American Rifle - Alexander Rose [13]
The catalyst for this expansion and extension of the Indian rifle market had been the British triumph over their French, Spanish, and Dutch rivals in the race to arm the Indians. Their winning strategy in the 1750s had been to provide high-quality merchandise at lower prices than their competitors, adding, as a bonus, inexpensive and sometimes even free repairs.86
Over the previous decades one of the British purveyors’ most successful products had been the “trade fusil,” an affordable, utilitarian musket imported under contract with the Hudson’s Bay Company.87 These smoothbores had significantly longer barrels than the German Jäger rifles then being made by the Pennsylvanians.88 Perhaps they were inspired by suggestions from their Indian customers; or perhaps they noticed that weapons with extended barrels outperformed their Jäger equivalents, but the Pennsylvania gunsmiths began lengthening their rifle barrels—making them up to forty-eight inches long, the same as a standard trade fusil. The contemporaneous shift toward smaller bores may also have been partly prompted by the trade fusils’ example. The original Jäger rifle’s caliber averaged, as we have seen, about .65, while from 1730 onward the fusil’s was about .56 or .58.89 From about that time the Kentucky’s bore fell to between .45 and .50. This melding of German engineering with English style had created a specifically American rifle.
Indians admired the rifles as ideal hunting weapons and objects of status, but they also quickly recognized that rifles represented their best shot at freedom. In his report of 1764 discussing British Indian policy, Colonel John Bradstreet astutely divined the native Americans’ desire for rifles: “All the Shawanese and Delawar Indians are furnished with rifled barrel guns, of an excellent kind, and that the upper Nations are getting into them fast, by which, they will be less dependent upon us, on account of the great saving of powder, this gun taking much less, and the shot much more certain, than any other gun, and in their way of carrying on war, by far more prejudicial to us, than any other sort” (emphasis added). He urgently recommended that the government “stop the making and vending of any more of them in the Colonies, nor suffer any to be imported,” if it wanted to save its hide.90
The most alarming aspect of the Indian preoccupation with rifles was that the attributes of this particular type of firearm admirably fitted their traditional way of warfare—threatening to make it deadlier and more effective than ever before. When they had first experienced the Indian style of fighting, English settlers (especially those with a soldiering background) were amazed by how different it was from their own. In European warfare of the time troops formed into long, thin lines spread across a chosen field of battle and efficiently marshaled by their officers. They would fire a volley or two from their muskets, then attempt to advance toward the enemy army as quickly as possible to use bayonets against them. Essentially, then, late-seventeenth- and eighteenth-century warfare was based on three factors: volume of fire, officer imposed discipline, and shock combat at close quarters. By contrast, the Indians relied on individual accuracy, initiative, and surprise.
Firepower was the realm of the musket, a