Hey Doc, you must also get "
RIP Ford's Texas", Ranger Captain John Salmon Ford's collected memoirs, hard to say enough good things about it, tho' it is written in the sometimes tedious 19th Century idiom.
A book notification here, tho' I only thumbed through it so cannot give an opinion on it, some here may already know of it....
"
The American Rifle: A Biography" (2008)
http://www.amazon.com/American-Rifle-Biography-Alexander-Rose/dp/0553805177Found it yesterday in Austin, at that bastion of Liberalism "Book People", which despite themselves have offered some remarkably Politically Incorrect titles on their shelves over the years (fer example... most everything I have read on Roger's Rangers I found on their shelves).
Pertinent to this thread what the book DOES lay out is the early spread of rifles into Indian hands, a process underway by the 1740's. Such that by that time the Upstate New York Iroquois were already complaining about losses in their ranks inflicted by the rifles of the Chickasaws... from Mississippi.
The gist of what seems to be an emerging consensus can be found written by te serious folks at
www.americanlongrifles.com .
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...
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.
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....
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....
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! Since buying one I have become a whole lot more familiar with 18th Century-style flinters, and a long-barreled smoothbore is capable of a surprising amount of accuracy when a careful load is worked up, in terms of "minute of deer" or "minute of redcoat" about equivalent to many rifles out past 100 yards, in an arm far more versatile.
I bought a smoothie on account of this is what MOST Colonials/Americans were carrying in the 18th. My 9lb fowler is a club however compared to accurate recreations of the contemporary Indian Trade gun. A builder named Mike Brooks makes the best...
www.fowlingguns.comHis 20 guage early 18th Century Carolina Trade Gun replica has a 48" barrel and weighs in at just 6 pounds.
I've handled one and compared to my 9lb 18th Century Mossberg-equivalent, a Carolina gun handles about like a magic wand AND shoots just as well as my fowler
THAT being the sort of gun common to the Southeast Tribes by the early 18th, and FAR from crude as per popular beliefs relating to Indian guns in general.
Not hard to imagine that general preference in form being transferred to rifles, as the guy at americanlongrifles suggests.
This supposition of rifles appearing first on the Frontier in Indian hands is backed by a number of period accounts and remaining records. To the point that if you are a reenactor, anymore if you are going to re-enact ANYONE White from 18th Century New York/Vermont/New England, you'd most likely be carrying a smoothbore... UNLESS you're playing an Indian from those same areas. Lots of rifles in Iroquois hands documented fer example, almost none that early from the whole Mohawk Frontier in the hands of White folks.
What is probable is that Indians were commonly carrying longrifles in the Kentucky/Ohio Country a full generation before the likes of the Boones and Kentons showed up, the longrifle being adopted by the Longhunters much as leggings, breechclouts and tomohawks were, for similarly practical reasons.
No one questions the importance of the rifle tradition in our own culture, the point relevant to this thread being that them Eastern Indians across Texas had that same tradition, and used their rifles to lethal effect, essentially whupping the Comanches at every turn WE know about.
They fought no major conflicts with Whites during the Texas era (other than the forcible eviction of Chief Bowles's East Texas Cherokees). But, given that while some Shawnees for example were guiding Hill Country settlers, OTHER Shawnees 700 miles to the west were collecting Apache scalps for bounty, and in light of the fact of Lt. Pat's accounting of Texas Cherokee atrocities, it seems probable that at least some White travellers out on the Plains were quietly "disappeared" over the years .
Ford in his memoirs relates the 1850's episode of a crack shot among the Comanches raiding South Texas who was "armed with a Swiss rifle" and commenced to picking off his Rangers. I dont recall him describing the rifle, or if they ever saw it, tbe range being extreme. But the Indian MOST likely to be shooting it, if Indian it was, would most likely be a member of one of the Eastern Tribes.
In early 1865 a combined party of nearly 500 Texans set out from the settlements on a punitive expedition against the Comanches and Kiowas but, to their misfortune, found Kickapoos instead. see...
http://cvassanangelo.org/uploads/The_Battle_of_Dove_Creek_wbiblio.pdfand...
http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/btd01Now, one could theorise that the Texas Confederates were fielding their "B" teams on the Frontier, especially by that late date, and that the flower of Texas manhood had already gone East to fight. But really, there seems nothing wrong with their tactics that day... an advance on the unsuspecting Indian camp on one side, combined with a mounted rush to steal their horses on another.
Shoulda been a route, and likely would have been with archtypical Plains Indians like Comanches.
I dunno the extent to which the Kickapoos were carrying Enfields, doesn't really matter, the REAL point being by that time they had been using rifles for at least three generations.
Can't say the Texans were exactly shot to pieces, they suffered less than 20% total casualties. OTOH the Kickapoos gave worse than they got, and the Texan surprise attacks were swiftly blunted by accurate and effective rifle fire. At any rate, the Texans faced a long and miserable walk home.
Funny how this whole episode seemed to disappear entirely from Texas popular history...
An interesting "what if" to contemplate being "what if it had been Kickapoos beseiging Adobe Walls and not Comanches?". At the very least, things probably woulda turned out different.
Birdwatcher
