So an early English trade gun circa 1740-60 could have been used in the French and Indian war carried by either Indians or colonial militia and could also have been used in the Revolutionary war by regular colonists, militia or even farmers/hunters?
It is difficult and dangerous to make generalized statements such as those above. There is no question that Indians were allied with the combatants in the F&I War and the AWI, and they would have used trade guns. There were colonists that sometimes led but often accompanied Indians on raids. Whether these colonists used trade guns, civilian guns, or military guns probably can't be proven. The same for militia. Many colonies required male citizens to be part of the militia and to provide their own arms. Some may have owned trade guns because they were inexpensive and commonly available. There really wasn't much, if any, difference in quality between an Indian trade gun and a low end civilian fowling piece.
Below is a photo of four contemporary guns made by Jack Brooks. These guns illustrate that most trade guns (the NW trade gun is the exception) were simply inexpensive versions of civilian fowling pieces.
At the top is Jack's interpretation of a high end English fowling piece. It is silver mounted and engraved with patterns and styles inspired by guns pictured in
Great British Gunmakers 1740-1790 by W. Keith Neal & D. H. L. Back. It has a hook breech and keys instead of pins. The barrel is temper or fire blued.
Below it is another gun that Jack made for a good friend to represent a mid-grade English fowling piece mounted in brass without the hooked breech. The barrel was polished bright and is pinned in the stock. This gun is fitted with a sling and engraved with dates and locations that represent activities and engagements of the customer's 4th-great grandfather experiences during the Rev War. Essentially, it represents a fowler/musket.
The third and forth guns from the top are Jack's versions of the Type G trade gun. The third down has been painted red and decorated with folk art designs that Jack copied from a F&I War era powder horn. It represents a Type G that might have been carried by a colonial trader or frontiersman that personalized his gun with his own decorations.
The bottom gun is a Type G painted with vines such as those on the Bumford gun.
All of these guns are based on the work of Richard Wilson and his firm and utilize the same architecture and barrel dimensions. The locks vary to represent varying quality. The high end gun has Chambers lock with bridles on the tumbler and frizzen. The mid-grade fowler has a lock with a bridle on the tumbler only. The Type G trade gun has neither tumbler or frizzen bridle. On the originals the quality of the barrels would vary too and obviously the mounts reflect the quality of the guns from sliver to cast brass to wrought sheet brass mounts. The quality of the thumb pieces and engraving also varies.
DavidB1757, you started out asking about the Carolina or Type G trade gun and early English trade guns from Clay Smith's website. I assume your question about trade guns used during the Rev War still pertains to the Type G. The answer is not particularly clear or is a matter of interpretation.
Below is a map of historical sites from the Lee Burke paper that
Notchy Bob linked above in Post #13 showing where Type G gun parts have been found. These archeology sites primarily date well before the Revolutionary War. The exception that Burke pointed out is the Spanish Fort site along the Red River in Texas and Oklahoma labeled 12 on the map.
The Spanish Fort site is thought to have been occupied by a group of Wichita Indians called Taovayas from the 1750s and into the 1800s. French and English gun parts have been found at the site. Of the English gun parts, both the Type G and Northwest trade gun parts were found. It should be pointed out that these gun parts were primarily surface finds.
The long period of occupancy and the surface finds makes it very difficult to conclusively date all the gun parts.
Lee Burke chose to interpret both the Type G and NW gun parts as introduced by English traders known to be in the area as early as 1772 and possibly as late as 1785. So Lee Burke sees the Type G trade gun still being made at the time of the Rev War.
But there are other possible interpretations. Early French explorers on the Lower Mississippi reported seeing Indians with guns. Guns that were most likely English that came all the way across from the East Coast.
The Indians had extensive trade networks going back thousands of years. Indians that had direct contact with European goods often acted as middlemen that traded the goods on to more remote tribes. These in turn would trade with tribes even further away.
So it is plausible that the Type G parts found at the Spanish Fort site date to the mid-1700s consistent with the other sites on Burke's map.
Under that interpretation, and consistent with the other archeological data for the Type G's which indicates the it was made from about the beginning of the 18th century to about the 1750s, then one wouldn't expect very many Type G trade guns to still be functional enough to be used in the Rev War.
