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  Many colonies treated the idea of traveling to church and other public meetings with a weapon as a civic duty, although a number of colonial municipalities could also fine men who did not own and carry weapons. In early Virginia, one law required that men not “go . . . abroad without a sufficient partie well armed” or to “worke in the ground without their arms . . .”7

  By 1639, Governor John Winthrop was already commenting on the Plymouth Colony’s two “skillful” regiments of militia. Though certainly not anywhere as skilled as a trained European army, most of the New Englanders took their jobs seriously. A couple of years later Winthrop assessed that “about 1200 men were exercised in most sorts of land service; yet it was observed that there was no man drunk, though there was plenty of wine and strong beer in town, not an oath sworn, no quarrel, nor any hurt done.”8 By the end of the seventeenth century, nearly every colonial town featured some kind of requirement impelling white inhabitants to bear arms (slaves, free slaves, indentured servants, and Catholics were typically prohibited from owning them) to protect their communities from external threats—and, on occasion, from internal perils.

  By the time these new inhabitants of North America had established towns, the guns they carried had become even more lethal and accurate. In fact, by the time the Pilgrims had befriended their Wampanoag neighbors and invited them over for a famous three-day feast, gun technology was already rapidly changing on the European continent. The matchlock was being supplanted by “flintlocks,” “doglocks,” and “wheellocks,” and by 1675 the old gun would virtually disappear in North America.

  • • •

  In the NRA National Firearms Museum in the Washington suburb of Fairfax, Virginia, sits a glass enclosure holding the purported musket of John Alden, a twenty-year-old passenger on the Mayflower voyage. “The Mayflower Gun,” a beautiful and intricate “wheellock” carbine, is purported to be the only remaining piece of physical evidence left from the first permanent settlement of Europeans in New England.

  As the story goes, Alden, gun in hand, was one of the first Mayflower passengers to set foot on New England soil. Perhaps. What we do know for certain is that Alden was the crew’s cooper, responsible for maintaining all of the ship’s barrels. His union with Mayflower passenger Priscilla Mullins is alleged to have produced more descendants than any other Pilgrim family.9 Along with Plymouth’s military commander Myles Standish, the couple were immortalized in the popular nineteenth-century Longfellow poem “The Courtship of Miles Standish.”

  Alden’s gun, discovered in a cubby during the 1924 restoration of his family’s home in Massachusetts, wasn’t standard for settlers of the time. Its sophisticated mechanism was superior to most models used by those who landed in Massachusetts—certainly the matchlocks used to ward off the first Indian attack. The firearm was likely the most expensive item Alden owned, and he probably took great care to keep it clean and polished, rarely using it. It would be the sort of exotic weapon that an English seaman, typically an officer, might have procured from a sea merchant or mercenary at port rather than a local gunsmith.

  Mayflower Gun

  More importantly, the Mayflower Gun heralded the soon-to-be predominant flintlock models, which eliminated many of the matchlock’s disadvantages and helped the settlers use guns in more effective ways. No need to worry about keeping fires or cinders lit or burning oneself. In the case of the Mayflower Gun, a rotating steel wheel created sparks, much like a modern cigarette lighters, igniting the gunpowder in a pan, which flashed and ignited the main charge in the firearm’s barrel and then fired.

  The wheellock had probably been invented in Germany in the early 1500s, but it would take a century for the speedier ignition system—often called the “snaphaunce”—to be used throughout Europe. The expense of owning one of these guns inhibited widespread military adaptation, much less ownership by the common man. It was most often a gun of the gentleman and the officer. John Smith of the ill-fated Jamestown colony owned a German- or French-made snaphaunce.10 Smith used this pistol in his fight with the Powhatan, which famously necessitated his supposed rescue by the princess Pocahontas. Although most of the guns in Jamestown were still matchlocks, an early wheellock pistol with a brass barrel, iron lock plate, and wooden fishtail was found by archaeologists at James Fort;11 much to the consternation of its owner, one imagines, it had been lost down the shaft of the well.

  There has long been debate about the origins of the “pistol” itself. Even the etymology has been disputed, with some historians making the case that the word came from Czech or Spanish. Others argued that the inventor of the pistol was Camillo Vitelli, who had created the weapon in Pistoia, Italy, and thus the town of origin left the name.12 As with many forms of technology, the most likely answer is that numerous engineers had been playing around with the idea of shortening the barrel of a gun at around the same time. What we do know is that many of the first pistols—often made at nearly right angles—were heavy and clumsy, and fired large ammunition.

  It was the smoothbore “flintlock” musket, however, that would become the most prevalent gun in North America from its first appearance shortly after the Mayflower’s arrival until the Civil War. The flintlock mechanism was safer than the matchlock and cheaper than the wheellock. The idea that made it work was simple and elegant.

  The flint, a hard rock that had been part of human technology since the Stone Age, struck the iron or steel “frizzen.” The force and friction of that downward motion produced sparks. At the same time the hammer’s blow would snap the frizzen back to expose the gunpowder in the pan and ignite the gunpowder. When the pan’s gunpowder ignited, it flashed through a small hole in the side of the barrel to ignite the gunpowder inside the barrel.

