WarData.net - Gunpowder and the Fur Trade

WarData.net ~~~ Gunpowder and the Fur Trade

Introduction

Gunpowder first came to America along with the first European explorers, colonists, and conquerors, along with a host of other boons and banes. At first, the Europeans maintained a military superiority due to their monopoly on the possession of gunpowder and firearms, but soon trade of both items soon became a way for the newcomers to gain allies amongst the indigenous peoples. Along with a host of other items such as lead shot and bar lead for casting bullets, bullet molds, edged weapons, and many other trade items, the native individuals and societies adapted to the use of firearms quickly. Firearms were manufactured in Europe, as was gunpowder, which was imported by the colonists from their various European countries of origin, and stored, used and traded as needed. For the Indians, firearms were at first a luxury, and then a necessity, for both military use and for hunting.

The first phase of the transfer of military technology to America was during the colonial period, when the use of firearms and gunpowder first came to America. This is when the interaction of the Western European GEs impacted upon a group of “secondary states and other actors” which were the Native American nations such as the Iroquois and the Powhatan. This phase was largely a struggle of the colonists and Indian groups to survive the experience of contact with each other. Usually, the Pequot War (1636 – 1638) is taken as the end of this phase and the beginning of the next, which was the expansion of the colonies at the expense of the Indians, and at the expense of each other. New Sweden was gradually absorbed by New Netherlands, which became part of the English colonies during a series of Anglo-Dutch Wars. The wars between the groups of colonists are directly related to conflicts between their European counterparts. Most relevant of these for this paper were the ongoing French – British wars that periodically recurred with the Dutch, Spanish and other GEs playing lesser roles. There was a constantly shifting set of alliances among the major powers, including the landlocked European GEs which did not have merchant or naval fleets. During this period, the French and British colonies also fought against each other, both sides using Indians as allies. The English colonists still waged war on the neighboring tribes, sometimes with Indian allies. The end of this period was marked by the period between the closing of King Philip’s War (1675-1676), a struggle between Indians and colonists, and the beginning of King William’s War (1689-1698), a war between two groups of colonists with both making use of Indians as allies.

The third phase of the story of gunpowder in America concerned the struggle for dominance between the two remaining groups of colonists, the English and the French. A number of wars occurred with almost periodic frequency during this period, each larger than the last. After King Williams War (1689-1698) was Queen Anne’s War (1702-1713), then King George’s War (1744-1748), the series finally ending with the French and Indian War (1754-1763). The Treaty of Paris of 1763 required the French to give up their presence in Canada to the British. During this phase, the Native Americans were used as allies by both groups of Europeans. This led to the continuance of the wars against the Indians between the inter-colonial wars, and even after the English had driven the French from the North American continent.

The expenses of this final war left Britain and France in financial ruins. Britain tried to ease her economic problems by passing them off on to the colonists in America. Many leaders in France began to make plans to avenge that nation’s loss to England by the Treaty of Paris. This began a process of escalating confrontation between the colonists and their British rulers, the final result of which was the creation of a new and independent gunpowder empire, the United States of America, during the American War of Independence (1776-1783).

The fourth and final phase of the story of gunpowder in America spans the years from independence to the latter decades of the nineteenth century, when gunpowder, sometimes known as black powder, was displaced by newer chemical explosives, the various types of smokeless powders. It was during the early part of this latter phase that the transfer of the critical technology for the manufacture of gunpowder from the Old World to the New took place. It was this vital industrial process that helped the United States to complete its independence from the GEs of Europe and led the way for America to assume the status of Gunpowder Empire in its own right. The gunpowder industry also helped the United States to enter the Industrial Revolution and led directly to the era of chemical explosives, which eventually led to the era of nuclear explosives. It is the object of this paper to give a brief outline of the story of gunpowder in the United States, and to mention some of the important ramifications of its use, up to the point where gunpowder was replaced by smokeless powders and other explosives in the latter decades of the nineteenth century.

