School Of The Rifle & The Tomahawk

The tomahawk was the primary melee weapon on the eastern frontier of North America through the 17th and 18th Centuries. With combat ranges usually measured in a handful  of yards, warriors often had time for only a single shot with a musket or rifle (with a rather high incidence of misfire) before closing with the enemy or ambush victim in hand-to-hand combat (or straight up butchery).

We’ve seen tomahawk combat in the Andrew Poe vs. Bigfoot melee.

And we’ve seen the murderous effects of the ’hawk in an ambush at Fort Laurens.

Zac Wingard of Wingard Wearables, who makes innovative tomahawks, recently examined the question of whether tomahawks were actually thrown in combat. I have long been skeptical of the thrown tomahawk — skepticism that Wingard shared. Why throw away your weapon on a low percentage gambit? I mean, we all love Mel Gibson’s hostage shot in The Patriot, but seriously…

But wait, though…. there is this sort of thing (from Ted Franklin Belue’s 2021 Muzzleloader Magazine article Remembrances of Samuel Brady Supreme Partisan in the Woods):

“Spies,” said John Cuppy, “practiced before going on a scout, shooting at a mark, throwing their tomahawks and sticking them in a tree at two or three rods and jumping over fences.” A “rod” (or, in their day’s terminology, a “perch” or “pole”) is an English measurement of varying length that by Cuppy’s era equaled 16.5 feet.

So, imagine: Brady’s men threw ’hawks at ranges up to 50 feet and in full gear, shooting and keeping skills honed by running Sam’s forested obstacle courses reflecting real-life combat, a training scenario most of us would throw down serious beaver to witness in real time. I sure would.

Brady’s Rangers operated in the 1770s-80s in western Pennsylvania, and were exceptionally effective in penetrating into denied areas, rescuing captives and disrupting raiding parties.

While throwing ’hawks is good fun — and I’ve done a fair bit in my day — Brady’s Rangers weren’t sportin’. They were training. And they wouldn’t have trained on a skill they weren’t going to use in the field.

Turns out that there are a number of historical incidences of throwing the ’hawk in combat – and Zac Wingard lines them out in this video.

Good stuff. In a separate video, Wingard recounts some intense tomahawk action involving a Revolutionary War soldier and Frontier Partisan named Moses Van Campen.

He is a man worthy of remembrance.

Van Campen grew up a hunter and woodsman in north-central Pennsylvania— learning from the Indians who hunted the region. As he put it:

“I was nurtured in the school of the rifle and the tomahawk.” 

I love that; it sounds like a Hawken Horse lyric.

It’s important to note that the frontier of that region was not a hard line with “civilization” on one side and “savagery” on the other. The settlements of whites — Dutch, German, English, Scots Irish, Scots — and the Iroquois of the now Six Nations, were in close proximity and often to a degree intermingled. There was considerable trade interaction, and intermarriage — both groups were acculturated to varying degrees, including religiously. The Mohawk War Captain Joseph Brant, for example, was devoutly Anglican.

When the American Revolution broke out, it took the form of a civil war, pitting neighbors and sometimes family members against each other. And it also created a civil war within the Iroquois Longhouse.

Van Campen saw some hardcore action on that Iroquois frontier of north-central Pennsylvania and western New York, including serving in the 1779 Sullivan Expedition, which scourged the Seneca Country. Van Campen’s story brings home the terrible nature of the civil war on that frontier. He lost a father, a brother and an uncle in a few horrific moments, was captured and took revenge in a dramatic escape.

There are several detailed accounts of Van Campen’s experiences, based on interviews with the old survivor, and his narrative in support of his application for a Revolutionary War soldier’s pension. At a remove of decades, and in the midst of the triumphalist spirit of Manifest Destiny, these 19th Century accounts tend to paint the ordeals of Van Campen as “thrilling adventures” — an entirely natural evolution of folklore and myth-making. I wrote a song about this phenomenon titled Now It’s Just A Story:

Now it’s just a story

Now it’s just a song

Trouble looks like romance when the years have come and gone…

It bears keeping in mind that the settlers and the native peoples alike suffered severe and sustained trauma and loss in the long series of wars on the early frontiers of North America.

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Just like his fellow Frontier Partisans Samuel Brady and Timothy Murphy, Moses Van Campen enlisted on the outbreak of hostilities between the American Colonies and the British Empire in 1775, and marched to Boston to join what would become the Continental Army. Like them, by 1778, he had been detailed to the protection of the frontiers, beleaguered by raids conducted by mixed forces of native warriors and Loyalist Rangers.

In 1780, Van Campen was taken prisoner by a party of those raiders. He effected a bloody escape, wielding a spontoon tomahawk to slay several of his captors. Otzinachson: A History of the West Branch Valley of the Sesquehanna, published in 1889, recounts the tale:

Lieutenant Van Campen says that his father’s house having been burned by a marauding party of Indians in 1778, he soon afterwards requested him to go with him and a younger brother to their farm, about four miles from Fort Wheeler, where the family was staying, to begin preparations for building another house and to make an effort to put in some grain. Little apprehension of Indians were felt. They left the fort about the last of March. Van Campen says: “I was accompanied by my father, uncle and his son, about twelve years old, and Peter Pence.

