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Giant Fowlers?

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hawkeye1755

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Can anyone tell what kind of guns these 'Giant Fowlers' are.Never seen such guns before.
Punts.jpg

punts2.jpg


:hatsoff:
 
Punt guns, baby. Mounted on a boat for shooting at large flocks of (sitting) ducks and geese. They were outlawed for hunting many years ago...but as I understand it, some folks came up with multiple barrel guns to get around that.

I've seen on TV where somebody was shooting one of these big guns. It pushed the boat back several feet upon firing!
 
Punt guns.....exactly. They were mounted in a boat with the stock braced the aft seat and the barrel over the bow. You aimed with the boat. My grandaddy used to tell some tales about him and his brothers using one in some lake in Idaho back in the early 1900's. Said they would sneak slowly up on a bunch of swimming ducks then startle them into flight, usually with a regular shotgun. When they all flared off the water they would touch off the punt gun and then spend the rest of the day cleaning ducks.
 
There are some videos on youtube that show them shooting one. They set up a sheet of plywood covered with clay pigeons and shot it. The thing that got me was the relatively tight pattern it threw. They showed the results in slow mo and it really threw a dense, consistant pattern.It wasnt much larger a pattern than the 4x8 sheet they were shooting at.Market hunters often took along a 4 or a 8 bore to pick off flying birds at longer ranges. The old timers used to have to allow for drop as well as lead when long range gunning at large groups of birds.Black powder AAA.
 
Theres some pictures of the multibarreled guns mounted on a boat in the Klamath Co. museum. They are spread out like fingers on your hand .The bores look to be around an inch.The market hunters of Klamath Lake took anyhting that landed on the water swans, pelicans ,everything. There were pictures of huge piles of birds waiting to be processed.
 
Market hunting punt guns, a take off from the keel boat bow mounted cannons the early explorers used. I would imagine more than a few of those explorers were not adverse to taking birds the same way.


Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.
H.L. Mencken
 
There is a complete collection of these type guns at the Old Sturbridge Village. The founder collected a whole range of these guns and the stealth boats that they used to get in range of HUGE flocks of ducks and geese. They have one gun that is 6 feet long, percusion lock that fires 2 pounds of BB shot. it is mounted to the boat and could only be loaded from land. The story that went with it stated that the one shot could kill as many as 250 birds, They shot the birds while they were on the water in big groups and would finnish off wounded birds with a 12ga shot gun.
They also have several examples of multi-barrel guns for the same purpose. There used to be a point of land in Great Bay, New Hampshire that still has a stone collumn about 5 feet tall with a pintle receiver built in for mounting punt guns for shooting geese and a stone bench for sitting on. My how times have changed.
 
flintlock75 said:
They also have several examples of multi-barrel guns for the same purpose.
When the LARGE bore punt {the guns were named after the 'punt' boats used) guns were banned from waterfowl hunting, tney switched to the multi-barrel guns as referenced above. By the 20s, market hunting was history ...
 
Thank you guys for the info. :thumbsup:
After the hint from slowpokebr549, here are two vids from Youtube.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuHdoDQ2b_4&feature=related[/youtube]
:shocked2: :shocked2: :shocked2:
:hatsoff:
 
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