The Spanish experience in Florida was filled with hostile encounters with various natives of the area. Although they did bring gunpowder to America, little came of this. The Spanish were in search of plunder and tribute and not trade or land, as did the French and English. Their efforts to convert the Indians met with only modest success. No guns were sold or traded to the Indians in this area, and “the Spanish left little behind them that was technologically disruptive.” Spanish colonization along the Atlantic coast of America will not be further discussed, although their experiences in the American west and southwest will be considered briefly. [Add to this section from M.L. Brown]

Prior to the coming of the Europeans, Indian warfare had been different from European warfare, both in motive and in method. The reasons an agricultural society of the south went to war were also quite different from the reasons for war among the hunting tribes of the colder northern regions, and the type of wars they fought were also different. While wars of the latter were largely sporadic and individual affairs, wars of the former were often larger and more organized, and were sometimes waged for reasons of territory. Wars were sometimes conducted in order to force a defeated tribe to pay tribute to the victor. The most frequent motive for war among all tribes seems to have been revenge. It was not, however, a matter of the whole tribe going to war, but rather, certain groups of men within the tribe would chose to fight, some for revenge, some for prestige, booty or captives. In general, however, there were few reasons for war among the indigenes and when war did occur, the casualties were few. Sometimes the Iroquois and other southern agricultural groups waged pitched battles with masses of warriors on each side, armed with clubs and bows, and wearing wooden slatted armor. After an exchange of arrows and a few blows, a few captives were taken, and both sides retired. Fatalities were relatively few because the combat was defined by rules not unlike those of medieval chivalry, and because of the neolithic technology employed. The arrows were tipped with flint, which tended to shatter upon the wooden armor, or upon hitting bone. The wounds could be severe and bloody, but usually were not fatal. At other times, for instance, during the mourning wars, where the objectives were revenge and captives, smaller war parties traveled long distances in search of victims. Captives were sometimes ritually tortured and eaten. In other cases, the captives were adopted into their captor’s culture, or exchanged. Motives for wars were various and differed with time, culture and circumstances. With the coming of the Europeans, there were many new reasons for warfare between the tribes.

Voyages of exploration along the coast and into the St. Lawrence Seaway acquainted some Indians with firearms and other European goods in the sixteenth century. Fishermen sometimes stopped in these areas to dry their catch before returning to their European ports. Indians were drawn to these places for trade goods, initially, household items like kettles, clothing, and blankets. European trade goods began displacing traditional Iroquois items in the 1580s and the Indians were fighting for trading routes. Iron axes replaced stone axes because of their greater durability and sharpness. Stone arrow points were replaced by metal ones of copper or iron, fashioned from kettles or other trade items. Once the first primitive flintlocks, known as snaphances (or snaphaunces), replaced the matchlock musket, the Indian demand for guns became undeniable. As Patrick M. Malone says, “no European artifact adopted by the Indians had a more dramatic effect on their military system than did the firearm.” Although their bows had a superior rate of fire, firearms had greater impact and were much more effective, especially when they were loaded with “buck and ball,” one large ball and three or more smaller ones, giving the muskets a shotgun effect. This was wasteful when hunting but very effective in combat. Some Indians acquired the ability to repair muskets and cast bullets by working as craftsmen for the colonists of New England. They also had “learned the art of casting lead, pewter, and brass soon after the establishment of the colonies.” Bar lead was used for casting bullets, and the Indians may have even been able to cast the fixtures for muskets. They mastered the simple skills of replacing worn flints and repairing broken stocks. The Narragansetts even had their own forge and became competent blacksmiths. The Indians also made desperate attempts to learn the technique for the manufacture of gunpowder. Had they acquired the knowledge, the skills would not have been beyond their capabilities. However, the production of saltpeter requires the composting of large quantities of organic material, such as manure and urine. This would probably have been impossible for the Indians to acquire, as would have been sulfur. So even had they been able to learn the necessary steps to manufacture gunpowder, they would have had difficulties obtaining the raw materials.

After founding Quebec in 1608, and establishing profitable trade relations with the Hurons of the Great Lakes region, Champlain fought in a war between the Huron and the Iroquois in 1609. In order to secure favor among the Hurons, he not only participated, but led an attack on their enemies, the Iroquois. He and two other soldiers found the Indians on both sides unprepared for the effect of the cumbersome arquebuses they carried. Three chieftains were killed in the first volley. The noise, flash and smoke produced by the weapons intimidated and frightened the Iroquois, who became bitter enemies of the French. Champlain’s use of firearms against the Iroquois ended their traditional forms of battle and was a shock to the Indians who had allied with Champlain.

