doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Shooting Flying in America

The American experience with shooting flying gained momentum after the Civil War when Charles Parker introduced his first commercially made "fowling piece," saying in early ads (ca.1867/68) that "Much care is bestowed to make it what the Sportsmen need--a good gun." The first appearance of the word "sportsmen" in America harks back to the early 1600s, as do references to "shooting flying." The English gave the name of Virginia to all between Florida and Canada, and while no books were published about hunting, fishing, fowling, and guns in America until after the Revolution, there is an ample, but dissparate record in the diaries, journals, and logs of the pre-revolutionary era. For example...

First reference to sportsmen: In Obadiah Turner's Journal, July 28, 1630, relating to Lynn MA, "Of birdes wee saw great store...verrie shy and quick a-wing, but our sportsmen, nevertheless, do bring down great plentie..."

While bringing down great plentie may or may not actually refer to shooting on the wing, a few years later in the New Amsterdam (NYC) area, the Rev. Johannes Megapolensis Jr. (1644) wrote that: We have here, too, a great number of all kinds of fowl...so that in the morning and evening any one may stand ready with his gun before his house and shoot them as they fly past."

So there it is; I have put guns firing birdshot in the hands of sportsmen in America as early as 1630 and shooting at birds flying no later than 1644, but it wasn't until the mid-1830s that American sportsmen took up the fowling piece in any significant numbers. It took a certain kind of person to value his time in quail and grouse rather than deer and buffalo. Also, the lock-times in the days of flint and steel were too slow and erratic to do much good on moving targets. This changed in about 1835 with the popular advent of precussion cap guns. But what about those realy early first 200 years of the American experience with fowling pieces (1630-1830). Here's a thumbnail sketch...

The Colonization of America was relatively high tech or low tech depending on the needs of a given situation. The trans-Atlantic shipment of persons and goods was terribly expensive and every effort expended to make the venture a success. Thus the first arms were of two types: The dumbed down matchlock and the first rate French style flintlock (or pre-flintlock, called Snaphance); the wheel lock was too expensive and all but impossible to repair in the field to be of use. Thus the quotes above about shooting birds in the early 1600s are thought to refer to the use of the Snaphance, the true flintlock merely being a refined version.

It should be obvious that all the guns were, for a period of time, imported. As late as 1866, Robert B Roosevelt, a well-known guns, hunting, and fishing writer of his day (and Teddy's uncle) wrote in his book, The Game-Birds of the Coasts and Lakes of the Northern States of America (1866) that:

There are properly speaking no gunmakers in America; a few workmen import locks, stocks, and barrels. After simply fitting them together they stamp them with their own names, but I know of no establishment where the smallest portion of the fowling piece is manufactured. It is hardly necessary to add that breechloaders must be imported.

Roosevelts book was published just before Charles Parker started to make the first all-American breechloader. The first Parkers, to their discredit, used war surplus Decarbonized steel musket barrels so even the barrels were domestic production. But going back to the 1600s through 1820, Tom Grinslade's book, Flintlock Fowlers: The first Guns Made in America (2005) pretty much agrees with Roosevelt's take on the subject of American made; according to Grinslade:

American gunsmiths did not make double-barrel fowlers in the eighteenth century...the difficulty encountered in welding two barels together and the heavier weight of the resulting doubel barrel gun no doubt disouraged their manufacture in the 1700s.

Of the 164 American made fowlers pictured in in Grinslade's book, some as late as 1820, all are single barrel with weights mostly governed by barrel length and bore size. Some barrels were over 6-foot long; some fowlers weighed over 20 pounds; bore sizes ranged from .60- to .80-inch; yet some barrels were "only" 44 inches and some guns were under 8 pounds, but in the final analysis, adding a second barrel to a light under-8-pound gun would have made it unwieldly. Meanwhile, Durs Egg, James Purdey, and Manton were busy refining the SxS flintlock in England, few of which found their way to America. A line cut in Greener's The Gun shows a ca.1820 Purdey thought to be the epitome of flintlock design and function. And thus we have a gap from about the 1820s/30s when precussion too over as the best means of ignition on both sides of the big pond, until the late 1860s when Parker, Ethan Allen, Wesson, Roper, and Whitney started making commercial quantities of fowling pieces mostly sourced in the USA. Some makers even forged their own barrel tubes for so long as it took to realize the cheap-labor economies of importing English and Belgian tubes.

