Sold – Contemporary Pipe Tomahawk by Brian Barker

Contemporary Pipe Tomahawk by Brian Barker

Forged pipe tomahawk with screw bowl made by Brian Barker (Huttonsville, Kentucky). Brian made this pipe ax as an exact copy of the very famous pipe tomahawk made by John Fraser, Venango, PA ca. 1758.

A beautiful hand forged pipe tomahawk with a screw on bowl made by a very talented  contemporary blacksmith. Brian Barker  ca 1999.

See Barlow Contemporary Longrifle Collection Book

About John Fraser

John Fraser immigrated to the new world from Scotland in 1735 and established his first trading house in the village of Venango in western Pennsylvania, adjacent to the Seneca village. He was licensed by the British to trade with the Native Americans and did extensive gunsmithing for the Seneca, often exchanging his work for furs and pelts. By 1748, Fraser had developed a strong relationship of mutual respect with the Native American tribes as well as with the Crown as a trader, but his station in life was challenged the following year when the French tried to regain a stronghold of the Ohio River Valley. On numerous occasions, Fraser had been forced to flee his trading house in Venango and had lost all of his trade goods. By the summer of 1753, he had moved and established a new trading house at the mouth of Turtle Creek on the Monongahela (within Allegheny County, Pennsylvania), where he would meet George Washington later that fall. Washington was commissioned by the Governor of Virginia to confront the French and demand that they leave their forts in the Ohio Country and with Christopher Gist in frigid weather upriver. After a terrible night where the two were stranded on an island due to ice forming on the river, they were able to make it to Fraser’s warm cabin by morning, which started their friendship. Fraser was with Washington at Fort Necessity, Braddock’s Defeat, and Forbes’s campaign against Duquesne.