At Jamestown, the colonists met the Paspahegh people and others, who were tributary tribes to the Powhatan Confederacy. Two Englishmen were wounded before the expedition even landed. After failing to establish communications with the Indians, the colonists began constructing a fort. On May 26, 1607, less than two weeks after founding the colony, a party of two hundred Indians surprised the English, killing two and wounding about a dozen of the others. The colonists reacted in true gunpowder empire fashion. They used the ship-mounted cannon to destroy villages along both sides of the James River, and soldiers took some prisoners and corn. The fort was quickly finished, complete with three batteries of about four cannon each. Powhatan let the English languish at the fort while a trade relationship developed. While he remained in control of the colony because the English were dependent on the indigenes for corn and other vital food items, the muskets and cannon posed a distinct threat. At the same time, an alliance could also benefit the Powhatans by bringing the English weapons to bear on their enemies. After an exchange of gifts, the English believed that Powhatan had accepted the authority of their own King James I, while Powhatan considered the English gifts of a scarlet robe, crown, and shoes as tokens of tribute from the English. This ambiguous relationship prevailed for a little more than a year. When the Indians had acquired all the copper they could use, the English still had to eat. Since copper no longer had value for them, and having already received as many swords and hatchets as they could use, the Indians demanded firearms. When the English refused and began negotiations with enemies of the Powhatans, the Powhatans embargoed the corn. Desperate, the English resorted to extorting the corn they needed from the Indians by taking captives, including the Powhatan chief, Opechancanough. Both sides began preparing for war, the English learning to fight in the woods and the Indians learning to operate a few captured muskets. Open warfare broke out after a group of new colonists arrived in the late summer of 1609 (The First Anglo-Powhatan War, 1609–1614). A group of newcomers sent as emissaries were tortured and killed by the Nansemond tribe. In retaliation, the settlers destroyed villages and desecrated graves of the Indians. Many of these settlers were in turn killed. Captain John Smith and about 120 soldiers forced the Indians to vacate an entire village complete with cornfields, which was then occupied by the new colonists. Warfare continued into the winter, which was as deadly for the English as the struggle with the Indians. The colonists survived by wreaking havoc on the Indian villages and crops. The Paspahegh were wiped out, their village destroyed, and most of the people captured and executed Jamestown, however, was barely managing to hang on. It was on the point of failing several times, only to be saved each time by another fleet from England with supplies and reinforcements. Although the Indians had captured a few muskets, they had little powder. After his daughter was kidnapped, Powhatan returned a few broken muskets but refused to relinquish the ones still in good repair. He also refused ransom for his daughter. After a final English expedition ended in a stand-off, Powhatan was forced to accept a truce and the marriage of his daughter to the Englishman John Rolfe. During the years of peace that followed, the two societies achieved a degree of integration, and many Indians had come to live among the colonists. This period of amicability saw the transfer of a few weapons to the Indians. An Indian named Kissarourr was possibly the very first indigene to obtain the latest in European firearms, the snaphance. The Indians also received instruction in the use of the muskets, in exchange for which the Powhatan chieftain allowed teaching of the Christian faith among the Indians. The colonists began to have second thoughts about the wisdom of this arrangement when they grew less dependent on the Indians for food. The number of arriving colonists made their situation less tenuous. Their own crops of corn and other foods were beginning to thrive and tobacco began to be exported back to Europe. The Virginia Burgesses attached the death penalty to anyone who sold firearms to the Indians. They also stopped returning any muskets brought in by Indians for repair. War broke out after the murder of an English trader, and the subsequent killing of his suspected Indian assailant. On March 22, 1622, the Powhatans attacked the scattered settlements along the James and Appomattox Rivers, killing 347 men, women, and children. Because the Powhatans did not kill women or children during their wars, this anomaly marked an important turning point in the relation between colonists and natives. In their efforts to drive the English from their lands, the indigenes had learned to make war in the European fashion, killing combatants and non-combatants alike. Total war had come to America. The majority of the fighting occurred in 1624 when a group of sixty Englishmen sailed up the river to the center of the Powhatan territory and harvested the crops of the Indians. The Pamunkey tribe decided to protect their food supply and attacked what they thought was a small group. The English were armed with snaphance muskets and wore heavy armor that protected them from the arrows of the Pamunkeys. Eight hundred warriors attacked the colonists, but, in a two-day battle, failed to kill a single Englishman, while taking many casualties themselves. The English retired from the battlefield, taking their wounded and enough corn to last a year with them. The war continued at a low level even after a truce was supposedly reached in 1632. After a period where the Jamestown colonists had been dependent on the Indians, the two different cultures had reached an armed stand-off with a six-mile wooden fence between them.

