In contrast, a musket penetrates flesh, shatters bone, and creates a larger wound cavity
Wayne E. Lee. The Military Revolution of Native North America: Firearms, Forts, and Polities // Empires and indigenes: intercultural alliance, imperial expansion, and warfare in the early modern world. Edited by Wayne E. Lee. 2011
The attractions of the gun versus the bow still elicit a surprising amount of disagreement. Elaborate and convincing arguments have been made that the musket, especially the matchlock and the snaphaunces of the early seventeenth century, held few advantages over the native bow. All experts admit that the advent of the flintlock made the gun more attractive, primarily because it was lighter and handier than the matchlock and did not require the bright, smelly, position-revealing match. Nevertheless, Brian Given contends that even the flintlock had more faults than virtues compared with the bow.
The problem with Given’s argument is the evident and persistent eagerness of native peoples to acquire guns and the services of gunsmiths and their equally strenuous efforts to secure and maintain their access to gunpowder. Given proposes that guns were attractive for their psychological effect against those enemies not yet supplied with them, but this does not account for the persistent and long-term quest for guns.
As Given and others have pointed out, the native self bow and the seventeenth-century musket had comparable effective ranges (50 yards optimum, 100 to 150 yards at the outside). The bow, however, could be fired much more quickly, did not require extensive material infrastructure (such as that required for making gunpowder), was generally more accurate in the hands of a skilled user, was silent, could be reloaded while kneeling, and could even occasionally penetrate iron armor (especially when equipped with iron or brass arrowheads). Against an enemy accustomed to its noise, flash, and smoke, the argument goes, the musket held few advantages. Admittedly, early snaphaunces and the later flintlocks avoided the problem of the match, but they were prone to misfire more often than matchlocks were (that is, when the flint did not spark).
Europeans (especially Englishmen with their tradition of using longbows) had played out many of the same arguments with one another about the relative efficacy of the bow versus the early musket. It seems clear that in Europe the gun initially succeeded the bow for demographic and economic reasons, and Europeans then profited in the long term by the room for improvement inherent in firearms technology. Whereas the bow required a lifetime’s training to use effectively, the musket could be learned quickly. This relative simplicity of use allowed for a significant expansion in the pool of men suitable for military service, and this expansion is a key component of the argument for a European military revolution. Native societies, however, had little to gain by expanding the category of potential warriors, since virtually all men of a particular age were warriors anyway. Given all these disadvantages, why did Native Americans pursue guns so avidly?
Some of the answers are obvious, some less so. For Amerindians, because the bow or the musket had to serve in both war and the hunt, something in the technology had to satisfy the needs of both pursuits. Although the burning match of the matchlock was ill suited to hunting deer, a carefully prepared charge in a flintlock could be highly effective (a musket typically misfires because of dampness or repeated firing). A musket ball was less likely than an arrow to be deflected by vegetation, and it also had a greater kinetic impact on the target. A deer hit with an arrow receives a very deep wound (arrows from modern bows often pass through a deer), which, though eventually lethal, might require the hunter to pursue the bleeding deer for some distance. In contrast, a musket penetrates flesh, shatters bone, and creates a larger wound cavity. It “smacks,” whereas an arrow “slices.” According to Given’s calculations, a military musketball at 50 yards hits a target with 706 foot pounds of kinetic energy. An arrow from a typical modern bow hits at 50 yards with 50 to 80 foot pounds of energy. This is more than enough to penetrate flesh and tissue and produce a killing wound, but it is much less likely to drop an animal in its tracks.
