1. LAUNCHING THE INDIAN ARMS RACE

“Allese Rondade! Shoot!”
Everywhere Harmen van den Bogaert went in Iroquois country in the winter of 1634–1635, he encountered Native people shouting the same demand. As perhaps the first person from the colony of New Netherland to venture west of the Mohawks to meet with other Iroquois League (or Haudenosaunee) nations, he had been charged to investigate whether French competition explained a sudden decline in Dutch-Iroquois trade (the actual cause turned out to be a smallpox epidemic). The Iroquois were happy to talk business, particularly to complain about having to travel long distances to Fort Orange (renamed Albany in 1664) only to be greeted with high prices and a meager selection of goods, but most of all they wanted van den Bogaert and his companions to fire their guns. In practically every community he visited, “there were many people here who walked along with us shouting Allese Rondade, that is to say, ‘Shoot!’ ” He had tried to put off the crowds, for “we did not want to shoot,” apparently out of fear that Iroquois warriors would attack his men as soon as they had emptied their slow-loading muskets. Yet eventually the Dutchman realized that he could not continue to reject his hosts’ demands without undermining his mission and even his safety. Finally, on December 30, after a week of equivocating, he and his men capitulated to the public pressure and shot a volley into the air. Now there was no stopping. The following day the Oneidas again prevailed on van den Bogaert to “fire three shots in this evening,” which he dedicated to God, Jesus, and the New Year. Little did he know that he was also witnessing the dawn of a new era in the Northeast.1
Certainly the Iroquois wanted van den Bogaert to shoot because of their astonishment at the pyrotechnics of gunfire, but they also had more practical matters on their minds. Ever since the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas of what is now upstate New York had formed their League sometime between the fourteenth and late sixteenth centuries, they had been at war with indigenous neighbors near and far. For most of this time the main purpose of these campaigns had been to seize captives for adoption (the fate of most women and children) or death by torture (the fate of adult men) to sustain the Iroquois population and answer the need of mourners for catharsis. Such “mourning wars,” as they have come to be known, were probably responsible for the disappearance of large indigenous communities at the sites of modern Quebec and Montreal that had been visited by French explorer Jacques Cartier during his explorations of the Saint Lawrence River during the 1530s and 1540s. Seventy years later, when the French returned to the area to found a permanent colony, there was no trace of them. As European fishermen, explorers, and then fur traders began to appear along the lower Saint Lawrence with greater regularity after the mid-sixteenth century, this warfare also began to focus on controlling access to European goods. The Iroquois appear to have enjoyed the upper hand in these conflicts, at least initially. The common European term for the Haudenosaunee, “Iroquois,” might very well derive from a Basque phrase meaning “killer people,” in reference to their marauding. But with the founding of French Quebec in 1608, the balance of power had begun to shift to the League’s enemies, the Algonquins, Montagnais, and Hurons, because of their trade and military alliance with the newcomers. Most famously, in 1609 French leader Samuel de Champlain and two of his gunmen determined the outcome of an open-field battle between those tribes and the Mohawks by firing into the Mohawk ranks and killing several chief men, producing a rout. Iroquois’ calls for van den Bogaert to “Allese Rondade! Shoot!” reflected their ambition to acquire this technology themselves and regain the initiative.2
Champlain’s gunshot has often been held up as a paradigmatic event. The story goes that Europeans blasted their way into the North American woods, overawing Indians with their technological prowess. The Natives, fearful of getting shot, then abandoned their customary open-field clashes in favor of ambushes, to make themselves more difficult targets. The ironic result of the colonists’ superiority in arms, then, was the Indians’ so-called skulking way of war, which plagued Euro-American society throughout the colonial era. One might call this line of reasoning the Champlain thesis. Missing in this perspective is the fact that early clashes with the French served less to intimidate the Iroquois than captivate them about what they could accomplish with European weaponry. Not until the mid-1620s would a market develop to feed that hunger, but once it did, and particularly once efficient Dutch flintlock muskets became available in the 1630s, League nations began trading for munitions with a fury. By the mid-seventeenth century, this armament had enabled the Iroquois to transform themselves into the preeminent military power of the Northeast and Great Lakes regions as far west as the Mississippi River. Bands of their gunmen fanned out over this range to capture foreign women and children for adoption, sometimes followed by armies of several hundred and even a thousand men to crush the enemy once and for all. Champlain might have fired the first major shot in the eastern woodlands, but it was Iroquois warriors who followed with a hail of lead.3
The Champlain thesis obscures that it was the threat of Iroquois, not colonial, gunmen that galvanized an arms race throughout the Native Northeast, involving new technologies, stratagems, and politics. By the mid- to late seventeenth century, arms traders had reached the Five Nations’ rivals in the Chesapeake, New England, and the Great Lakes, enabling them to answer the Iroquois musket for musket. In turn, gun violence erupted across this vast geographic zone. The limits of the historical and archaeological records prevent testing the part of the Champlain thesis positing that gun-toting warriors employed ambush more often than the bowmen of earlier times, though it is clear that they favored this tactic. The reason, however, had less to do with fear of enemy firepower than an eagerness to exploit the offensive capabilities of their own weapons. It is also true that indigenous people facing enemy gunmen avoided open-field battles because of the risk of getting shot, and abandoned customary wooden armor because it reduced a warrior’s mobility without protecting him against bullets and metal-edge weapons. Yet too much emphasis on the decline in pitched battles can miss the fact that sieges of fortified villages were on the rise because an invading force with an advantage in firearms and steel-cutting tools possessed the means to breach its enemy’s defenses. Indigenous people answered this threat by replacing their circular palisades with straight-wall fortifications that gave defensive gunmen clearer shots at attackers. Sometimes they even mounted cannons atop their bastions. Politically, their decision making increasingly focused on securing their people’s access to arms and directing arms away from their rivals. To these ends they entered multilateral alliances with shifting lineups of indigenous and colonial polities and even relocated their people closer to gun entrepôts. These innovations constituted a new epoch in Indian life.