Initially, at the Plymouth colony, there was a period of “shock and awe” amongst the indigenes before they became acquainted with the weaponry of the Europeans. The noise and flash, the sudden appearance of a cloud of smoke, and most of all, the lethal impact of the projectiles were something beyond the experience of the Indians. There is an instance of the almost magical power of gunpowder in the first years of the Plymouth colony. In 1622, two years after the Plymouth colony’s foundation, the Narragansett Indians declared war on the colony by sending a symbolic token of their intentions, a bundle of arrows wrapped in snakeskin. The Pilgrims filled the snakeskin with gunpowder and lead shot, their own symbolic tokens of war and the equivalent of the arrows sent by the Indians. The Narragansetts not only did not follow through on their declaration of war, but they balked at even receiving the package at all. Later confrontations at Plymouth were not resolved so bloodlessly, and that same year (1622) colonists at Jamestown were involved in a bloody war with the Powhatan Confederacy.

The Dutch established a settlement on the Hudson River, near present-day Albany, in 1614. Fort Orange became an important outlet for trade goods in large quantity. This development changed the balance of power among the tribes in the region, “opening the equivalent of a modern mega-mall on the eastern edge of Iroquoia,” and the Mohawks, being closest of all, benefited the most. The Mohawks wasted no time in starting a war with the Delaware, “particularly the Munsee in southern New York and northern Pennsylvania and New Jersey.” The Dutch, the English, and the Indians became engaged in a three-way struggle for control of the trade in the area. Soon, the English were engaged in an all-out war with the Pequots, known as the Pequot War (1636 – 1638), or the First War of Puritan Conquest, depending on one’s point of view. The Dutch attacked the Pequots in 1634, and fought a brief war with the Munsees in 1643-1644. The European series of Anglo-Dutch Wars affected this relationship, with New Amsterdam going back and forth between the English and Dutch (1652-1654, 1665-1667, and 1672-1674), and finally remaining as New York. The end of the third of these wars, in 1674, saw the end of the Dutch colonial presence as their colonies were absorbed into the English colonies, leaving the English and French in control of the north part of America and the Spanish in the south. Although the Dutch colonies had been absorbed by the English, Dutch traders continued to “remain active” in the lucrative fur trade for some time afterward.

This is the ornately carved stock of a Serpentine-sideplate fusil, an early type of flintlock, originating around 1640. These were introduced probably introduced by Dutch, and were made specifically for the Indian trade. The Indians sometimes refused to trade for other types of firearms. See: Brown, Firearms in Colonial America, 153, 180, and 283-285.

[Section to be inserted here: The later stages of the colonial period up to King Philip’s War.]

The unevenness of the transactions between the Indians and the Europeans left the former at the mercy of the latter. When Indians granted or sold lands, the territory became European forever. In return the Indians received trade goods but not the means or skills of making and repairing such goods themselves. Becoming addicted to European products, the Indians soon lost their own neolithic [sic] skills through disuse; bowmakers found no apprentices where hunters and warriors knew the advantages of guns, and an artisan gap of a single generation can wipe out a craft in an illiterate society. In the trade that thus came to dominate their economy, the Indian had no choice but to supply the commodities demanded by the Europeans. Apart from personal and military services, the Indians’ only commodities of value were food, peltry, and lands. When European farms and herds began to flourish, the demand for Indian-produced food dropped off. Commercial hunting and the sale of lands perpetually depleted the stocks of the very commodities on which the Indians depended. Military services [as allies of the Europeans, against the Europeans, and against each other] destroyed their bodies as well.

