plmeek
40 Cal.
The Type G does predate the Northwest trade gun. As stated before, the Type G may have developed around the second decade of the 18th century. The development of the Northwest trade gun appears to begin in 1741 with the adoption of the large trigger guard bow and continued through that decade. An early version is in the Museum of the Fur Trade collection that was made between 1741 and 1744 that has all the characteristics of the Northwest gun except it has a Type G side plate, albeit a restored one. The earliest dated full formed Northwest gun known has a lock marked on the tail "WILSON 51" for 1751. S. James Gooding found a reference in the HBC records of 1749 that instructed "the Sideplates to be polished." He surmised that this referred to the cast serpent side plate with scales that obviously would need clean up and polishing after they were sand cast. So the final transition to the Northwest gun as we know it may have occurred that year.
Except for the inconclusive finds at the Spanish Fort site, the Type G appears to fade out after 1750.
That's not really supported by any evidence. As the map shows, evidence of the Type G has been found in what is now Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, and way up in Canada, not just in the South.
I'm not sure what you mean by "as rifles become more predominant"? I'm not aware that rifles became predominant in the Indian fur trade. At least not until right at the end of the muzzleloader era and cartridge guns were becoming common.
Rifles get more attention on these forums, in books, and by collectors, but that doesn't really reflect the history of the use of firearms in North America.
When I was a kid, we had a lot more shotguns in our house than rifles. I think that was the norm through a big swath of America from the 20th century all the way back through this country's history.
We don't have a good record of how many NW trade guns were imported into America because both the fur companies and the US government had to buy them from independent importers and neither the companies nor the government bothered to keep good records of their purchases.
I think for the government, they were trying to keep the purchase of foreign merchandise below the radar because the politicians were pushing "buy American", but the Indians demanded British products because they were of higher quality and less cost. Not too unlike Walmart now with its dependency on China.
I'm not sure why we don't have better records from the fur companies, but it may have something to do with the fact that they made their purchases through middlemen in the US and in England. The AFC did not have a person in England that was ordering guns directly from the gun makers. They went through an import merchant in the US who dealt with and export merchant in England who bought from the manufacturers. The fur companies often used different merchants depending on who had the product on hand or could get it the quickest and had the lowest price. It may be that the information does exists in the surviving AFC records, and no one has bothered to look through the many volumes of records to tabulate the trade gun orders.
Once American gun makers were able to compete with the English on quality and price (in the early 1840s), the US government shifted their purchase of NW guns to firms like Henry Leman and George Tryon and kept records of the contracts and the deliveries. From 1837 to 1860, the US government only purchased 500 rifles from Henry Leman while purchasing no less than 8,620 NW guns from him. The government purchased 2,130 rifles and 5,822 NW guns from Tryon between 1832 and 1855. Rifles certainly aren't predominate in these figures.
On another forum, someone asked about NW trade guns in the Carolina's post 1800. Another person made the point that NW trade gun parts don't exist in the archeological record in the South. I pointed out that from 1795 to 1822, the US government was buying imported NW guns for their factories, many of which were in the South, and the British government sent a significant number of NW guns to the South for their Indian allies in both the Rev War and the War of 1812. So we have good evidence that the Indians had access to them.
When I reviewed my books on archeological gun parts, nearly of of which were written or edited by T. M. Hamilton, I noticed that they were all focused on trade guns of the Colonial Period. Further, Hamilton seems to ignore NW gun artifacts in all areas of the continent, not just the South. He just wasn't interested in them and left their study to the likes of Charles Hanson, Jr. and S. James Gooding. Hanson's interest was mostly in the West and a little in the Great Lakes Region and Gooding's interest was in Canada. No one has written books about NW guns in the South because they hadn't looked there.
I found a paper titled "THE FUR TRADE AND HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY - A BIBLIOGRAPHY" Complied by Michael A. Pfeiffer dated March 2015. It lists books and papers alphabetically by author and is 38 pages long. There are probably on average 12 sources per page or around 450 total. I got through the H's, which ended on page 14, and only found two papers about archeological sites in the South, and they focused on the early Colonial Period. It doesn't appear that anybody has been very interested in the fur trade, the deer skin trade, in the South.
Searching some of the state archeological websites for a few Southern states has lead me to believe that the archeological interest by the academics down there is focused on Pre-Contact Native sites, the Colonial Period, Slavery, the Civil War, and early 20th century. The period that the NW trade guns would have been used and artifacts deposited doesn't appear to be an area of study.
It seems to me that the lack of NW trade gun parts in the archeological record in the South is more a lack of study and knowledge and not a lack of existence.
That lack of knowledge skews our perception to think that the Indians in the South only used rifles. That's like saying the Southern Indians only liked blue blankets. In reality, they were human beings with individual preferences. Some would have preferred rifles while others preferred smoothbores such as the NW trade gun, just like some preferred blue blankets, some white, some red, some green--you get the point.
