THE 17TH CENTURY FIREARMS TRADE

AND ITS IMPACT ON THE INDIANS OF THE NORTHEAST 
To The Reader:
   As I began the research for this article I knew I would find enough information to write an interesting piece on firearms and their effect on the lives of the Indians in colonial America.  What I have written here is a very trim version of one aspect of white-Indian relations in the northeastern colonies during the 17th century – I have hit the high points.  Since there is so much known, and so much more being learned even as I write this, I’ve had to continually narrow the scope of this article so I could at least present work with which I hope to pique your interest. 
         Edward Maurer            
                                  

     Of all the trade goods the European introduced to the American Indian, the gun has had the most broad-ranging effect, both positive and negative, on native and settler alike.  As a tool for hunting the gun helped the Indian provide more food for his community, which in turn led to a better standard of living and provided for greater population growth.  On the other hand, this increased efficiency also made it possible for the Indian hunter to harvest more animals than could be removed from the environment without having a negative impact on the ecology.

   Not only did the gun allow for more efficient hunting, it provided a better means of making war. This in one respect could protect a small tribe from a much stronger neighbor, but could eventually allow some nations (as in the case of the Iroquois) to utterly destroy their own weaker neighbors.  The gun, as it still is today, was a helpmate when used as a tool for feeding or defending the family, and was a terror when misused as an apparatus of uncontrolled destruction.

   There were three types of guns on the American frontier which found their way into the hands of not only the Indians, but also the settlers and employees of the trading companies.  The military musket issued to regulars and militia was made available for sale or trade when in surplus or unacceptable condition, or when sold on the black market by deserters or undisciplined troops or officers. Some muskets were also supplied to Indian allies as enticements to fight an enemy of the colony or crown.  High grade sporting guns were brought over for use by wealthy traders and company owners, as well as military officers and some explorers, as presents “From The Crown” to Indian leaders.  Trade guns, in this case a firearm made exclusively as a trade item by the English, Dutch, or French, were of great variety and quality, and were available to all but the poorest or most unsuccessful hunter or trapper.

   The Dutch established Fort Orange [now Albany, NY] in 1618 as a trading post to the Iroquois. It was effectively the seat of the Iroquois Confederacy by 1650.  From here they traded, not only firearms, but also metal cookware, cloth, blankets and other items of European origin.  The fur trade was so important to the Dutch that the entire economies of villages such as New Amsterdam came to be built on maintaining a viable trade, no matter what the consequences were to other settlements in New Netherland.  Unscrupulous traders dealt in guns, powder, flint, and lead, even while the Indians where engaging in active warfare with other Dutch settlers in the area (Russel 12).

   The trade in furs was extremely lucrative for both the whites and the Indians. The Indians were trading furs that were relatively easy to obtain in the beginning, and the whites were dealing in commodities that they found easy and cheap to procure.  The greatest problems the whites had to deal with were maintaining a consistent source of supply, and the constant fear of arming people they considered savages.

   Charles Hansen reports that in 1625 at Ft. Orange alone, 7,250 beaver and 800 otter were taken in trade. T. M. Hamilton reports this number to be 5,295 and 493, respectively, for the same year.  They both agree that 10,000 furs were traded in 1628 (Hansen 5; Hamilton 9).  The original disparity isn’t important. What is important is the impact this amount of hunting pressure had on the environment.  By 1640 the Iroquois country was effectively barren of fur animals to be trapped and traded.  This was of course an unbearable condition and the Iroquois responded as how we would only expect any shrewd businessman to respond: they went after other sources of furs, and the easiest source happened to be the Hurons living to the north and west (Leach 97-98).