While the Indians acquired firearms and gunpowder, not to mention a host of other trade items, the Europeans acquired furs, the lands of the Indians, and permanent customers for their trade items. Most important of these was gunpowder, without which the firearms were useless. The dependency was mutual, but as time passed, the Europeans were better able to do without the cooperation of the Indians than the natives were able to do without the newcomers.

The Indians were in a process whereby their strength relative to the Europeans was diminishing, while that of the Europeans was increasing. Besides the diseases and combat, there were processes of mutual dependence which left the autochthons with a feeling of the Europeans dominance. The Indians were intimidated and awed by the “wooden walls” of the European ships armed with cannon from which the sailors and soldiers regarded the Indians with curiosity while the Indians gazed back from their “lowly canoes.” Similarly, the indigenes acquired a sense of cultural inferiority when they saw and felt the effects of firearms and edged metal weapons when they had only their wood clubs and bows. The warriors and hunters found themselves in the position of sharecroppers. They had to buy their supplies from the English and French traders who wanted pelts in payment. To get the pelts, the warriors needed gunpowder and traps. It was a vicious circle from which they found no escape.

The effect of firearms and gunpowder on Indian societies and tribes (or European or Asian societies, for that matter) was analogous to that of an addictive drug. The initial effect was been tremendous. The first tribes to acquire firearms gained a significant military advantage over their enemies and all other groups in the region. In battle, one or two firearms, against another group armed only with neolithic weapons and armor, meant instant and complete victory, as it had for Champlain in his first encounter with the Iroquois in 1608. Those with weapons were also able to acquire more wealth and improve their status relative to other groups. But as other groups also began to use firearms, the original group required larger and larger numbers of weapons to get the same effect. As these peoples abandoned their previous was of life and existence, they required a constant, and constantly increasing, supply of gunpowder just to maintain their daily life and existence. To abandon this new substance would have meant giving up this new status and wealth, and a painful return to the previous mode of existence. Just as Americans are unwilling to give up automobiles and return to a simpler way of life, the Indians were not about to give up firearms. And, just as Americans, order to maintain their standard of living, are forced to buy gasoline whatever the price, the Indians had to have gunpowder at whatever the price. They had to pay for it, in the currency of peltry with the traders, or military service to one European military leader or another. To a limited extent, this was true of other European items, especially those expendable commodities such as lead for bullets, and less durable items like cloth. However, iron hatchets, kettles, and other tools soon began to saturate the market to varying degrees. Eventually, these items would have been so cheap as to have been relatively worthless, as copper had saturated the nearby Powhatan market for copper, driving the Jamestown colonists to steal corn instead of trading. Gunpowder, besides being an expendable commodity, was difficult to store for long periods. It readily absorbs water from the air and quickly becomes useless. Like gasoline, it is quite dangerous to store and transport. For the Indians, even when a quantity of gunpowder was captured in battle, it was impossible to move large containers of it, such as kegs or barrels. In the summer of 1763, during the French and Indian War, “Indians had seized the stores of eight forts,” but “because the Indians had only their canoes for transport, they could scarcely move heavy barrels of provisions, powder, and shot from the posts where they had been captured to [other] forts still under siege.” To transport the gunpowder, they were forced to unpack it and disperse it into numerous smaller containers, in the process exposing it to moisture and other contaminants. Lord Amherst, knowing the Indians would expend their supply of gunpowder in warfare that summer and in hunting the following winter, saw the summer of 1764 as his “first realistic opportunity to subjugate the Indian rebels militarily.” This was even truer in the years1600, as the manufacturing methods were less precise, thereby increasing the likelihood of contamination, and contaminants increase the susceptibility of gunpowder to moisture.

