I don't know why Jackie Brown elected to call his fowlers "Carolina Smoothbores." I think he might have been living in one of the Carolinas at one time, but I'm not certain of that.
As for the historic Carolina trade guns, the absolute best reference I know of is Lee Burke's
18th Century English Trade Guns in the South, or the Carolina Gun... (
American Society of Arms Collectors Bulletin 65: 2-16). Mr. Burke wrote, "
English guns made for the Southern Indian trade may appropriately be called 'Carolina guns' as this name was used in British Rules of Proof, and in at least one instance in colonial documents in America" (p. 65/6). He goes on to reference an inventory of a store owned by a man named Thomas Hancock of York County, Virginia, between 1732 and 1740. The inventory lists with the shooting supplies "
40 Carolina guns" (p. 65/6).
From reading this paper, it is my understanding that Charleston (or Charles Towne) was the real hub for the buckskin trade with England, at least in the south. Charleston at that time would have been analogous to St. Louis during the beaver trade 80-100 years later. Ships from England anchored in the harbor and unloaded, and traders ("packhorsemen") carried the goods into the interior, and carried the buckskins out. There were almost certainly some white hunters, but it is my understanding that the bulk of the skins were collected by Indians, who resented the white hunters killing their deer. Traders would have been tolerated and in many cases welcomed. Hunters... not so much. Interestingly, this pattern was repeated in the buffalo robe trade of the 19th century.
So, they were called Carolina guns because that was where they were headed when they left England, and they were of a recognizable type. I'm not familiar with the Carolina Rendezvous. Oglethorpe landed in 1733 and laid out the plan for the city that would become Savannah, but I don't know when the port was established there. I'm pretty sure the trade from Charleston was already underway, and I suspect Oglethorpe's traders may have gotten their goods from Charleston, initially. Florida was a Spanish colony at that time and until the end of the Revolutionary War. There were traders heading north out of Pensacola into the Indian Country, under license from Spain. I think most of these guys were actually English, carrying English trade goods. As I understand it, Spain had no real interest in trading, but they had to in order to keep "their" Indians from supporting the British. I don't know where these traders got their goods, whether from brokers in Charleston or Savannah. New Orleans was French until 1763. This really doesn't have much to do with Carolina guns, but the Spanish were trading with their native subjects in Texas pretty early on, to assure their alliance. I found this interesting "price schedule" for trade goods coming out of Nacogdoches on the
Texas Beyond History website:
View attachment 325923
Note the date of 1782. Spain owned New Orleans then, but France and Spain were allies, and I'm thinking the east Texas trade goods might have been French. In any event, we see one buckskin would get you five loads of powder and ball, or six gunflints, or a worm for cleaning your piece. A
fucil, though, would set you back thirty skins. That sounds like a lot. I don't know how this might compare to prices asked by the English traders farther east. Maybe someone reading this will be kind enough to post the value, in deerskins, of a Carolina gun from that period.
History gets really complicated if you dig into it.
Notchy Bob
