unknown Punt shoulder gun?

[Artificer]

It worked before and now it is not working. Sorry. Can't seem to find a way to make it work for a quick link on this forum. It can be found by googling flintlock wall gun and going to the images, though.

Gus

 

[Many Klatch]

I have shot a couple of modern repro Wall Guns. They generally look like a Brown Bess on Steroids. One is a smoothbore and one is rifled. Both are 4 bore. With 350 grains of powder they will put a ball 18" into the dirt at 300 yards.

The Jaegers during the Rev War used them much like we use a .50 machine gun today. They anchored strong points, reduced enemy entrenchments and eliminated cannon crews. They were somewhat common since a regiment or fort might have one or two.

At least one Kentucky fort was apparently saved from attack when the English officers accompanying the attackers heard the boom of the wall gun and thought that it was a full sized cannon. They did not want to deal with a cannon.

 

[Dphar]

Curators are often completely clueless.
I would not trust the firearms museum in Cody to know anything about this and its probably the biggest firearms museum in the US.

Dan

 

[Dphar]

Looks like a wall gun to me. Possibly bored smooth when converted to percussion. Could have been a 90-95 caliber rifle originally. Its stocked and carved like a rifle. Does it have a rear sight?
A 90 caliber rifle would be an easy 400-500 yard gun for wall use.
Dan

 

[Lassen Forge]

This is the kind of stuff that got me into smoothbores way back when!!

My grandfather when he was young was a commercial waterfowl hunter, and had a punt (which was at least 4" in diameter) and his "clean-up" double, an 8 ga. Parker. Unfortunately, the punt and skiff were sold to a collector when I was young (I got to see it once, and called it a cannon on a raft - the barrel was larger than my 2 then-young hands making a circle, fingertip to fingertip), but the Parker is still in the family (perhaps because the stock was repaired 3x over its lifetime, and it's a commercial gun, not a fancy looker...)... When dad died I inherited the 8 ga, and contemplated restocking it so it could be used again (for show only :grin: )...

What you have may well be a "clean up" gun - designed to take out the wounded in a flock taken by a punt. The shortened stock is what's making me think this - easier to have on a hunters skiff and bring to bear after firing the punt. The objective back then for people like granddad was to bring in as many birds as they could to put on the meat counter that day. The punt was heavily loaded to take out as many birds as possible, the clean-up to take out the birds left by holes in the pattern.

As a side note - my dad remembered as a young boy having to pluck and clean piles of birds for market that day, and while he (and the rest of my family) were and are avid (maybe rabid!) waterfowlers he HATED plucking and cleaning. He'd do it, and he was darned good and damned fast at it... but you knew that was NOT the time to ask him a favor!

Still, what you have is a pretty nice piece of history... It'd be fun to see what it looks like once the rust has been arrested and you can see what's going on there, even more fun to see how she patterns. Thanks for showing us!

 

[TFoley]

I agree 100%.

tac, who lives in the country of the punt gun.

 

[Zonie]

It really pi$$e$ me off when someone makes a topic like this and a lot of people take the time to respond to it and then the OP does something like remove/change all of the photos in it.

Now we have a bunch of people talking about some imaginary gun that no one can see.

Most unfair to all of the members.

For those who don't know, when you post a picture here on the forum, all of that gobbledygook of numbers, slashes and letters tells our computer where to go to get the picture.

If the picture on the storage site is removed or changed in any way, its name changes.
This is true even if you just change the image size or quality.

Our computer goes looking for the old name and when the storage site looks for it, it doesn't find it.
The storage site then sends us the above "Photo not found." message.