My new book, Parker Guns: Shooting Flying and the American Experience (Collector Books, Paducah KY, late summer 2008) puts a new spin on the old guns by delving into the WHY and HOW, rather than the well-traveled avenues of WHO, WHAT, WHEN, and WHERE. I answer the Chapter One question, "Why Parker?" in 43 subsequent chapters, explaining how The Parker Gun met the challanges of the competition from 1866 thru WWII. Some of the other guns were not well thought out, like the Boyd & Tyler, Roper, Ethan Allen, and Original Fox. Others were not profit centers for their otherwise successful makers, like the Colt, Wesson, and Whitney. Some gun mechanics like Dan Lefever, William Baker, and Ansley Fox had recurring problems with financial partners. All this with the lingering predisposition of many leading sportsmen for British imports, whether or not they could afford the "best."

But we came out of our anglophile funk after the Centenial in 1876, and by the mid-1880s "American-made" was established as a worthy prefex. While I use The Parker Gun as the connective thread, logically as Parker was the pioneer maker, this new book should be of interest to anyone who favors the nostalgia of old-time fowling pieces without regard to maker. I'm taking subscriptions for the First Limited Edition of my new book--contact me with your name and address for a flyer-- <knightofthetrigger@yahoo.com>

From time to time when I have time I'll share some of my new material on this website, like today when I'm snowed in, 1/8-mile visability in freezing fog, and a power company tree trimming truck stuck in the ice and snow on my 1/2-mile driveway. Wife Nancy just arrived after an errand and the right front tire went flat, probably a sharp splinter. Don't we have fun? Happy hollidays, Merry Xmas and all that. EDM

I'm digesting "Pioneer Life or Thirty Years a Hunter" by Philip Tome (1782-1855). Wrote a lot about elk and deer hunting on PA, but nothing about little brids. Guess time in woods was to precious and there was too little meat on them birds!

I've never owned a Parker gun...saw a couple that caught my eye just never bought one.
A good friend at my gun club said if I ever saw inside a Parker I wouldn't want one ?

Joe, there's more to the shooting flying experience and mystique than polished parts. After fifty years of shooting birds located by pointing dogs and attracted by artificial sights and sounds, and using a shotgun to gamble my hard earned money against the skill of others competing for the same money, as well as accumulating the artifacts of that sport, again using my hard earned money, I am not going to dismiss a certain brand of shotgun because its internal parts are not shiny enough. To my own fifty years I might add the similar experience of my father and grandfather whose "shooting flying" lifestyle began probably in the 1860s. We are a well spread out family, my grandfather having been born in 1856. I like a Purdey or a Boss as much as the next guy, own a few English guns myself, but feel a bit more of a twitch in my groin when I kill a bobwhite with a rusty Parker smallbore. Of course, that's just me. Murphy

My experience with Parkers dates to the mid 1970s and I've never had reason to be inside one. Curiosity led me to detach the locks from a hammergun once and the age-old gunk was about what I expected. The coil mainsprings of the hammerless were guaranteed 25 years and I've never heard of a broken one. Babe DelGrego once showed me drawers full of nosed hammers his dad bought from Remington when he went out on his own and said their firm never had reason to replace the hammer/firing pin because none ever broke.

I have attended a great many SxS shoots and double gun get-togethers over the years and think my ear is pretty close to the true skivvy, yet I do not recall chronic failure being part of the doublegun experience. When you get more than 100 Parker and LCS guys shooting it out at Sanford every year one would think gunmaking failures of longstanding would rear their ugly heads; after all, these guns are on the average pushing one hundred years. And it seems to me that generally all the venerable old guns continue to be suitable for purpose, although individual guns, depending on the vagaries of care and usage, may just wear out.

