Firearms Of The Frontier Partisans — Double-Barreled Flintlock Fuzee

 

The Annotated & Illustrated Journals of Major Robert Rogers, by Timoth Todish and Gary Zaboly is a glorious treasure trove of Frontier Partisans lore — and a fine resource for The Ranger Project. One of its many delights is a featured piece by Zaboly on Joseph Marin de La Malgue.

Marin was a Tier One French Canadian operator, a brave, effective officer who led regulars, militia, and Indian detachments in slashing raids against the English footholds in the Lake Champlain corridor. He became a dark legend among the beleaguered English.

Marin engaged Rogers in a ferocious firefight in the woods near Lake George in 1758 — a tale we’ll take up in detail in Spirited For That Work. Rogers Rangers prevailed and held the field, and a French prisoner identified one of the dead as Marin. Rogers personally scalped the corpse “down to the the neck.” In other words, he scalped the whole head. That’s how deep the animus ran.

It turned out that the prisoner was mistaken or lying; Marin had escaped to fight another day.

Zaboly’s depiction of Marin is below. He’s the warrior on the right, dressed entirely in native fashion. Note the weapon he’s holding: a double-barreled carbine. This weapon seems to have been a signature among the French Canadian officers who perfected the Ranging Way of War. Zaboly reports that another French partisan officer named La Corne had carried such a weapon in a raid on Saratoga in 1747, during King George’s War. And more were thus outfitted:

With information obtained from a prisoner in December of 1757, Robert Rogers noted in his Journals, ‘500 Rangers were lately raised in Canada, each man having a double-barreled fuzee.’

“Fuzee” is slang for fusil — a light musket of smaller caliber than the standard military musket (usually approximately .62 caliber, or 20 gauge), a common arm among Rangers during the French & Indian War. Rogers wielded a fuzee, but the traditional type, not a double-barrel.

Such doings were not unheard of among the English, of course. Sir William Johnson, Superintendent of Indians in the British Northern Department, had one that he used to signal one (or two) of his many lovers for a rendezvous at his love shack.

But I have not seen accounts of English soldiers or Rangers deploying double-barreled firearms in combat, certainly not arming up a 500 man contingent.

Maybe it was a French thing. Remember, Jean Chastel wielded a double-barreled shotgun in the hunt for the Beast of Gevaudan.

The double-barreled fuzee would have been a versatile weapon in the forest warfare of the 1750s. Always nice to have two ready shots, of course, and you could load one barrel with ball for the longer ranges, and the other with shot for close quarters. Or just load both barrels with buck-and-ball and blast away…

Certainly a fine signature weapon for one of the greats among the Frontier Partisans.