In the mid-nineteenth century more than a dozen gunmakers worked in Lafayette and Tippecanoe County, as well as hundreds more statewide. Many of these men have interesting, often idiosyncratic, life stories set in the era of the Wabash and Erie Canal, the coming of the railroad, western expansion, and the early industrial revolution. For this program, RIck Conwell and author/researcher Jeff Jaeger have assembled a special selection of rifles made by these local and regional makers and gathered from both public and private sources to illustrate their biographies.