Delving into the reading for the upcoming podcast series on King Philip’s War that ravaged New England in 1675-76, it is striking how central firearms were to the conflict. That seems axiomatic: guns tend to be a factor in wars, right?
But I’m not talking solely about the waging of war. I’m talking about the economics and diplomacy of the gun trade. Attempts by the Plymouth Colony to disarm the Wampanoag were a precipitating factor in the outbreak of hostilities, which were initially confined to a relatively small set of followers of the sachem Metacomet (King Philip). The boneheaded English policy of seeking to disarm neutral or even friendly Indians pushed them into Metacomet’s camp and widened the war, which proved to be savagely destructive.
The Wampanoag and the Narragansett used firearms most effectively in conjunction with ambush tactics, and they had the upper hand through the first part of the war in 1675 and into 1676. But firearms presented a paradox: The Indians were dependent on them, and they were at war with their principle supplier of arms and ammunition. You can see the problem…
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The gun trade in New England started early and continued apace right into the era of the conflict. In his outstanding book Thundersticks: Firearms and the Violent Transformation of Native America, Daniel J. Silverman demonstrates that the First Nations peoples of the New England coast adopted and avidly sought firearms for the same reason that other native peoples did consistently throughout Frontier Partisan history: To alter the balance of power with their native rivals. They came to prefer them for hunting, too, but the primary consideration in the arms trade was military.
The Indians were not in the market for clumsy matchlock muskets, either. They wanted the latest and best technology — the long-barreled, smoothbore English doglock musket.
The avid desire for firearms kickstarted the fur trade; native hunters were willing to pay a premium in furs and wampum for a good gun. They became very proficient in their use — notably superior as marksmen to the general run of Puritan militiamen.
Silverman notes that native peoples did best with the firearms trade when their “gun frontier” featured multiple, rival European powers vying for their trade. The Wampanoag and other coastal New England people didn’t really have that scenario. They might trade a bit with the Dutch in New Netherland, but that option was gone in 1674, and they could only trade with the French through native intermediaries. That left them dependent on English traders, who supplied them pretty well, despite efforts by colonial authorities to crack down as tensions ratcheted up. However, once war broke out, the clampdown became harsh and effective, and the Indians’ pipeline was shut off.
The Wampanoag did develop a greater capacity to repair their firearms than most First Nations people did because of what Silverman describes as the “intensity” of the colonial relationship in Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay. Native and Puritan societies were not really separated, certainly not by any hard “frontier” line. Many natives converted and became “ Praying Indians,” and some of them picked up smithing skills. That was perceived as a threat by Puritan authorities, who moved to cut off access to repair as the war developed.
Silverman and others make a convincing case that the dwindling access to new firearms, the falling capacity to maintain existing stocks, and — most critically — short supplies of ammunition were a deciding factor in the war. By the summer of 1676, when Captain Benjamin Church and his ranging force of colonial frontiersmen and native allies were running down Metacomet and his followers in the New England swamps, the Indians were severely lacking in the means to fight.
Church’s men, too, were armed with doglock muskets , as this well-turned-out reenactor shows:
The situation was considerably different on the northern front of the war in Maine (often neglected in historical accounts). The Wabanacki had stable and steady access to firearms through the French in Canada. The war in the north ended very differently than the war in southern New England, and the gun trade was a key factor in the outcome.
Matthew says
Technology has always been a factor in war. I remember somewhere hearing that it is always more advanced in use of war than in regular life. That they were using iron weapons before it was commonly used for utensils for example.
It is certainly a case of how governments in their infinite know all make horrible mistakes.
It is also a lesson on being too dependent on technology. If the Indians had kept the old hunting methods alive they would not have to be dependent on the gun trade and the violence could have been avoided.
JimC says
It is interesting that the revival movements that sprang up periodically — the Delaware Prophet during Pontiac’s War, Tecumseh’s brother Tenskwatawa, the Shawnee Prophet and many others — all urged rejection of European ways and technologies and a return to the Old Ways. The native peoples certainly understood the dependency trap they had stepped into. Of course, the military movements associated with these religious revivals rejected the notion of giving up guns and gunpowder, so…
lane batot says
Alas, even IF the Native Americans had maintained highly skilled archery ability(and manufacture), along with other weaponry, they might have only DELAYED the inevitable Manifest Destiny that had invaded the continent, and whether one or many generations later, the “Ishmael” phenomenon of large, organized, “civilized” societies based on intensive agriculture, would have sealed their doom as independent cultures dominating their traditional territories. Luckily, at least, much has survived(even if much has also been lost) by remaining somewhat “peripheral” to the dominant invaders…..
Matthew says
I doubt anything could really have prevented Manifest Destiny.
Really, the cultures should have weeded out their own faults and maybe combined into a better one.
Kent says
Violence between European invaders and the resident First Nations was unavoidable, regardless of armaments. The first Pilgrims settled in an area left vacant due to a plague (smallpox?) that killed an entire native village. A generation later there were hundreds more immigrants as well as a large second generation of Pilgrim/Puritans who all demanded their own farms. Even if they’d only had bows and arrows, the natives would have had to fight or become refugees.
J.F. Bell says
Technology-wise, a culture needs to be within a generation of their enemy (give or take) to have a chance at overwhelming victory.
