Hello. Were there NWTG’s in the colonies around the time of the AWI? I love my newly acquired NWTG and would like to think some were carried in that time and place. Thanks.
Before answering we need definitions. Let's define "colonies" as the 13 British colonies that became the original 13 states (New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia), and "around the time of the AWI" as pre-1790. With those definitions, the last time I checked (2018 or so, I've done these searches periodically since 1981) I was unable to find any specimen of what we'd consider as North West guns with a provenance indicating use in the "colonies" during that time period. I was unable to find any mention of archaeologically-recovered specimens or components of North West guns from sites in the "colonies" with reasonably-secure dating to prior to 1790. In contrast, I found several instances supporting the use of matchlocks and snaphaunces in this region and time period.
NWGs start showing up in Ohio/Indiana/Ilinois by ~1790; possibly due to a combination of trade from the British and guns supplied by the British in support of the proxy war we know of as the Northwest Indian War.
Granted, my search to date has only covered about 3-400 books, 1,200 museum collections, 12,000 archeological site reports/analyses, and a few thousand pages of original records. I'm sure someone with more time could do a better job of it: I mean that in all seriousness, the last update of my search took a few hundred hours just with records published since my most-recent-prior search. But I think it is
almost safe to say that there is no evidence that North West guns (a product designed and marketed at the time almost exclusively for the interior and northern fur trade) were in use in the "colonies" in the time prior to the AWI.
T.M. Hamilton , the great archeologist , uses the time line as such ... N.W. Trade guns with smaller bow trigger guards are pre1780 , N.W. trade guns with large " ox bow " trigger guard is post 1780 . This isn't a hard and fast rule but Mr. Hamilton was one heck of a archeologist and historian so.I bet its close . As the one gentleman mentioned ....there is a N.W. trade gun still in existence , which is amazing , that is dated 1751 , so that date for certain . I have pictures of the dug up parts of a NW trade gun from the 1740s ....So .... A couple things ... Were N.W. trade guns in the present continental U.S. during the Rev. War ? Yes ... Were they in the present continental U.S. during the F&I war or before ? ...I dont know . My guess , and as much as I love the N.W. gun I'm no expert ...my guess is they may have been in the Colonies but in very small amounts as the English fur traders were vastly outnumbered by the French fur companies.... that after the F&I War when the English moved from way up north , Hudsons Bay , and into what was once French Canada then the N.W. Trade gun were being seen and traded in abundance as the English took over the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River area for the fur trade ...
Hamilton suggested the enlarged (but smaller than later) trigger bows were an early characteristic, but as I recall he excluded conventional-sized trigger guards from the category of NWG.
There is the 1751-dated NWG at the MFT; there's a NWG in a British collection dated 1749 (having a triggerguard bow that is enlarged but still smaller than later NWG, cast dragon sideplate, no-bridle lock, octagonal-to-round barrel, but lacking the sitting fox/tombstone fox stamps), and a very similar gun in a collection in Scotland lacking a date but with provenance to the 1750s. There's another one in a British museum with a date to the late 1760s; again, no fox stamps.
None of these have the gracile dragon sideplate shown in the photos you provided of the archaeologically-recovered gun (almost makes me wonder if that is a transitional form). Where was this gun found?
Early NWG show up in the archaeological record after the F&I war in the areas of the Great Lakes (one early name in the literature relating to what is now the US is "mackinaw gun") and moving onto the plains (a 1777-dated gun from Wyoming, for example, and mention in the ethnographic literature of the Blackfoot having a few guns by the 1790s). But the form--the pattern--was out there earlier.
But none of this suggests NWGs were used--or even available--in the colonies that later became the first 13 United States.