Guns of the western history makers


In addition to the Stars and Stripes, the flags of Spain, France, England, Russia, Mexico, the Confederacy and the short-lived Bear flag of California have been raised aloft in our American West. This is an area with a history that started well before Captain John Smith was being ransomed for “two guns and a grindstone”at Jamestown in the early 1600s, or the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony were blasting away at turkey gobblers for their Thanksgiving dinners.
The first sound of gunfire in North America was in our Southwest when Francisco Vasquez de Coronado led a force of soldiers north from Mexico. He was in search of reported gold and other treasure, and his soldiers were armed with assorted weapons including some matchlock muskets and possibly a few wheel-lock guns. The year was 1540.

Soldiers have burned much of the gunpowder and written many pages of western history, but there were also the self-reliant Mountain Men, the hardy miners, pioneer settlers and early merchants of varied nationalities, the lawmen and the lawless. And, of course, there was the native—the Indian. For the western migration it was said the “The weak died along the way and the timid never started.”

Rivalries among the Indian tribes made it somewhat less difficult for the white men to secure a foothold on the North American continent, but the task was not easy.
Following the explorations of Coronado from Mexico into the Southwest men with a mission
Like Father Eusebio Francisco Kino, “the padre on horseback,” and the trieless Father Garces, In California there was Father Junipero Serra, a remarkable man among all pioneers in American history. With these pioneers of the cross came adventurous leaders like the borderlands frontiersman Juan Bautista de Anza.

Spanish endeavors in bringing Christianity to the native Indians and establishing settlements extended into the 1700s and 1800s In this period the primary weapons were the sword, the lance and the flintlock musket. Horsemen used a short flintlock carbine often called an escopeat. The flintlock ignition, it will be remembered, extended, it will be remembered, extended well over 200 years into the 1800s and indluded miquelet, snaphaunce and other variations of flintlock from.

Spanish settlements at Santa Fe. Taos. Tubac and Tucson attracted the caravans of trade ; and to San Diego, Monterey, Los Angeles, and Yerba Buena ( San Francisco ) came the sailing ships. Not only did the caravans of trade goods come up the trails from Mexico, but they eventually came overland from the Missouri. The ships of Spain, England, Russia and some other countries the waters of the blue Pacific.

Thus there came to the Southwest, and to the West Coast the stirrings of a great migration. Although the Pacific coastline was first dominated entirely by Spain, England soon had a foothold to the north of California; the Russians came across into Alaska and down into northern California; France claimed a great but little known section of West extending from the Mississippi to the coasts of what are now the states of Oregon and Washington. In all this reaching out to extend the empires of Russia, England and the European countries, the skirmishing was light, Indian troubles attained no great proportion, and the flintlock muskets of the various nations were used primarily to harvest the game which was in great abundance.

The pace was stepped up at end of the 18th century, and in 1803 France ceded to the United States its vast claim to western territory. Although up to this time a few rifles may have been brought in by traders, the smoothbore flintlock musket, or fusil, was the predominant firearm west of the Mississippi.