   The Iroquois, with great business acumen, approached the Dutch in 1640 with demands for arms so they could invade their neighbors for furs (Hamilton 9).  This being done, they headed north into Huronia, trapped beaver, and even set up ambushes for Huron hunters returning with furs, which the Iroquois then spirited back to Ft. Orange (Leach 98).  In 1641, the Iroquois were even bold enough to send a 500-man delegation (which had only 36 guns among them) to Montreal to demand guns. The French wisely refused (Hamilton 9).  By 1643 the Iroquois were making their presence known in Montreal by carrying on their fur-gathering operations very close to the city, much to the consternation of both the French and the Huron.  During the winter of 1648-49, the Iroquois, apparently having enough of the French and their Indian allies, attacked two Huron villages, destroyed them and a number of their occupants, and drove the survivors west.  Soon after, the Iroquois spread the wealth and gave other native groups, the Petuns, Nuetrals, and Eries, Huron-treatment and took over furring operations in their areas as well.  This continued until the Iroquois came face-to-face with the warlike Ottawa of Lake Huron, who had moved into the Huron trade-gap and picked up the French trade (Leach 98).

   Before and during this whole mess some whites, like the Pilgrim leader William Bradford (noted friend of Squanto), complained that the English, French, and Dutch were providing arms to the Indians.  That same year, William Wood of Massachusetts, also accused the French of supplying guns (Hamilton 9).  Wood complained about this method of procuring beaver furs in his tome “New England’s Prospect.”  As an observer of the trade, what did he expect the Indians to barter for their furs – beads?

   In response to all the complaints, or possibly from its own observations, the Dutch government attempted to meter the trade in guns to the Indians.  It established a system of trading permits, which would be issued to traders by a council.  At the same time, the government enacted price controls that were judged by the Chamber of the Dutch West India Company to be about 1/20 of what the Indians would be willing to pay (Russel 13).  These trade laws were soon rendered ineffective. The Indians wanted guns, and would refuse all transactions with any trader who would not provide them.  Bootleggers were easily found and, in spite of a threatened death penalty for lawbreakers, the illegal trade flourished.  As the few law-abiding communities felt the economic impact of the controls, more and more began to return to an unfettered gun trade (Leach 100).  In spite of all its efforts to control and extend the Indian trade, the Dutch government would soon lose in a big way.

   Three separate wars were fought between the Dutch and their neighboring Indians until a peace treaty was signed in May of 1664.  Peter Stuyvesant, Governor of the colony, had fought long and hard for the survival of Dutch interests in the New World.  But August of that year found the English, who probably smelled the blood of a fledgling rebellion caused by social unrest and economic weakness from too much war, sailing into the harbor of New Amsterdam.  Stuyvesant could not mount a viable defense, and had no alternative but to surrender his colony — lock, stock, and barrel — so to speak.  In spite of this turn of events, or possibly because of it, many Dutch stayed and carried on the trade.  Many English traders of the colony, now called New York, adopted the all-too-successful Dutch methods of trade. Why upset the apple cart (Russel 13)?

   The English in New York now brought the trade fight to the French.  Both shared a long border inhabited by numerous towns and tribes of Indians whose good will had to be fought for in earnest, and the loser could very well forfeit more than just his business.  In 1685 the English began a trade war by flooding the market with guns and ammunition, oft times at a loss.  By trading very generously, the English sought to undermine the French by giving the Indians much more in trade when they came to Orange, than when they went to Montreal.  A typical English trader would take two beaver furs for a gun, while the French would demand five.  A single beaver would purchase eight pounds of powder from the English, while it would take four furs for the same amount from the French.  Forty pounds of lead could cost either one beaver if was English lead, or three beaver if it was French.  To add insult to injury, the English were indifferent about the quality of the skins, whereas the French accepted only the best (Russel 14).   

   The gun trade had a tremendous impact on the social, economic, and ecological order of New England and its residents, both white and red.  Social and economic orders are not mutually exclusive, both rely on one another and are equal influences on a society.  The Indian, who was ill prepared to suddenly change from a society of stone tool users to one of iron and mechanization, could not readily absorb the impact of the new technology.  Nor could any other society in similar circumstances.  This socio-economic impact was expressed in an increase in warfare, genocide, and almost irreversible ecological damage.

   A excellent example of how a rare commodity can be manipulated and used almost as effectively as any weapon is the evolution of the trade in wampumpeag, or what we know as “wampum,” the purple and white beads made from the shells of quahog and whelk shells.