The Montagnards of the central Vietnamese highlands may have made for skilled guerrillas who could go toe-to-to with the Viet Cong with a little logistical help from Uncle Sam, but they were also functionally living in the late Stone Age when the advisors showed up.
Secondhand American technology might have been decades ahead of China and Russia’s contributions – and if so, World War II (and older) surplus from the communists was centuries, if not millennia, beyond what the hill people could make locally.
Likewise the indian in the Ohio River Valley, or the Plains tribes a hundred years on, or even the Montagnard a century on from that. They could USE the rifle as good as any, but they could not MAKE the rifle.
JimC says
If you haven’t read Thundersticks, I think you’d really dig it.
J.F. Bell says
I’ll amend it to what I fear is an ever-growing list….
Nelson LAWRY says
The term “conventional wisdom” is used almost always to preface the exception to that belief. Conventional wisdom has misled even the likes of Don Troiani, whose outstanding artistic skills customarily go hand-in-glove with his meticulous historical research to produce his splendid military action renderings. I do very much like his “The First Muster”—both showing the first muster of the Massachusetts Bay militia in 1636 or 1637 (soon after the onset of the Pequot War) and memorializing the roots of the National Guard—but my heart sinks at the matchlock muskets that, with the single exception of the pike-wielding sergeant, uniformly arm the militiamen…far too late to have seen such service.
Whereas matchlocks were the most common firearms imported to America during the first two decades of the 17th century, there were notable exceptions brought in by the leaders, affluent gentlemen, and professional soldiers arriving on these shores. Such include John Alden’s famous wheel-lock carbine—putatively of Italian origin and now in the NRA museum—and Miles Standish’s flint firearms, at least one of which saw lethal use. Well south of New England, the numerous ordnance inventories made at the Jamestown colony show the progressive replacement of the original matchlock muskets by flint firearms. By 1625, of the 1000+ firearms counted at Jamestown, a mere forty-seven matchlock muskets remained. Fifty year years later, Massachusetts Bay prohibited matchlocks in the prosecution of King Philip’s War. Troiani’s painting, while artistically fine, gets the weaponry wrong.
Nelson Lawry says
An error crept inadvertently into my previous. ‘Twas Plymouth Colony that banned the military use of matchlocks in 1677. It took Massachusetts Bay until 1693 to enact a like proscriptive law. Such a belated response to the liabilities in the continued use of matchlock firearms during wartime does surprise me.
Along the way, I found a great recent source that persuasively summarizes and documents the evolution of 17th century shoulder arms and firelocks:
Laura Damon, 2018, “Muskets in Misery Swamp: An Investigation into a King Philip’s War Battle,” masters thesis, University of Rhode Island. See
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/0fda/b2b4821b215ec507cfd51f8a54bfb60cdcf4.pdf
In her nicely readable thesis, Damon cites the obligatory earlier sources such as Patrick Malone’s 1991 “The Skulking Way of War” and Harold Paterson’s original 1947 paper, “The Military Equipment of the Plymouth and Bay Colonies, 1620–1690”. From their collective research, all of these authors concur that the transition toward flint firearms began in earnest by 1630 within the Massachusetts provinces, and likely all over New England, as it had in Jamestown, Virginia. So while there would have been matchlocks still in use during the Pequot War, 1636–37, the decided shift to some type of flint arm had already taken place. I suppose one may surmise in the Don Troiani painting, “The First Muster”, that the bearers of flint arms and those still using matchlocks have been segregated for instructional purposes, and the viewer has simply come upon the latter cohort.
Of at least equal importance: from the get-go, native tribesmen wanted nothing to do with matchlocks and sought zealously to acquire flint firearms. Hey, no dummies them.
JimC says
Thanks Nelson. It is, indeed, instructive that the Native peoples eschewed the matchlock the second a better firearm was available. They more than the settlers made their living with firearms, and they weren’t inclined to accept an inferior tool.
Nelson Lawry says
Right, Jim, and I emphasize you had already made this point early in the thread…except one essential point: WHEN did the coastal tribes begin lusting for firearms? We hardly need ask when the Iroquois did: very likely soon after encountering Samuel de Champlain and his two gun-totin’ buds in late July 1609, on the shore of the lake now bearing his hame. It’s reckoned by some that the native tribsemen farther east became strongly interested in acquiring firearms during the 1630s, which leads one to ask when precisely: early in the decade OR following the Pequot War? That is, after another bloody lesson had been delivered by the English. I write “from the get-go”, you write “the second a better firearm was available.” Both of which imply the trial and error period was brief to none. Logic tells us that the tribesmen in more than one place would have had some experience with matchlocks, only to have found them wanting. But all of that had to have unfolded against a better alternative, viz. that the matchlock was not the only game in town.
We know some few flint firearms arrived at various points of English incursion, Jamestown (1607), Plymouth (1620), likely Sagadahoc (1607–08). In putatively eschewing the matchlock by the 1630s, then, the native tribesmen had to have had common knowledge of the flint firearm, i.e. they had to have been confident that such modern firearms were available in a sufficiently large number in North America to shun the matchlock and opt for the better firelock. All of that strongly suggests that flint firelocks were quite plentiful earlier than heretofore appreciated—that they were not a rare commodity in the 1630s, and thus the tribesmen could realistically get their hands on them. I think this is the great revelation.
JimC says
I think that’s on the mark.