We had been on our farm about four or five days when, on the 30th of March, we were surprised by a party of ten Indians. My father was lunged through with a spear, his throat was cut and he was scalped, while my brother was tomahawked, scalped and thrown into the fire before my eyes. While I was struggling with a warrior, the fellow who had killed my father drew his spear from his body and made a violent thrust at me. I shrunk from the spear, and the savage who had hold of me turned it with his hand, so that it only penetrated my vest and shirt. They were then satisfied with taking me prisoner, as they had the same morning taken my uncle’s little son and Pence, though they killed my uncle.” Soon after this, at another point, they took a boy named Rogers prisoner and also a man named Pike.

With their captives the Indians then rapidly made their way over the mountains to the North Branch, near the mouth of Tuncannook Creek, and thence toward their concerted rendezvous.

The warriors were ten in number; but Peter Pence and Van Campen were not the kind of men to pale in view of peril, and determined to avail themselves of the first opportunity to strike a blow for freedom. The opportunity came at length, and the blow was struck. One evening, when above the Wyalusing Flats, while the prisoners were being bound for the night, an Indian accidentally dropped his knife close to Van Campen’s feet. By a movement that escaped observation it was promptly covered. About midnight, when the warriors were all asleep, Van Campen secured the knife and released Peter Pence, who in turn cut from the others the bands that held them fast. Cautiously, but quickly, the weapons were secured and a plan for action decided on. The prisoners had been placed in the midst of the warriors—on either side five. Van Campen and Pike were to use the tomahawk on one group, while Peter Pence opened fire on the other with the rifles.

At this juncture a warrior assigned to Pike started from his slumber, and Pike was overcome with fear. In an instant Van Campen buried his tomahawk in the head of the wakeful savage, and then made quick work with the adjoining four, while four of the other group were as speedily dispatched by Peter Pence. Then followed a desperate hand-to-hand contest between Van Campen and the surviving Indian—John, the Mohawk Sachem.

The two were athletes in their way, well matched in skill and strength. Van Campen with his left hand grasped the wrist of the warrior’s right, in which his keen-edged knife was held. The Mohawk with his left hand seized Van Campen’s right, in which the bloody tomahawk was clutched. Thus grappling, they struggled, fell, and struggling, rose again, each vainly seeking to take advantage of the other’s first false movement, while Pence, unable to distinguish the two combatants, dared not fire a shot for fear of killing the wrong man. At length the Mohawk, breaking from Van Campen’s grasp, turned to flee. Springing after him, Van Campen, with uplifted tomahawk, aimed a deadly blow straight at the retreating Sachem’s crest; but the wary Mohawk, by an agile movement, saved his head, the hooked blade sinking deep in the muscles of his shoulder. With a bound that wrenched the weapon from Van Campen’s hand, the Indian dashed into the darkened forest and escaped, bearing the truculent trophy in his quivering flesh.

The liberated captives, after scalping their late captors and securing their plunder, embarked on a hastily constructed raft down the river, and after a series of adventures reached Wyoming in safety, there leaving Pike and young Rogers. Van Campen, with his nephew and Pence, made their way by canoe to Northumberland.

Long after the war, John Mohawk visited Van Campen at his home, and showed him his scars. The old adversaries shook hands. The family of Horatio Jones, a long-term captive of the Iroquois who acted as an interpreter and cultural mediator, gave to Van Campen’s family the tomahawk Van Campen had buried in John Mohawk’s shoulder.

Van Campen was captured a second time in 1782 when a party of British Rangers and Iroquois warriors overwhelmed his patrol after a sharp fight. Van Campen had to stand by stoically as the warriors tomahawked those of his men too severely wounded to march into captivity. One man was bent over a large rock, and the warriors used him for target practice, blowing his skull to bits and blowing his brains all over the ground. When a warrior moved to tomahawk a man named Burwell who had been wounded in the arm and shoulder, Van Campen intervened. Otzinachson:

Van Campen, perceiving his movements, jerked from the warrior who was holding him by the arm, sprang forward with his right hand clenched, and gave the Indian executioner a blow in the breast which sent him reeling backward until he fell upon the ground like one dead. The warriors then turned with their hatchets upon Van Campen. But a party who had witnessed the scene were highly pleased with the bravery that had been shown by their prisoner, and as the tomahawk was about to descend, they leaped forward over his head to rescue him from death… This well-timed blow was the means of sparing Burwell from falling under the hatchet of the executioner, for as they came around Van Campen they repeated one after another: “Brave warrior, brave warrior.” They seemed by common consent to yield the life of the one as a tribute to the noble deed of the other.

Van Campen would serve out the rest of the war in the custody of the British. They tried to induce him to turn his coat, an entreaty he vigorously rejected.

After the war, he married, moved to New York, and lived out his days as a respected member of his community and a well-regarded soldier of the Revolution.

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Continuity & Persistence in the tactical use of the tomahawk has been given an enormous boost by Jack Carr, who has made crossed Winkler tomahawks his “brand.”

 

 

There are folks out in the wild getting that image tattooed upon their person…

Carr’s Navy SEAL hero James Reece has wielded a Winkler ’hawk in every one of Carr’s thrillers, and it’s featured prominently in both the inaugural book and the series The Terminal List. There’s a scene directly and explicitly inspired by an incident from Allan W. Eckert’s The Frontiersmen. If you know, you know…

Winkler’s not alone in the field — there are several makers of top-tier “tactical tomahawks.” The school of the rifle and the tomahawk is still in session.