Hatfield's estimated sales last year were close to $2.5 million. (He doesn't like to say how much his business grosses.) By early this year he had back orders for almost 2,000 guns and had gone to two shifts. His biggest problem was the old perennial -- lack of capital. "I talk to my banker more than I'd like to," he confesses.
By then he was in a large old brick building in the middle of St. Joseph. One side of the building housed a bar and hamburger restaurant. "Seems like it is just my destiny to be in alcohol and firearms," Hatfield says. "Moonshine and muzzle-loaders are my life."
He is wearing blue jeans and a faded chamois shirt when I meet him at his new quarters, and he wipes his hands on a rag before shaking my hand. "Caught me working," he says, as he leads me out back, to where the guns are assembled.
Muzzle-loaders and side-by-sides rest upright in racks. They are in various stages of completion. Some stocks are dry and rough, others have been sanded, and a few have been oiled and rubbed down with steel wool until they gleam.
The guns' barrels and actions are a dull shade between silver and gray before they have been dipped in the bluing solution. The blued steel parts, which are ready to be fitted on the stocks, have the slightly ominous cast one associates with arms.
The work is done almost entirely by young women. They are unskilled, hourly employees and are trained in one or two basic tasks -- sanding, oiling, rubbing.
Hatfield oversees everything and does the final assembly and fitting of the side-by-sides himself, working at a bench that is littered with the tools of his trade -- hollow-ground screwdrivers, taps, punches, files, and soldering irons. He works with studied patience, taking a micron off with the file, then trying the metal-to-metal fit two or three times before he picks up the file and makes another soft stroke. The tools and the gun, the pace of the work, and the smell of linseed oil. . . it is all satisfyingly redolent of a different time.
A man is bent over a bench, carefully engraving the image of a quail in gold on the floor plate of a finished gun. The engraver, Danny Pitts, wears wire-rimmed spectacles and has long, wild hair. Hatfield has known him "oh, just about forever." He sent Pitts to Italy to perfect his technique. "But what he does," Hatfield says, "is more in the American tradition. Bolder and broader than the European style."
Hatfield works for an hour to get the fit just right. When the gun is ready, he carries it to a rack where the finished guns rest, waiting for a final inspection and then shipment.
"Man in Illinois bought that one for his wife. She liked his so much that he never got to shoot it."
He wipes his hands on the rag again and says, "How about a beer and some lunch?"
At a table next door, he talks about his plans. "Well, I've never had a business plan, you know. It was just make as many guns as I could, sell them, and take more orders. But now I've got a financial adviser, and we're working up a three-year plan. The way he sees it, I can go one of three ways: I can go public, I can sell to someone bigger and keep running the company, or I can buy some machinery -- investment casting and CNC -- and start making components for myself and taking orders from other businesses."
Which way will he go?
"I don't know," he says. "Whichever way makes the most sense economically, I suppose." He doesn't say this with much enthusiasm, and one senses that he might already miss the days when he was on the road with one of his prototypes, taking orders and immersing himself in the details of the technology that enabled him to succeed. The stability of a three-year plan probably does not stir his blood much.
Hatfield has recently made a prototype of a double rifle, like the old safari guns. He believes he can sell it to Americans who want to hunt in Africa the way Teddy Roosevelt and Hemingway did. Hatfield especially enjoys describing how he called an English gunmaker to price an African gun.
"Told him I was Billy Bob Brewer from Midland-Odessa and I was thinking about going over to Africa to shoot something. 'So tell me now, boy,' I said, 'how much you going to charge me for one of them guns?'
" 'That will be 50,000, sir,' he said.
" 'Real money or pounds?'
" 'That will be pounds, sir.'
"I told him that sounded fair, when could I pick it up? He said, 'Three years,' and I said, 'Hell, boy, I'm supposed to leave in a month's time. What's the big holdup?'
"He explained how the gun had to be fitted and handmade and all that. Got right snooty about it. All the time I was thinking how I could make that same gun and see a profit selling that thing for $15,000.
"And you know what?" he says. "I believe I'll make a better gun, too. Better looking and better shooting."
He has begun producing a half-stock muzzle-loader, a replica of the guns carried by the mountain men as they roamed the American West. It is an odd, and oddly satisfying, juxtaposition. The old guns and the new tools -- especially computers. Workbench and workstation. A niche where the Hatfields of the world can thrive. "It's been a lot of fun," Hatfield says, "and it beats hell out of going back to sea."
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Geoffrey W. Norman has written widely about outdoor sports and is the author of four books, including the recently published Bouncing Back (Houghton Mifflin).
