History out loud - Inspired by television program, pair builds cannon from log
By JOHN CRAMER of the Missoulian
ALBERTON - About a year ago, Rick Sween was watching a History Channel program about warriors who made cannons out of logs centuries ago.
He thought: Hell, if they did it, I can do it.
So, he did.
“KA-CHOONK!”
That’s the sound coming out of the homemade cannon, along with a cloud of gray smoke and the frozen water bottle that serves as his cannonball.
Rick Sween examines his homemade wooden cannon: prior to shooting the History Channel-inspired howitzer last week at his home near Alberton. Photo by MICHAEL GALLACHER/Missoulian
It flies true and straight about 100 yards up the mountainside behind his log cabin in the forest outside of town.
Sometimes he fires a can of beer, Hamm’s being his favorite.
“But I hate to waste a beer doing that,” he says.
Sween, 66, is a big man with big calloused hands, a friendly woodsman who knows his way around explosives.
A South Dakota native, he served seven years in the U.S. Army, including a tour in Vietnam with the 84th Combat Engineers, where he spent some time “blowing down trees” to make helicopter pads in the jungle.
He was an oil field construction supervisor for 20 years in California and New Orleans who later retired as the maintenance supervisor at Ruby’s Inn in Missoula.
He and his wife, Betty, who reared six children, had settled in western Montana in 1990 after visiting his uncle and aunt in Stevensville.
“I just never left,” he says.
His uncle left him a little money, so he and Betty bought 22 acres along a creek beside West Mountain Creek Road, where they built a one-room log cabin for $4,000 in a shady drainage.
He and Betty and one of their sons - he’s on his second tour in Iraq with the same Army unit that his father served in - lived in a shed on the property while they built the cabin in six months.
“It was the best time of my life,” Sween says. “I just liked the peace and quiet. I wanted to get away from people.”
He hung a big American flag across the front porch. The Stars and Stripes are faded now, hanging in the cool mountain breeze.
A few neighbors are nearby, but mostly there’s just the wind in the trees, the gurgling creek, deer and elk grazing, a hawk overhead. And the grizzly bear that left claw marks and slobber on the front door.
He spends his retirement hunting, making clocks and birdhouses in his workshop, walking in the woods, making fruit wine and riding along mountain roads in his pickup with his dogs, which are as friendly as he is.
He didn’t want a television or a telephone - civilization was close enough in Alberton a few miles away - but then Betty took ill and she thought they needed those modern contraptions to stay in touch with the outside world.
She died six years ago at age 60 - “We were married 39 years and eight months,” he says, as though it happened yesterday, both the marriage and the death, the passing of time unrecognizable.
Alberton is mostly a quiet place, an aging little railroad town along the Clark Fork River in Mineral County, where not much happens these days, although a chlorine tanker car spill in 1996 and the Interstate 90 wildfires in 2005 drew attention.
Many of Sween’s neighbors evacuated during the wildfires, but he stayed put, watching the sky turn an ungodly orange as the flames roared over the ridgeline and trees exploded in the heat.
He stomped on baseball-size embers that rolled down the mountain onto his property during the night. He had cleared a safe zone around his house, which Frenchtown and U.S. Forest Service Hotshot firefighters saved along with hundreds of other homes and the town of Alberton.
Since then, he says, it’s been mostly quiet.
Which set the stage for Sween and his neighbor, Roger Shour, another retired oil field worker, to test their notion that they, too, could turn a log into a cannon.
Sween doesn’t remember the details of that History Channel program. He thinks it might have been George Washington’s troops using log cannons during the Revolutionary War.
In fact, the Chinese invented the cannon’s predecessor about 1,000 years ago, a prototype of artillery using a bamboo tube and gunpowder to shoot fire and shrapnel from a “fire lance.”
Today’s metal cannons are a sophisticated staple of warfare, but Sween wasn’t interested in killing anything. He was just curious whether he could resurrect a bit of history.
So, two weeks ago, he and Shour drilled a 27-inch deep core into the center of a log that’s 6 feet long and 14 inches in diameter. It might be larch or ponderosa pine - he isn’t sure.
The first time they fired it, the log cracked a little, so they wrapped it in steel bands for support.
The cannon’s barrel points away from the house, aiming between two tall pines.
Sween puts a scoop of black gunpowder and some wadded up paper towels into the barrel.
He inserts a fuse into a small hole drilled into the top of the log so the fuse touches the gunpowder.
Then he lights the fuse - and runs for cover. He’s a bear of a man, but he moves quickly enough.
Fifteen seconds later: KA-CHOONK!
Another frozen water bottle hurtles skyward, rocketing between the trees, exactly where he aimed it.
A metallic cloud hangs in the air. It’s the eighth time he’s fired the cannon. He smiles.
“Yeah, I like the smell of gunpowder,” he says. “A little cordite in your nostrils is a good way to start the morning.”
Now, Sween and Shour are thinking of using a larger log to fashion a double-barrel homemade cannon.
“I guess people will think, 'What’s that crazy bastard up there doing now?’ ” Sween says, chuckling. “It’s just boredom. Just plain old boredom.”
Reporter John Cramer can be reached at 523-5259 or at johncramer@missoulian.com.
