Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire French and Indian War and American Revolution Books???

Huh? got a cite?

that would be a neat trick considering their weapons were poor quality smoothbore trade muskets or worn out smoothbores, usually damaged or defective captures from European wars dumped on the "savage" market.

I'd like to see some scholarship on (a)use of rifles..which at that time were all individually crafted..by Indians (b) any example in history of someone witnessing Indians shooting target practice.

just sayin'

Daniel Boone said he could always outshoot Indians in target matches because they jerked the trigger all the time.

+1 on 1776

Here is a good one you'd enjoy Steelie.

Another vote for the Eckert books.

The Frontiersmen is an awesome book.

I used to teach my students a short lesson on Washington, Fort Necessity and the whole affair. It's an amazing story for several reasons. I bet the vast majority of Americans have never even heard about it though.

I have a copy of "A Rabble in Arms" by Ken Roberts. Someone here at the fire sent it to me, I can't remember who.
If you want it I'll pass it along, just pm me an addy.

If you want fiction, James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Series is really good, light reading & entertaining.

The 3 books in the collection are "The Deerslayer", "The Pathfinder", and "The Last of the Mohicans".

All feature the main character Natty Bumpo, aka, Hawkeye at various stages of his life.

MM

Thanks all, my cart at Amazon is full.

I probably pass Braddocks grave site and Fort Necessity 20 times a year.

The Fort was nothing more a circle of planks stuck in the ground that surrounded a block house. They have a new museum on the grounds that I have yet not had the chance to visit. Washington called it "A Charming field for an encounter"

At this stage of his life Washington's fort building skills were lacking to say the least.


An interesting and violent time for all present.

Northwest Passage by Kenneth Roberts, not a fast read. It's an old historical fiction. It is more about Robert Rogers. Not a page burner though.

Interesting quote from Anderson, "The Crucible of War", page 411, on the change in the Redcoats' (In America) marksmanship during the Seven Years War:

Another vote for "Washington's Crossing" by Fischer and "An Angel in the Whirlwind" by Bobrick.

You might as well read "Albion's Seed" by Fischer because it explains the roots of our nation's present divisions.

Numerous, go hang out on a reenactor board....

The basic question begins with numbers, as per www.americanlongrifles.org

No technological development occurs in a vacuum, and the American longrifle as a technological as well as an artistic development was no exception. It is generally accepted that the American longrifle evolved from the Jaeger rifle brought to the colonies by German gunsmiths in the early 1700�s and most certainly imported in some quantity along with English arms up until the American Revolution. The Jaeger was a short, stocky, usually large caliber, flintlock rifle designed for hunting by the well to do in the fields and forests of Europe. At one time, some thought that rifling and a patched ball were innovations unique to the American longrifle. They weren�t. These things were known to European gunsmiths for at least two centuries before the American longrifle and were incorporated into the Jaeger. Some also have the impression that the Jaeger was heavy and hard to handle. They were not. From personal experience, I know that Jaegers were surprisingly light and easy to handle. In fact, I would much prefer to carry a Jaeger in the woods than a typical longrifle.

That begs the question, why were changes made? Well, the standard answer has been something along the lines that the American longhunter needed an economical, accurate, and long range gun to put food on the table, take skins for cash, and protect their families from Indian raiders. The Jaeger rifle was accurate but it was not necessarily a long range gun or economical in terms of lead.

It has been thought that in order to accommodate the needs of the longhunter, the early gunsmiths started to elongate the barrel and reduce the caliber of their rifles. These two design changes did three basic things; increase accuracy and range, and decrease the amount of lead used for bullets. It is easy to see how a longer barrel could increase accuracy for long range shots, but the added length also allowed for the effective use of larger powder loads to support those long range shots. The more powder you put down the barrel, the more time and therefore more barrel length you need for the powder to fully combust.

The potential to use higher powder loads and the higher muzzle velocity that that produces also supports the use of smaller balls. A smaller ball with a fully combusted higher powder load can have the same impact energy as a larger ball with a smaller charge. The higher muzzle velocity will also give you a flatter ballistic trajectory and longer range. Lastly, the smaller ball size means less lead to buy and carry and less powder for small game at short distances.

All in all, the American longhunter got economy along with the ability to make long range shots and take down large game if needed. At least, this is the standard answer that you will glean from some of the earlier research.

While I have generally accepted this explanation for the elongation of the barrel and reduction in bore size in the American longrifle, the argument has always seemed to be a little too contrived and does have some problems. Peter A. Alexander, in his new book The Gunsmith of Grenville County-Building the American Longrifle, proposes another theory based on some of George Shumway's research.

While no one denies the influence of the Jaeger on the development of the American longrifle, Peter Alexander proposes that the English trade gun had as much influence as the Jaeger. The argument goes that there were not enough white longhunters to account for all the rifles we know were made and most frontier settlers did not have guns of any type.