In this context if a seller insisted on showing me the inside of his Parker, I'd just say "No Thanks; I want a gun that hasn't had to be taken apart." The true collector/shooter is always on the lookout for perfect screws; the provocatuer endlessly counts the farries dancing on the heads of screws of guns he never owned. EDM

Jagermeister: I assume you have the 1928 Reprint. Back in 1914 there was only one 1854 original, that in the library of Chas. Sheldon. I guess I can take this off my Want List because I'm interested in shotguns and wildfowl and small game research/reading and draw the line at rifles and big game. Given the difficulty of obtaining books such as Tome's Pioneer Life, it takes some doing to build a library with seminal volumes.

Just today my own original copy of Schreiner's Sporting Manual (1841) arrived in the mail. I missed my last opportunity at this rare shooting flying book in 2005 when James Cummings had it for $2,500; I just bought my copy on eBay for $32. Go figure! I have a complete photocopy from the original at the National Sporting Library in Middleburg VA, and a bad print-on-demand trade paperback, but to have my own iconic original...Wow! I feel like I bought the Czar's Parker for pocket change. And I didn't need a FFL. EDM

"...but feel a bit more of a twitch in my groin when I kill a bobwhite with a rusty Parker smallbore. Of course, that's just me."

That's me, too. Don't be a hog, Bill. Regards, King

Bill: I don't know who Homeless Joe is but I am familiar with your credentials, shot against you in the pigeon ring, fondeled and photographed your guns, had our wine and cigars, you remember the drill. But the one thing I don't remember--ever--in a real-person, real-time face-to-face discussions of double guns, no matter the maker, no matter the locale, is the innuendo that constantly seeps onto the various Internet sites, almost always by persons the well traveled and well-connected of us don't know and/or can't identify.

And the dig is almost always a variation of the same old theme: Some undisclosed friend told them some vague thing. Now there's provenance for you! Write that up and send it off to SSM or the DGJ and see which way it lands. The safety valve here on the Internet, however, is that nobody in his right mind would ever rely on the unedited and non-peer-reviewed stuff that is so easily posted. My impression is that very few Parker people I know, and I know a lot of them, would think it a good idea to take apart their own gun(s). This was all hashed and rehashed in the nineteenth century and is even more true now than then.

Captain Bogardus wrote in 1874 that: "I could never see any use in a long theoretical or practical description of the principals and details of guns as they are made. All such knowledge is necessary to the maker, but of no practical use of all to the shooter.... Sportsmen may safely leave such matters to the gunmakers, who are nearly everywhere a very ingenious, painstaking, trustworthy class of men."

Going back to the 1840s, William Henry Herbert ("Frank Forester") also weighed in on the topic: "Few amateurs, even the best informed, are competent to describe, much less comprehend, the materials and mechanisms of a first rate gun, although they maybe perfectly capable of deciding the quality of the gun when manufactured."

The idea that anybody would look inside a Parker Gun and based on observations not buy a Parker shows an a profound grasp of the irrational. Most people I know have only the vaguest idea of the innards of their favoriate piece and cringe at the thought of having one opened up for cause. The suprising thing is how many of the old guns of all makers continue to provide faultless service. This doublegunshop site and others plus the various double gun organizations, publications and events are ample proof of the continuing success of double guns in general and the pecking order of the various guns valued in the markerplace. EDM

EDM, How/where can I get in line for a copy of the new book?
Thanks R Rambler

Perhaps jOe's associate was referring to what many consider the unnecessary complexity of the Parker.

I agree that those uninterested and probably ham handed should not disassemble a gun just to 'look inside'. Such people should also probably defer the replacement of a light bulb or the changing of a tire to those with adequate mechanical ability and interest in the task.

Simplicity of design has much to recommend it. My taste runs to simple and elegant designs. The Fox is a perfect example.