   Wampum was historically a rare commodity among the Indians of New England due to its difficulty of manufacture with stone tools.  It was found only among the higher classes as decoration or as a ritualistic sign of respect or friendship, and occasionally as compensation for a wrongful death.  The Dutch adopted wampum as a commodity for trade in 1622, which they in turn spread from its original area of use in southern New England into the rest of their area of influence. 

   In 1627, the Pilgrims introduced the coastal Maine Indians to wampum as a trade medium.  This was done at the prompting of the Dutch, who pointed the Pilgrims north, and out of Dutch territory.  By 1629 it was the single most important commodity of the Pilgrim trade, and traders from Plimoth colony used it to full advantage to beat out other traders who had only European goods to offer (Cronin 95-96).

   As the trade in wampum grew, the whites supplied iron tools to the Pequot, Mohegan and Narraganset. This gave these coastal Indian nations the ability to produce even more wampum at a lower cost per unit.  This had the additional effect of making once rare wampumpeag available universally, which in turn threatened the social order of the Indians.  What was once accepted as a badge of rank and social standing, was now available to all without consideration (Cronin 95-96).

   Once the wampum inventory was controlled by whites who flooded the market with guns, colonists started complaining that the Indians were too well armed, and they craved a “safer” way of getting wampum without having to trade guns.  (Well, we just can’t eat our cake and have it too, now can we?)  Apparently some folks along the coast of New York and New England thought they could.  Thus we have the Pequot massacre of 1637, which was apparently a political move as well as economic, and the assassination of the Narraganset leader Miantonomo in 1643. With these two events, we have a safer way to obtain wampum, at least for the whites.  By exacting wampum as a military tribute the wampum supply became both safer to obtain and more reliable.  It was at this time that the Indians became acquainted with the idea of “prices,” an established value for a commodity that was in turn traded for a variety of goods, including guns of course (Cronin 97).

   Aside from the socio-economic impact of the trade in just one commodity, there was an even greater, almost irreversible, impact on the ecology of the northeast.  By 1675 the Indians had a large supply of guns and had become quite adept at using them, not only for warfare, but also for hunting (Leach 101).  The native hunter, with his new ability to kill even more effectively than with the bow, coupled with his innate knowledge of his environment and his prey, was undoubtedly the most deadly creature of the forest.  As already seen with the fur-bearing animals, the great lumbering moose, which heretofore had been hunted almost exclusively in deep winter snows, was now easily dispatched with one well placed musket shot.  So many moose had been killed by mid-17th century that they were almost eradicated from much of eastern Canada, a condition soon realized by the rest of New England (Cronin 104).

   The turkey was by 1672 almost entirely eliminated in New England, to the point that one observer commented that hunters had “now destroyed the breed, so that ’tis very rare to meet with a wild turkie in the woods,” only domesticated birds were generally to be found in eastern Massachusetts.  A century later a farmer’s manual stated that they were domestic birds brought from Turkey.

  The Indian hunter’s efficiency, in concert with his limited understanding of the long-term threat he posed to his environment with his new found ability, led to wide-spread disaster for many native people.  Their food source dwindled and they became more and more reliant on Europeans for clothing, weapons, and tools. They were ripe for dissolution of their society.  By the next century, the whites were there to step in and give them the coup de grace: land purchase, relocation, and eventually, reservations.  

REFERENCES

CHANGES IN THE LAND, Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England

William Cronin; Hill and Wang; New York; 1983

COLONIAL FRONTIER GUNS

T.M. Hamilton; The Fur Press; Chadron NE; 1980

GUNS ON THE EARLY FRONTIERS

Carl P. Russel; U. of California Press; Berkely & L.A.; 1962

THE NORTHERN COLONIAL FRONTIER 1607-1763

Douglas Edward Leach; U. of New Mexico Press; Albuquerque; 1966

THE NORTHWEST GUN

Charles E. Hansen Jr.; Nebraska State Historical Society; Lincoln; 1955