American Rifle - Alexander Rose [2]
The Mohawks eventually recovered from their fear of the Europeans’ thunder-making machines, but even then they and many other tribes were reluctant to dispense with their traditional weaponry. Being heavy, inaccurate, useless in the rain, instantly spottable at night, and based on iron and gunpowder (two elements requiring specialized production facilities), the early gun initially found few takers.
The increasing use of the serpentine, an idea borrowed from cross-bows, began to change these attitudes. This was a freely pivoting, S-shaped metal arm attached to the breech—that part of the gun behind the barrel—that served simultaneously as a rudimentary trigger and as a clamp to hold the match, a lengthy wick that burned at an even rate. By suspending the match above the priming powder until the shooter pulled the trigger, the serpentine allowed the firer to hold the “match -lock” gun with both hands—unlike the old harquebus, which had to be steadied with one hand as the other manually applied the match to the powder. As a result, accuracy greatly improved, though the issue of long-glowing, slow-burning matches giving away one’s position remained nettlesome.
With the arrival of the flintlock, which used flints to ignite sparks on demand, shooters could forever dispense with sputtering matches. While Europeans saw this new type of gun as merely a gentle evolutionary progression past the basic matchlock, Indians quickly realized that flintlocks comprised an entire replacement technology that rendered their bows and arrows obsolete. To them, the flintlock was a sudden, punctuated revolutionary leap forward.
At that point the Indian adoption of flintlock firearms became extraordinarily rapid.14 As early as 1628, wrote William Bradford, an early governor of Plymouth Colony, the moment the Wampanoags “saw the execution that a piece [musket] would do, and the benefit that might come by the same, they became mad (as it were) after them and would not stick to give any price.” They reckoned “their bows and arrows but baubles in comparison to them.”15 Exactly a century later the Indians used “nothing but firearms,” remarked William Byrd, a Virginia lawyer who traveled the area widely. “Bows and arrows are grown into disuse, except only amongst their boys.”16
Purchasing firearms was one thing: as with most forms of technology (such as cars and computers), maintaining them in decent condition over the long term added considerably to their cost in time, effort, and cash. Not only needing spare parts to remain in working order, guns also required a constant supply of powder and ammunition. Neither the parts, nor the powder, nor the bullets, let alone skilled gunsmiths, were easy to come by.
The Indians were quick to learn how to make rudimentary repairs and basic lead ammunition. For parts, they cannibalized unsalvageable weapons. According to Bradford, they soon owned “moulds to make shot of all sorts, as musket bullets, pistol bullets, swan and goose shot, and of smaller shots,” then moved on to forging “screw-plates to make screw-pins themselves when they want them.” Given that settlers generally took their firearms to smiths if they were broken, the Indians’ ability to take care of the bare essentials meant that they were soon “better fitted and furnished than the English themselves.”17
Still, performing a simple repair on a gun was a far cry from manufacturing one. Aware of the necessity of keeping certain forms of knowledge and technology out of Indian hands, in 1630 New England colonial governments forbade whites to teach any Indian how “to make or amend” firearms. A decade later gunsmiths were banned from repairing seriously damaged Indian-owned weapons; in reaction,