Use of fine shot in colonial America

[Billy-by-gosh]

Some northern tribes made a sieve by piercing birch bark, then pouring molten lead thru that into water. The result was some fairly decent small shot. Pretty simple yet ingenious device that saved the labor of cutting lead strips, although that was no doubt used as well.

 

[Ohio Rusty]

Shot was used in the 18th century. The PDF :
Highways to History: The Archaeology of Connecticut’s
18th-Century Lifeways
There were excavations of several 18th century homesteads in Connecticut. This PDF has some great pics of artifacts. On page 67 of the PDF, it shows pics of round ball and two different types of shot was was found both round shot and cut shot.. On page 75 of the PDF, it talks about all the different sizes of shot that would have been used for hunting different game animals. The whole PDF is a really interesting read with all the stuff that was dug up on the different 18th century sites. Here is the link to the PDF:
https://portal.ct.gov/-/media/dot/highwaystohistorypdf.pdf

Ohio Rusty ><>

 

[French Colonial]

According to Hamilton "Colonial Frontier Guns" 1987 the French in 1734 alone shipped 28,000 Livres (30,212 lbs) of shot to the French colonies.

One must assume the English were doing similar in the English colonies

 

[Jay Templin]

I don’t think it was generally available and so was rarely used.
Safe bet that even most waterfowl was killed with rifles or smooth rifles or regular smoothbores loaded with a few buckshot/Rupert shot.

Small shot was absolutely widely available:
“At first, single shot was used for target-shooting and four-footed game; by the 1540s multiple shot was also used, at this date cut from lead sheet. By the end of his life Henry possessed 41 such “Haile Shotte peics”, clearly used for birds. These were obviously pretty deadly, as an Act of 1548 at-tempted to ban the “shoting of hayle-shot wherby an infinite sort of fowle is killed and much gaym therby distroyed” and lamented their uselessness to military training. These weapons, loaded with shot, can be regarded as the remote ancestors of the modern shotgun.” https://www.thefield.co.uk/shooting/history-shotgun-shooting-26590

“In 1686, Richard Blome’s “The Gentleman’s Recreation” became the first English publication portraying the shooting of flying birds. By the early 18th century, overhead shots were becoming a fairly common practice.

In 1776, the first recorded use of the term “shotgun” arose in a Kentucky publication called “Frontier Language of the West” by James Fenimore Cooper. This term separated the smoothbore shotgun from the rifled musket as advancements in technology greatly changed firearm barrel designs.” https://blog.gritrsports.com/the-history-of-the-shotgun/

Jay