American Rifle - Alexander Rose [3]
Not surprisingly, the talents of competent gunsmiths became highly prized—so much so that their skills could save their lives if captured in hostile territory. During Lewis and Clark’s expedition to the Pacific, Le Borgne, a one-eyed Indian chief, threatened to massacre the Corps of Discovery but said he would make an exception for “the worker of iron and the mender of guns.”19 During the Pontiac uprising of 1763, when Shawnee, Delaware, and Seneca warriors laid siege to Fort Pitt (now Pittsburgh), they demanded that English soldiers and settlers leave or be killed but that the gunsmiths must stay—and they promised them fair treatment.20
At least New Englanders did not have to worry about the Indians making their own gunpowder, which was the product of a multistep, highly specialized chemical and industrial process. Gamely, if unsuccessfully, they tried alternative means of acquiring the gray powder more desired than glimmering gold. In 1637 Pequots kidnapped two young English girls and asked them, according to Edward Winslow, the lordly Plymouth governor, “whether they could make gunpowder. Which when they understood they could not do, their prize seemed nothing so precious a pearl as before.” (Dutch traders later freed them.)21
As early as 1639 Massachusetts attempted to establish its own powder mills, and three years later the colony’s General Court ruled that every plantation and town must build its own saltpeter house. Gunpowder, said its elders, was “the instrumental means that all nations lay hold on for their preservation.” Because natural deposits of saltpeter, the key ingredient of gunpowder (it provides the oxygen needed to burn the powder rapidly at high temperature), were unknown in New England, the colonists used a special shed to mix limestone, old mortar, and ashes with animal and vegetable refuse gathered from slaughterhouses and farms, which was then moistened with urine. That of a horse was most often used, but a heavy wine drinker’s was much sought, for it was reputed to make the mightiest powder. After decomposing, the compound was leached with water and the crystallized saltpeter extracted. Note that this was a pretty rough-and-ready method for harvesting saltpeter (and would not have passed muster in the finer European armories), but it had to do.22
Despite Massachusetts’s best efforts, all its powder mills failed either financially or productively. Not until 1675, about thirty-five years after the colony’s initial attempt, did a mill at Milton, on the Neponset River, at last succeed in making sufficient quantities of powder to supply the provincial troops and militias. In October 1676 Edward Randolph reported back to London that “the powder is as good and strong as the best English powder.”23 Even so, until the Revolution gunpowder could be hard to come by in parts of America.
The great paradox of gunpowder was that although it was enormously difficult to make, it was also, owing to its lightness and its fluid shape, ridiculously simple to smuggle. A pound or two in a deerskin pouch was sufficient to make a long trip for an illegal transaction economically worthwhile. At the opposite end of the spectrum, musket balls were easy to make—all one needed was a flame, a cheap pair of tongs, and a spherical bullet mold—but the raw lead was so heavy that it was too burdensome to sell in bulk at a profit. The gunpowder shortage combined with ammunition self-rationing encouraged gun owners not to waste their shots. Aim carefully, fire once, was the rule. The habit died hard: in the future the thriftiness and marksmanship of American shooters would become renowned throughout Europe.
The government’s efforts initially succeeded in reducing the number of new weapons and the amount of gunpowder available, but their effectiveness was slowly eroded by gunrunning during the Thirty