American Rifle - Alexander Rose [226]
130. “I expect you will take great pains to make your soldiers good marks-men by teaching them to shoot at targets,” he instructed. Washington to Virginia Regiment officers, July 29, 1757.
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131. “Extract of a letter from an officer in Winchester, in Virginia, dated April 13, 1756,” New-York Mercury, May 3, 1756, p. 3.
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132. See Kauffman, Pennsylvania-Kentucky Rifle, p. 234. The rifles were probably made in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.
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133. Mackay to Washington, August 27, 1754, and also Washington to Sinclair, May 6, 1792.
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134. Interestingly, this would not be the last time, and was perhaps not even the first, that Washington had to search for his property. Owning between 35 and 65 firearms over the course of his long life, he had a talent for misplacing or losing his weapons. In March 1776, while inspecting the American defenses overlooking Boston, he must have dropped a pistol somewhere. Despite multiple inquiries, the expensive pistol was not returned, but a little more than a year later he “mislaid or possibly lost” a much-treasured brassbarreled pistol that had been given to him by the late General Braddock. (After more than a century it turned up in the collection of the U.S. Cartridge Company of Lowell, Massachusetts.) Perry, “Firearms of the First President,” pp. 32–33; Brown, Firearms of Colonial America, p. 322.
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135. On the purchase from Ashbrook of a rifle, see entry of that date in George Mercer’s ledger of disbursements, March 20, 1757; on Baker in general and his estate, see Gill, Gunsmith in Colonial Virginia, pp. 19, 48, 70–71; and on Baker’s relationship with the Virginia Regiment, see Baker’s June 14, 1758, entry in the Virginia Colonial Militia Disbursement Book. On the skill needed to bore a barrel, see Dillin, Kentucky Rifle, pp. 45–48.
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136. See Mahon, “Anglo-American Methods of Indian Warfare,” p. 266. J. F. C. Fuller, British Light Infantry, (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1925) remains the standard, if flawed, work. See also P. E. Russell, “Redcoats in the Wilderness: British Officers and Irregular Warfare in Europe and America, 1740 to 1760,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 35, no. 4 (1978), pp. 628–52.
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137. Forbes to Bouquet, June 27, 1758, in James, ed., Writings of General Forbes, p. 125.
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138. Washington to Bouquet, July 3, 1758; Washington to Bouquet, July 13, 1758; and Bouquet to Washington, July 14, 1758. See also Washington to Adam Stephen, July 16, 1758, and Washington to Francis Halkett, same date.
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139. See Washington to Adam Stephen, July 16, 1758, and to Francis Halkett, same date.
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140. Washington to Bouquet, July 16, 1758.
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141. Washington to Forbes, October 8, 1758.
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142. In the words of General John Forbes, who always made an exception for Washington. Quoted in Higginbotham, Washington and the American Military Tradition, p. 28.
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Chapter 2
1. Pennsylvania Packet, No. 201, August 28, 1775, quoted in J. G. W. Dillin, The Kentucky Rifle . . . (Washington, D.C.: National Rifle Association of America, 1924), pp. 81–82.
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2. “Extract of a Letter to a Gentleman in Philadelphia, Dated August 1, 1775,” in P. Force, ed., American Archives: Consisting of a Collection of Authentick Records, State Papers . . . (Washington, D.C., 1848–53), 4th ser., III, col. 2.
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3. Ibid.
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4. I was tempted to dismiss the plank-between-the-legs story as hyperbole until I found a rare copy of the memoirs of General Victor Collot’s A Journey in North America in the New York Public Library. According to the general (died 1805), who met the residents of the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys after a buffalo hunt, “they had drunk plentifully of whisky, and though the greater number were intoxicated, they were amusing themselves in firing with carabines [i.e., rifles] against a piece of plank tied to a tree, which is called shooting at a mark. The