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