Who then, owned all those early longrifles. The answer, according to Alexander, is the Indians. He contends that, as the primary harvesters of furs and skins on the North American continent at the time, the Indians had the most need of rifles and the wealth from the fur trade to buy them. This argument has the ring of truth to me.

According to Alexander, the real reason for the longer barreled American rifle, was that the Indians had become accustomed to the long barreled English trade guns and wanted rifles of similar form. The German gunsmiths here, and possibly in Germany, supplied what their customers wanted. There may have been more style than substance at work in the evolution of the American longrifle. Imagine that!

When Alexander and Shumway talk longrifles, people listen....



But then ya gotta look at specific examples, to do them all would require pages and pages. But, starting from the F&I era, someone mentioned Conrad Weiser, Pennsylvania agent to the Iroquois....

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&...f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=

One day Shickellamy said to Conrad Weiser, �I have had a dream. I dreamed that Tarachiawagon gave me a new rifle.� Conrad, who owed much of his success to his strict observance of Indian etiquette (which believed all dreams would eventually come true), is said to have answered the dream with the rifle, and then to have spoken for himself.

�I, too, have had a dream,� he said. �I dreamed that Shickellamy gave me an island in the Susquehanna,� and he indicated the Island of Que at the mouth of Penn�s Creek, on the site of what is now the town of Selinsgrove. The old chief, we are told, matched Weiser�s politeness, but, �Conrad,� he said, �let us never dream again.�



OK, so oral history can be wrong. Robert Kirk however, Scottish captive in the Ohio Country in the 1760's ("Through So Many Dangers", mentioned above), when Boone was still a teenager, specifically mentions buying a rifle the first time he went in to trade with his Indian 'family'.

By that time the bigger, more settled Indian towns could have glass windows, iron hinges, sawn timber houses, orchards, split rail fences the works... and blacksmiths. Source by the 1770's mention Delawares repairing their own rifles in the Diaries of David Zeisberger, Moravian missionary, 1772-1781.




About that time, down South, the British found themselves on the receiving end of Cherokee sniping...

http://www.historyonfilm.com/docs/cherokee-war.htm

Lyttelton was replaced by William Bull in the spring of 1760 and the damage caused by the raids persuaded Major General Jeffrey Amherst to send eleven hundred regulars, including a battalion of Highlanders, under command of Colonel Archibald Montgomery. His second-in-command was Major James Grant, who had been captured at Duquesne and recently exchanged for a French officer.

Montgomery�s men arrived at Charleston in early April and marched through Cherokee territory to relieve Fort Prince George, burning numerous towns along the way. However, when the expedition moved into more mountainous terrain in late June, Cherokee rifles and guerrilla tactics enabled them to wear down the British.

If ya take the time to find the primary sources, the Brits were getting picked off at ranges measured in hundreds of yards.





Um, no, actually. Comes down to this, the Indians were "longhunters" (ie. professional hunters in the back country) in large numbers decades before Daniel Boone crossed the mountains. In the 1740's those Cherokee's were trading up to 150,000 "bucks" (deer skins) annually at Savannah.

The Indian trade was big business, in fact the ONLY business in the interior on the other side of the settlement line. Big business too cranking out workable quality smoothbores and knives etc for this trade back in England.

So much so that Indian trade guns, usually long barrelled (see the longrifle link up top) are now classified into "types" or periods, with known English makers. Surviving examples (and their $1,800 repros) are well balanced, lightweight and functional. Also, almost all the surviving traders' invoices list different grades of trade guns.

So where were an aproximatley 4,000 Cherokee men of combat age (to name just one tribe) getting them rifles? Seems like smiths in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Maryland stepped in to fill the void.

Up north, Sir William Johnson's papers have him doling out rifles to the Iroquois by the barrel-full over the decades, so much so that if you are going to reenact that period up there, if you wanna carry a rifle and be from Upstate New York you had better come as an Indian.

In the Rev War period the most documented rifles we know of along the Mohawk valley is in the post-war reimbursement claims of the American-allied Oneidas and Tuscaroras. This despite the fact that by that time the Iroquois were but a small fraction of the population up there, and the Oneidas and Tuscaroras fewer still (the rest of the Iroquois sided with the Brits, but the documentation suggests they were similarly armed).

Comes down to this; ain't saying the Indians were geniuses, but in the backwoods, a rifle would have the same appeal to them as it would to a Boone or Kenton... accuracy and above all... economy of shot and powder.

In those brief decades of the 1700's where they were still present in numbers in the back country before getting swamped by diseases and Whites, we know that Indian towns pretty much looked like Euro villages, so much cultural and technological transfer had occurred. Why is it so surprising they would adopt rifles too?

Braddock's men were picked off like chickens, and in that slow moving Minnisink Ford battle thread I got, Colonials were too.

Sorta like them Redcoats in front of Andy Jackson's lines at New Orleans decades later, for the same reason, marksmanship as carried out with rifles...