The results were terrible, with intertribal wars and related outbreaks of epidemic diseases dramatically reducing the population of nearly every Native group in the region. Some groups were completely wiped out. In the long term, however, the growing balance of power, and recognition of the high cost of gun warfare, produced something of a dĂŠtente. By the end of the century, people who expected their young men to prove themselves as warriors would have to look outside the region for victims among the poorly armed tribes of the continental interior. As they did, the gun frontier spread with them, leaving a trail of devastation that was becoming a signature of colonialism in indigenous North America.

The Rise of Iroquois Gunmen

The opening of Dutch trade and colonization on the Hudson River gave the Iroquois their counterweight to the French alliance with the tribes of the Saint Lawrence. In 1614, five years after Henry Hudson’s famous voyage of exploration, the Dutch erected Fort Nassau, a tiny blockhouse and trade post, on an island near the site of modern-day Albany, just to the east of Mohawk territory and less than ten miles south of the confluence of the Mohawk and Hudson Rivers. Seven years later, in 1621, the West India Company obtained a monopoly of the Dutch Republic’s North American Indian trade, spurring the establishment of Fort Orange on the upper Hudson in 1624 and New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island in 1626. Together these settlements formed the colony of New Netherland, the purpose of which was captured in its seal of a beaver surrounded by a string of indigenous wampum beads. Trade with Indians was the purpose of this enterprise. Guns, powder, and shot would soon become bases of that commerce.
Yet it would take another decade to launch the Dutch-Iroquois arms market, a decade in which League nations acquired fresh incentives to war against their neighbors and in which gun technology advanced to meet the needs of Indian users. Politically the 1620s and early 1630s witnessed a renewal of Iroquois warfare against the so-called French Indians (the Algonquins and Montagnais) of the Saint Lawrence River and the Mohicans of the Hudson River Valley. The Five Nations found themselves in a biological war as well. Between 1633 and 1634, smallpox tore through Indian communities along the New England coast and Connecticut River Valley and then up into Iroquoia. The Mohawks alone might have lost two-thirds of their population, with their absolute numbers dropping from an estimated 7,700 to 2,800 people. As the death toll mounted, the cries of mourners built into an irresistible call for the people’s warriors to raid their enemies for scalps and captives. Only then would the ghosts of the dead and the hearts of their survivors find peace.4
Fortunately for the Iroquois, their Dutch trading partners were able and willing to supply them with Europe’s best firearms technology. The Dutch were not only Europe’s greatest manufacturing and trading nation, boasting supply lines of raw materials from the Baltic, Mediterranean, and Asia, they were also the continent’s main producer and exporter of weapons of every sort, including shoulder arms. The Netherlands’ long war for independence from Spain (1569–1648) had stimulated its gun industry, while the demand for military wares elsewhere in Europe during the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) and subsequent conflicts sustained it into the early eighteenth century. By the time of New Netherland’s founding, the Dutch Republic was manufacturing an estimated 14,000 muskets annually, most of them for export, a figure that grew larger by the year. No other European nation came close to this production level until decades later. Furthermore, Dutch gunsmiths were introducing technological innovations to their weapons that made them even more attractive to Indian customers, the Iroquois foremost among them.5
Initially Dutch guns came with serious drawbacks, which limited Indian demand for them despite their destructive power. In the 1620s and early 1630s these weapons would have been mostly matchlock muskets. Loading the matchlock was time-consuming and cumbersome, requiring twenty to thirty seconds for a trained hand. It involved using a worm (or metal screw attached to a handle) to clear the barrel of residue from the previous shot; blowing on a wick (or match) treated in saltpeter solution to make sure it was lit; pouring a measure of priming powder into a tiny basin (or pan) on the right-hand base of the barrel and then closing the pan cover; pouring a larger measure of gunpowder into the muzzle, then using a rod to tap down a musket ball nestled in wadding cloth until it rested on top of this charge; and, finally, securing the match in a clamp (or hammer) on top of the gun. Upon completing these steps, actually firing the weapon took only a split second. The gunner flipped open the pan cover and pulled on the gun’s trigger to lower the wick