DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker at this Gillespie County site tells it — and it's worth slowing down for. Picture the Civil War bearing down on Texas, and somewhere in this Hill Country, two men are sitting down to solve a problem that could mean the difference between a working rifle and a very expensive stick. One of them is E.
Krauskoff, a gunsmith. The other is Adolph Lungkwitz, a silversmith. Now, a gunsmith and a silversmith walking into a workshop together sounds like the setup to a joke — but what they were building was anything but funny.
They were making gun caps. The little percussion caps that detonate the powder, fire the round, make the whole thing go. Without them, all those rifles and pistols being turned out at Austin, Houston, Bastrop, Waxahachie, San Antonio, Corpus Christi, Burnet, Lancaster, Rusk, and Tyler — every last one of them was just ornamental ironwork.
The caps were everything. And Texas was running short. So here's what Krauskoff and Lungkwitz did.
They invented the machinery themselves. From scratch. They rolled copper thin — paper thin — and cut it down to cap-size pieces, precise enough to seat on a rifle nipple and do its job.
Then came the chemistry: saltpetre and quicksilver, packed into those tiny copper cups to give them their fire. Now, the saltpetre? That was the easy part, relatively speaking.
Bat caves nearby were supplying it. But the quicksilver and the copper — those had to come from somewhere far outside a blockaded Confederacy. And that meant hauling them through neutral Mexico or running them through the coastal blockade.
Either way, you were threading a needle. Either way, somebody was taking a risk to get two men in the Texas Hill Country the materials they needed to keep Confederate guns firing. That's the full weight of what happened at this site — a gunsmith and a silversmith, a copper sheet and some bat-cave saltpetre, and a whole lot of ingenuity holding the line.
What the marker says
In the Civil War, at this site, E. Krauskoff, gunsmith, and Adolph Lungkwitz, silversmith, made gun caps. Inventing machinery, they rolled copper thin and cut it to cap-size pieces. Saltpetre and quicksilver went into the caps, to detonate rifle and pistol ammunition. Saltpetre came from nearby bat caves. Quicksilver and copper had to be brought through neutral Mexico or the coastal blockade. Rifles, cannon, gunpowder and pistols were made at Austin, Houston, Bastrop, Waxahachie, san Antonio, corpus Christi, Burnet, Lancaster, Rusk and Tyler.