The musket has similar advantages against humans. Much of a human target is limbs, especially when walls or trees are used to cover the trunk of the body. An arrow wound to the leg or arm is rarely lethal, although it can be debilitating. But a musketball strike to the arm or leg may shatter the bone and is more likely to carry debris into the wound, lead to infection, sepsis, and death. In 1612 William Strachey described Powhatan fears of such a “compound wound . . . where . . . any rupture is, or bone broke, such as our smale shott make amongst them, they know not easely how to cure, and therefore languish in the misery of the payne thereof.” In the immediate term, a man with a shattered leg or arm, flung to the ground by the weight of a musket shot, also makes a better target for being taken prisoner or scalped. Unable to flee, he becomes vulnerable and may hold up his fellows trying to carry him away from the field. The musket’s kinetic energy also made it a more reliable penetrator of wooden armor (a hardened steel arrow point may, in fact, penetrate steel armor better than a soft lead ball, despite the difference in kinetic energy). Although there is early anecdotal evidence for Amerindian bows penetrating European armor, the systematic evidence of the disappearance of wicker-and-wood armor (and shields) from the Native American repertoire is more convincing proof of the difference in the penetrating power of musket and arrow against a semirigid surface. More obviously, bullets cannot be dodged, whereas arrows in flight over any distance (especially on an arcing trajectory) can be seen and dodged. Modern film footage of the Dani people’s arrow and javelin battles in New Guinea shows this process clearly, and numerous European witnesses commented on the Amerindians’ ability to dodge arrows.
Finally, the musket could be loaded with multiple small shot (or even, famously, “buck and ball” - a load of small shot combined with a normal musket ball). This, too, could serve both hunting and warfare practices better than a bow. Very high levels of skill are required to take small game with a bow. An improvised “shotgun” load, however, greatly improves the odds, as it also does against humans at short range. The shotgun-style loading of a musket is described from the very beginning of the colonial experience and became famous during the American Revolution. Its ubiquity among the colonists surely informed the Amerindians’ use of it as well. The Connecticut militia in the Pequot War of 1637, for example, was ordered to carry twenty bullets and four pounds of shot. Excavations at the Monhantic Fort, a Pequot fortified village occupied from the mid- to late 1670s, has found small shot (4 mm to 5 mm) almost exclusively, with only one full-sized bullet so far recovered.
P.S. John Connor. Australian Frontier Wars, 1788-1838. 2002
The limitations of spears and clubs determined the tactics used in raids for women and revenge attacks. While a spear could be thrown accurately and could be lethal, an Eora spear thrown from a distance of 50 metres took about two seconds to reach its target. As Bradley wrote, ‘the spears may be easily avoided if you see the Man, who is going to throw it’. In the same way, while a club could be an effective weapon, the intended victim was unlikely to stay still and allow a death blow to be struck. The solution was to use surprise to ensure the target could not see the spear or club coming. Even though Captain David Collins unfairly refers to the Eora tactic of spearing unsuspecting enemies in the back as ‘treachery’, surprise is surely a legitimate tactic of war.
Roland Bohr. Gifts from the Thunder Beings. Indigenous Archery and European Firearms in the Northern Plains and the Central Subarctic, 1670-1870. 2014
Bears are among the most imposing and dangerous land animals in North America. Aboriginal peoples in the Subarctic and in the Great Plains held them in great reverence. While it is possible to kill black bears with wooden bows and arrows, Louis Bird suggested that before the introduction of firearms, black bears and polar bears were rarely killed except in emergency situations, for example, when humans had accidentally startled a bear, provoking an attack. He stated that firearms killed large animals faster, due to their greater penetrative force and stopping power: “Also the gun can kill the large animals like moose, caribou, black bear, polar bear much easier than bow and arrow. Bow and arrows are just as good, but they are not as quickly as the gun. And at mating season the bull moose is very dangerous and charge you. Usually when that happens, if then somebody got the gun, has a chance to load and he’ll be able to knock down the moose, instead of hightailing it, instead of running away.”
David Thompson noted about Swampy Cree methods of hunting polar bear in the late 1700s that “the Nahathaway Indians are all armed with guns, and are good shots, but they only attack this species of Bear when they are two together, and one after the other keep a steady fire on him, but a ball in the brain or heart is directly fatal.”
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According to Two Leggings’ description, a firearm could be used effectively at close range even if the user was exhausted and out of breath, while the effective use of bows and arrows required a greater amount of physical strength, stamina, and calmness.