into the pan. With this, the priming powder ignited (or flashed), sending a stream of flame through a small opening (the touch hole) between the pan and the barrel, which in turn set off the main charge and shot the musket ball. This weapon was well suited for the wars of Europe fought by massive armies on open battlefields, for it was easier to teach infantry in line formation to fire their matchlocks in unison at a similarly massed force than to train them as archers. Additionally, bullets fired from matchlocks, unlike arrows, could penetrate armor at a distance of up to a hundred yards. For Indians, however, the problem was that the smell and sight of smoke from the match could reveal ambushes and the wick was unreliable in wet weather. Furthermore, loading and firing a matchlock was agonizingly slow compared to shooting a bow and arrow, which would remain true of all guns until repeating breech loaders superseded single-shot muzzle loaders in the nineteenth century. This is not to say that Indians did not want matchlock muskets in lieu of better alternatives, or that Indians did not find ways to use these weapons effectively. The remains of matchlock muskets from archaeological sites indicate that some indigenous warriors learned how to employ them. At the same time, the small number of those parts, and scant mention in the documentary record of Indians wielding these guns, suggests that most Indians judged matchlocks not to be worth their cost.6
The weapon used by Champlain against the Mohawks, a wheel lock, redressed these issues with a self-igniting mechanism in which pulling the trigger lowered a hammer containing a piece of pyrite against a rotating serrated wheel, producing sparks that ignited the priming powder and then the main charge in the barrel. Yet wheel lock technology was fragile, prone to clogging with gunpowder residue, and expensive to buy and fix. Consequently, the wheel lock was a weapon of the European elite, not of common soldiers. It was also incompatible with the wear and tear that accompanied the activities of Indian hunters and warriors. Few colonists in the Indian trade included wheel locks in their inventories, to judge from the small number of wheel lock remains in Indian archaeological sites.7
The emergence of the flintlock in the 1630s introduced to the Indian market guns that were dependable and relatively easy to maintain. Flintlock technology began with the Dutch snaphaunce in the 1620s, in which pulling the trigger thrust a clamp (or “cock,” as the piece looked and functioned like a pecking rooster) holding a piece of flint against a small metal plate (the “steel”), creating a shower of sparks that lit the priming powder and then the main charge. The “true flintlock,” which began to appear in Europe in the 1630s, continued the evolution by combining the steel and pan lid (separate pieces in the snaphaunce) into a single “battery,” thereby allowing the pan to remain covered (and thus protected from the elements) until the very moment that the flint struck the steel. Whereas gun remains from Mohawk archaeological sites dating from the 1620s and 1630s come from a mix of matchlocks and snaphaunces, by the 1640s the majority of parts derive from “first-quality snaphaunces or flintlocks” that were “up to date even by European standards.” Sites from the other Iroquois nations demonstrate a similar pattern.8
Flintlock Mechanism. Flintlock firing technology, which superseded the matchlock, was the standard on Indian trade guns from the early seventeenth century well into the early 1800s. The Iroquois, supplied by the Dutch, eagerly traded for guns possessing this cutting-edge mechanism from as early as the 1630s. This example comes from a Dutch gun in the collection of the Museum of the Fur Trade, Chadron, Nebraska.
By the 1660s it appears that the Dutch were manufacturing guns specifically for the Indian market, especially the Iroquois. These Indian trade muskets were lighter (about 7.5 pounds) and shorter (50 to 67.5 inches) than most European guns (which often weighed as much as 16 pounds and extended more than five feet in length) in order to facilitate use in the bush and long-distance travel. Some examples included a back-catch (or sear) that kept the firing mechanism at partial cock and allowed warriors and hunters to fire even quicker than normal at moving targets. The Dutch were producing weapons tailored to the needs of their Iroquois trade partners, and it is clear that the Iroquois were eager to buy them.9
The primary reason for this demand was that the gun was remarkably effective in Iroquois warfare, particularly as a first-stage weapon in ambush. Small parties of warriors would station themselves at places where enemy travelers were most vulnerable, such as river narrows, portages, bends in the road, or places where cliffs, tree stands, and swamps provided cover for the attackers and blocked the retreat of their targets. The goal in these assaults was to unleash one or two volleys, ...