitch’s family had moved to New York’s Long Island, but his schoolteacher father returned the family to his ancestral home to spend the summers. Luckily for Mitch, his family originally hailed from the motherland of eighteenth century American longrifle development in Lancaster County Pennsylvania.
Mitch’s grandfather owned two original longrifles that had been handed down through the family. And, when it came to those historical relics, Mitch’s grandfather had a strict look, but don’t touch policy. So, as a boy, Mitch would admire the graceful lines of the long barreled rifles with their sleek full-length maple stocks. Being forbidden to touch them just added to the allure of those guns.
Mitch’s memory of those rifles would inform his own work as a rifle builder later in life. But his first gun building effort harkened back to that Thompson Center Hawken. Fifteen years ago Mitch was invited on an elk hunt, and he decided to build a .58 caliber, percussion Hawken rifle for that trip.
Building that rifle was supposed to be a one time thing. It was just a means to an end. Mitch wanted a big rifle that could solidly anchor an elk, and building one seemed like the most efficient way to get exactly what he was looking for. But, during the course of that first project, Mitch discovered that he really enjoyed the process of gun building. In fact, he enjoyed building the gun even more than he enjoyed hunting with it.
With his appetite whetted by his first build, Mitch decided to make another muzzleloader. But this time he wanted to make a rifle that would be more in keeping with the history of the Long Island area where he’d made his home. So, his next effort was a .50 caliber, New England style rifle.
As happens when you have a talent at gun building, his friends and shooting buddies took note of his new hobby. First one friend asked him to build a rifle, then another asked, and another, until, eventually, Mitch closed his business and went into rifle building full time.
Mitch’s workmanship is outstanding. His previous occupation as a high-end finish carpenter and cabinetmaker gave him a great education in both wood and metalworking. At the age of 19 Mitch had gone to work for a carpenter whose primary trade was restoring fine eighteenth and nineteenth century homes. His mentor taught Mitch to do his carpentry work primarily with hand tools, because the only way to match antique moldings and woodwork in the old houses they were restoring, was to make the new piece the same way the old piece had been made.
Mitch also learned metalworking at the same time. He and his mentor restored Parson’s Black Smith Shop, the last standing black smith shop in East Hampton, New York. And, in the process, he learned blacksmithing well enough to man the shop and put on blacksmithing demonstrations for the public.
Mitch eventually started his own furniture and cabinet making business, where he specialized in working on the beachfront homes of the rich and famous in the Hamptons. But, three years ago, his love of gun building, and the growing popularity of his guns, led him to close down his cabinet making business, so he could devote all his energy to gun building.
There are so many skills needed to build a proper longrifle, that it can be daunting for anyone to try to master them. Even though his work as a furniture maker and a cabinet maker gave him a solid grounding in wood working techniques, Mitch realized that gun building calls for a more wide ranging set of skills. If Mitch wanted to produce the kind of guns the old masters produced in the eighteenth century he wanted to learn the intricacies of the craft from some of its master practitioners.
For years Mitch attended the National Muzzle Loading Rifle Association sponsored gun builder’s classes at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, Kentucky. He took an 18 -day seminar with the House brothers to learn to forge iron gun furniture, and for six years he travelled to Bowling Green to study stock carving and metal engraving under the tutelage of Wallace Gusler and Gary Brumfield, each of whom made their mark as the master gunsmith of the gun shop in Colonial Williamsburg.
Still Mitch felt that metal engraving was his weak area. The standard engravers work on their art is to engrave practice rounds. These are blank sheets of metal that engravers cut practice designs on. In a way, practice rounds are the metal equivalents of the notebooks we filled with our penmanship practice in elementary school.
Mitch told me that the problem with practice rounds is that they are boring. There’s always something more interesting in the shop calling for your attention. Mitch said, “I’d start a practice round, but my attention would wander, and I’d lose focus on the engraving.”
Mitch’s solution reveals the kind of thinking that helped him become one of the small cadre of elite gun makers who can actually make a good living building traditional longrifles. Mitch said that doing practice rounds, and throwing them into a box just didn’t provide enough motivation. So, he started selling a line of engraved trade silver. Mitch practices his gun engraving by taking his chisels to work on small silver items like tobacco boxes, armbands and medallions.
“When I’m engraving something that I need to sell to a customer it really sharpens my focus.” Mitch said. And, as a result, his engraving skills have improved considerably. In fact, engraved trade silver has developed into a profitable sideline that goes a long way towards defraying his expenses from travelling to trade shows.
“Let’s face it,” Mitch said, “Most people who come to my table to look at the guns on display don’t have thousands of spare dollars in their pockets to actually buy a gun. But an awful lot of those people have the money to buy an engraved silver wristband or a snuffbox. The gun orders I take at shows keep my business going, but the trade silver pays for the gas, booth rental and hotel rooms to get me there.”
Like a lot of artisans, Mitch is modest about his abilities. I’ve looked at his work for years, and as far back as I can remember, his engraving has been top notch. Like the rest of his work, his engraving shows the attention to detail that is a hallmark of all of Mitch’s work. When it comes to gun work, Mitch believes hand work is the only way to go. Very little work in his shop is done with power tools. Mitch makes all his stocks from planks, so he uses a band saw to rough cut the basic shape. He also uses a drill press when he’s building a lock, and he uses a lath to turn his own screws. Other than that, everything is done by hand. Even the pinholes that attach the barrels to the stocks on Mitch’s guns are drilled with a hand-cranked eggbeater drill. Now that’s dedication!
Mitch chuckled at that. “You can’t properly make an eighteenth century gun unless you use eighteenth century techniques,” he explained.
He even makes his own nitrate of iron stock stain by dissolving wrought iron nails in a mixture of nitric acid and water. It is the only stain he’ll use on gun. To make his stains, he prefers to use nails salvaged from demolished eighteenth century houses, but he will also make solutions using other ferrous metals like soft steel. Different types of ferrous metal produce different tones when applied to a gunstock. Mitch feels that his nitric acid stain is the only way to duplicate the color of wood on original longrifles.
When it comes to building rifles, Mitch is a traditionalist. While he doesn’t like to make exact copies of original rifles, he insists on maintaining the original architecture, and style of embellishment. If, for instance, the original gun was decorated in the Baroque style, Mitch will do his own interpretation of the carving and engraving, but it will be true to the Baroque style.
Mitch builds several types of rifles, including New England rifles, and iron mounted Virginia style rifles, but his favorites are brass mounted Pennsylvania rifles. His family roots in the Keystone state led to his interest in the history of the region during French and Indian War era and the Revolutionary War era.
He definitely prefers the earlier guns of the region. The transitional jaeger rifles and proto-Lancaster County rifles of the Christian Springs area represent his favorite school of gun making. Rifle #40 in George Shumway’s book, “Rifles of Colonial America, vol I”, with its slightly stepped wrist, open bow trigger guard and Rococo stock carving is a style that Mitch loves to recreate. But any Mitch Yates rifle that I’ve been fortunate enough to hold is a symphony in wood and steel that anyone would be proud to own.
Mitch is a member of the Contemporary Longrifle Association (CLA) and the National Muzzle Loading Rifle Association (NMLRA). You can see some of his work on his website at mitchyatesgunmaker.com. And you can contact him by phone or email at 631-728-3729 or jmyii@hotmail.com.