As Fred Anderson says in his introduction to Liberty or Death, a book that covers the French and Indian War, the American Revolutionary War, and the War of 1812, the three wars “are seldom treated together, [although they] were intimately interrelated.” They also cannot be isolated from the larger context of the “long eighteenth century,” a span of years from 1688 to 1815 during which France and Britain were intermittently at war with each other. Another author, Kevin Phillips, sees a continuum from the three English Civil Wars (1642 – 1645, 1648 – 1649, and 1649 - 1651) through the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783) and the American Civil War (1861-1865). Yet another, David Skaggs, see a continuous process in the various Indian Wars from 1754 to 1814, which he calls the Sixty Years War. The various wars more familiar as the French and Indian War (1754-1763), Pontiac’s Rebellion (1763-1765), Lord Dunmore’s War (1774), the frontier warfare during the American Revolution (1775-1783), the Northwest Indian War (1786-1794), and the War of 1812 (1812-1814), were only phases within this larger Sixty Years War. Author Robert Leckie sees a sequential process in the various colonial wars from 1688 to 1763, and writes the history of King William’s War (1688-1697), Queen Anne’s War (1701-1714), King George’s War (1740-1748), and the French and Indian War (1756-1763) and describes how each war in this sequence of North American corresponded to a concurrent war in Europe. These European wars were, respectively, the War of the Grand Alliance, the War of the Spanish Succession, the War of the Austrian Succession, and the Seven Years War. Each was a struggle for power amongst the various European GEs. What each of these authors says is true. However, one must take a step yet further back and see each of these conflicts in the light of its place in the large scheme of things. In politics, everything is local. The same is true in history, all history is local, and every event is the combined actions of small groups and individuals. Yet the opposite is also true, that to understand the actions of the parts of a system, one must look at the whole system as well. Each of these wars grew out of the expansion and interaction of the most dominant actors in this international system, the gunpowder empires. In the case of this paper, to understand the actions of the important actors in the formation of the United States, it will be necessary to at least acknowledge the larger context of conflict within which they occurred.

George Raudzens. “War-winning Weapons: A Measure of Technological Determinism in Military History.” The Journal of Military History 54, no. 4 (October, 1990), 403-434. (PDF)

Craig S. Keener. “An Ethnohistorical Analysis of Iroquois Assault Tactics Used against Fortified Settlements of the Northeast in the Seventeenth Century.” Ethnohistory 46, no. 4, Warfare and Violence in Ethnohistorical Perspective. (Autumn, 1999), 777-807.

Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, “From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in between in North American History,” in The American Historical Review 104, no. 3 (June, 1999), 814-841.

“The Dutch tried to outlaw the sale of guns to Indians in 1639, but it was already too late for such measures to succeed.” In 1648, the Dutch reversed this policy and began the sale of guns directly to the Mohawks. “Iron tomahawks of European manufacture replaced the ball-headed war club, changing the older weapon into a status symbol for great men.” Traditional wooden slat armor disappeared around this time. Iroquois women gave up making clay pots and men gave up making traditional clay pipes; both were replaced by trade items from Europe. Endemic warfare (variously known as mourning wars or beaver wars) between the Iroquois and Hurons began around 1634, after both had been ravaged by epidemics. The Iroquois were able to generate greater firepower and eventually drove the Hurons from the Great Lakes area.

To continue the analogy between gunpowder and fuel, consider the last hundred years of the automobile in the United States. Use of the automobile has transformed our lives in the span of a few decades. Automobiles are the way people get to work. They are status symbols, and a centerpiece of our culture. There are industries based around automobiles. Auto manufacturing, auto repair, auto tires, auto insurance, used cars, on and on, the list is long. Road construction and road repair are huge sectors of our national and state economies. There millions of auto racing fans, and several different types of racing. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands of auto clubs, and many more people collect cars. Television has used this fixation to great advantage, while at the same time, adding to the attraction of automobiles. Many people since the 1930s, from teen-agers to the typical working man and woman, have built their lives around them. More could be said, but the point is that when the price of oil goes up, everyone gets nervous and angry, but no one stops driving. When the price of oil goes up, the price of everything else goes up, because everything is transported by oil-based fuel. Now picture the average Iroquois brave in the seventeenth century. His whole culture has been transformed by European trade goods, but most of all by gunpowder and firearms. Firearms have displaced traditional weapons to a large extent, both for warfare and for hunting. They were a status symbol and a necessary tool in a very warlike culture and milieu. The average Iroquois youth, upon coming of age, desired the latest new firearm from Europe, just as American teenagers in the 1950s and 1960s lusted after the newest hot automobile from Detroit (or Europe). Just as automobiles and gasoline changed the societies that adopted them, firearms and gunpowder transformed European and Indian societies alike. Gunpowder had an equally important role in the establishment of the United States of America.