Birdwatcher

Just to flog the topic a bit more.

This here's my generic mid/late-mid 18th Century "fowler", about $1,400 as delivered....


.62 caliber as virtually all modern repro fowlers are (so that 20 gauge stuff works). 42" barrel, about 10 pounds. Just a reasonably good and somewhat accurate generic flinter smoothbore, appropriate to miltia or Tory. The Mossberg of its day.








There are good repros of trade guns from the Southeast available, just like the originals... long and slender, over five feet tall, 48" .62 barrel, just 7 pounds. I've seen one and as you might imagine, they are an absolute joy to handle. Because of the time required to make 'em, they start at about $2,000. If my fowler is a Mossberg 500, a Southeast trade gun is like one of your shotguns... top of the line.



Anyways, since I happen to have this guy's drawing on hand. Here's a sketch from the Rev. War, from a Hessian Officer on the side of the Brits...... Johanne Von Ewald, an excellent observer in that conflict who's journal is an invaluable source (he liked and admired his American opponents, and was blown away how citizen-soldiers took on the best that Europe had to offer and won).

In 1778, Von Ewald was present at the Battle of the Bronx, where a unit of 48 Stockbridge Indians (Mohicans) fighting on the American side, sadly misused as on that occasion as regular line infantry, were out-flanked and overrun by Tarleton's cavalry and Simcoe's Queen's Rangers (light infantry).

http://www.americanrevolution.org/ind3.html

From Col. Simcoe's own narrative we read:

The Stockbridge Indians, about sixty in number, excellent marksmen, had just joined Mr. Washington's army.




Von Ewald, crossing the battlefield after the fact came across their bodies, and was fascinated enough by their arms and accoutrements that he took the time to draw one....




That guy is carrying a bow and a rifle (and note the use of a sling, along with the pre-Viet Cong heavy linen pajamas, this being an image that knocks re-enactors on their ear ).

As an aside, the Stockbridges, composed mostly of remnants of various New England/New York Algonquin groups, were an acculturated Christian Indian community living where the present town of Stockbridge, Mass now stands (as another aside, it was their Christian Minister, Samuel Kirkland, that convinced the aforementioned Oneidas split with the league to go over to the Americans too). The loss of over 40 of the Stockbridge fighting-age men, virtually all of them, in service to the Americans was a blow from which the community never recovered.

Hardly anyone remembers them today.

Birdwatcher

Thanks Birdwatcher,

You saved us all the price of a book.

JM

WAIT! I ain't done yet....

Readers of "White Devil" and "War on the Run" from the list above may recall that Robert Rogers had recruited heavily from among the Stockbridge Indians to add to the ranks of his famous Rangers in the F&I war, twenty years earlier....

...but that ain't why I ain't done....

I would be remiss if I brought up Von Ewald's name without mentioning his ringing endorsement of his American foes, a gift to all of us still.

From his journals, in response to a stated contempt of the Rebels.....

http://www.americanrevolution.org/hessians/hess19.html

"He who has served against this nation, will be convinced of the contrary, and will not be able to speak of them with contempt."

Ewald relates, with great admiration, the gallant taking of Stony Point by the Americans, under Anthony Wayne, on the 16th Of July, 1779.

"Do not these men deserve to be admired? who, but a few years before, had been lawyers, doctors, ministers, or farmers, and who, in so short a time, made themselves excellent officers, putting to shame so many of our profession who have grown gray under arms, but who would have been in a frightful state of mind if they had been commissioned to carry out such a plan.

I shall perhaps be told that these men were endowed by nature with a great talent for war. This may be the case with one or another of them, but, on the whole, nature is not so extravagant with her favors. Allow me to say it, these people did not choose military service as a refuge, as the nobility generally does, nor as a house of correction for an illbred son who would not learn anything at the academies, as is often the case among the middle classes, but they chose this profession with the firm resolution of being zealous in every way, of serving their country usefully, and of pushing themselves forward by their merits.

I was sometimes astonished when American baggage fell into our hands during that war to see how every wretched knapsack, in which were only a few shirts and a pair of torn breeches, would be filled up with military books. For instance, the 'Instructions of the King of Prussia to his Generals,' Thielke's 'Field Engineer,' the partisans 'Jenny' and 'Grandmaison,' and other similar books, which had all been translated into English, came into my hands a hundred times through our soldiers.

This was a true indication that the officers of this army studied the art of war while in camp, which was not the case with the opponents of the Americans, whose portmanteaus were rather filled with bags of hair-powder, boxes of sweet-smelling pomatum, cards (instead of maps), and then often, on top of all, some novels or stage plays."


If ya read up on the Hessians in combat, when it came to war ya could sure tell they were the ancestors of the Wermacht. Von Ewald was a professional soldier all his life AND a Hessian, so coming from a guy like him, his endorsement really carries weight.

Thank you Johann

Birdwatcher