American Rifle - Alexander Rose [7]
Europeans criticized traders on various grounds, but not because they had become “savages.” It was widely understood, rightly or wrongly, that traders’ adoption of Indian customs was a temporary disguise and that underneath they remained white men. Most of them were runaway servants, former convicts, or rougher individuals making a buck well away from the watchful eyes of the law; their rowdiness and insolence were what most annoyed observers. James Adair, a trader himself but one blessed with a fine education, disliked the current crop because they taught Indians the most horrendous terms of “obscenity and blasphemy.”46
Many residents of the frontier did not luxuriate in overly positive images of themselves. The Irish, who made up the majority of frontiers-men, “do not prosper so well; they love to drink and to quarrel; they are litigious, and soon take to the gun, which is the ruin of everything,” according to Crèvecoeur (who confessed nonetheless that he always carried “my gun, for no man you know ought to enter the woods without one”). But one group stood out in contrast: German immigrants. Observers made exceptions for them, believing that they retained a strong sense of decency, community, and religion.47 Unlike their Celtic cousins, in the eyes of Crèvecoeur and others, the Germans were just the kind of immigrants America needed more of. Perhaps so, for it would be they who introduced the rifle to this country and helped turn it into the national weapon.
The first recorded German immigrants arrived on October 6, 1683, when the Concord arrived in Philadelphia with thirteen Mennonite families aboard. Scraping their money together, they founded Germantown in a new colony euphoniously named Pennsylvania, which King Charles II had granted to William Penn two years before. For these seventeenth-century Israelites, Pennsylvania would become Jerusalem. There they could leave behind the dreadful bloodletting and persecutions of the Thirty Years’ War and settle down in peace.
The Mennonites were soon followed by a variety of religious sects—Moravians, Schwenkfelders, Amish, Dunkards, Pietists, and others.48 Owing to theological strictures, few of these arrivals brought or used guns of any kind (though Moravians and Schwenkfelders were permitted to bear arms in self-defense).49
This initial wave of emigration lasted until about the first decade of the eighteenth century. From then onward “religious” Germans were slowly outnumbered by their more secular Lutheran and Reformed compatriots, a good number of whom had performed military service in Europe. Less literate than their predecessors—Benjamin Franklin, annoyed that they were apparently ruining his Philadelphia, called them “Palatine boors” and opined that Germany’s jails were being emptied to fill Penn’s paradise—these immigrants were also less able to afford to buy farms, as the sects had done, and instead sold their skills as artisans.50 Gunsmithing was a specialty for a significant number. Indeed, a favorite proverb came from the old country: Ohne Schweffel und Salzpeter gibt’s keine Freiheit! (Without sulfur and saltpeter there can be no freedom!).51
Those accustomed to muskets found the typical German firearm an odd-looking piece. Significantly shorter and lighter than an English-made weapon, with a much narrower caliber and a finer set of rear and front sights than any musket, its most intriguing aspect was the grooves carved inside the barrel (which was smooth in other makes of gun). The weapon was commonly known as a “Jäger rifle.”
The ancient Greeks had known