  The first flintlock guns were likely developed in France in the early 1600s by the brothers Marin and Jean le Bourgeoys, gunsmiths of King Louis III.13 Initially more expensive and complicated to construct than the simple matchlock, it took decades for the technology to be universally applied. As we’ll see, throughout history military leadership would be slow in adopting new technology—or, to be more precise, it was reluctant to move on from what it already knew. The flintlock was no different. It was only during the French victory at the Battle of Steinkirk in 1692, when British generals noticed their soldiers dropping matchlock muskets and picking up the flintlocks of the fallen enemy soldiers, that they realized wholesale change was needed.14

  Once it was adopted by Europeans, though, it was taken up by Americans and transformed, improved, mythologized, and embedded in the everyday lives of people across the continent. By that time the advanced locks had proliferated to English and North American gunmakers and would soon become the mechanism for the first guns manufactured by the United States and a tool of necessity.

  With a large number of people living scattered and away from denser population centers, newcomers found themselves more reliant on firearms for hunting and protection from unfriendly Indians. The Mayflower Gun’s primary purpose, if and when it was used, was probably to hunt deer, turkey, grouse, and other birds that fed the new colonists.

  In Europe, hunting was typically reserved for the well-bred. That was not to be the case in the colonies. Samuel Johnson once remarked that “hunting was the labor of the savages of North America, but the amusement of the gentleman of England.”15 The wealthy looked upon common men who hunted as lazy and potentially unmanageable. Those who chased around small animals were, as The Laws of England Concerning the Game of Hunting, Hawking, Fishing and Fowling, &c. (1727) explained, “very bad Christians . . . of little or no Worth . . . loose, idle, disorderly and dissolute Persons” who would, inevitably, use their weapons for criminal acts.16

  Yet one reason the common man in England could not enjoy hunting as the American “savage” did was that nobility had banned men from participating in the practice either for survival or sport. In the centuries before the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock, the English aristocracy enacted a number of decrees lim
iting the ability of the average man to hunt for food. Ostensibly these laws were aimed at preserving game, and to some extent that was true. But as William Holdsworth, the noted nineteenth-century historian of English law, explained, such bans were also for “prevention of popular insurrections and resistance to the government, by disarming the bulk of the people; which last is a reason oftener meant than avowed by the makers of forest or game laws.”17

  Perhaps in England, where land was in high demand, such positions could be rationalized and insurrections averted. In America, not only would hunting be a necessity; it would soon evolve into a source of recreation for the common man due to the abundant wildlife. Within a few years municipal governments in New England were passing laws regulating hunting, not to limit use of guns, as some modern historians argue, but rather to protect private property from the numerous guns of sports hunters. In the vast lands of the New World, these laws would be nearly impossible to enforce.

  Hunting, not war, was the main use of the gun in early America. By the turn of the century, Indian reliance on European firearms for stalking prey was also growing. As Native Americans gradually adopted the apparatuses, they became increasingly adept at fixing and maintaining the weapons—even, occasionally, making their own ammunition. However, Indians were never able to manufacture and craft iron, and this doomed their hold on the land.

  Bradford had worried that selling Indians guns was sinful, and perhaps that losing technological superiority over the native population could be a dangerous proposition over the long term. Yet the lure of trade was often stronger than the need for safety. The settlers of New England so regularly traded guns—often hiring Indians to do beaver and food hunting—that the British Crown was forced to issue a law prohibiting it: “In trucking or trading with the Indians no man shall give them from any commodity of theirs, silver or gold, or any weapons of war, either guns or gunpowder, nor sword, not any other Munition, which might come to be used against ourselves.”18 As the British soon learned, controlling the colonists across a vast sea was no easy task, and the gun trade continued unabated. More consequentially, the gun proliferated among the colonists, and the newcomers soon started devising technology that outshined anything they were doing in Europe.

  • • •

  In 1681, another influx of pacifist immigrants, much like the Pilgrims, sought to escape the perpetual violence and quarreling of Europe. At first the German Quakers and Swiss Mennonites found North America to be only marginally more hospitable than their homelands. Considered heretics by the Puritans of New England, their books were burned, their property was confiscated, and some were expelled from their homes. In the early 1660s, four Quakers were hanged on Boston Common for alleged crimes against the budding Massachusetts Bay Colony. The violence stopped only after King Charles II stepped in to demand an end to incidents of intolerance.

  It was the same King Charles II who, twenty years later, handed over an immense piece of his North American landholdings to the Quaker William Penn as a means of satisfying a debt he owed Penn’s father. This property encompassed much of present-day Pennsylvania and parts of Delaware. Penn, who had become a Quaker in 1666 and was briefly imprisoned for this apostasy, harbored quixotic plans for his new land. His first journey to the New World included an armada of twenty-three ships containing plenty of well-to-do Quakers from London and Bristol, along with many others seeking refuge from around Europe.

  Penn’s intent was to create not merely a safe space for his coreligionists but a “tolerance settlement” that was to be a haven for persecuted Christian sects of Europe that would be “void of Sword or Staff, Drum or Musket, Tumult or Violence.”19 Penn had planned for densely populated cities to be surrounded by idyllic farming communities that fed them. This was not to be. Thousands were drawn to the promise of fertile land, and that freedom lay inland. New immigrants continued to make their way westward into the vast expanses of America, a habit that continued unabated for the next 150 years or so.

  These settlers needed the proper weapons and tools to survive. It was a group of Quakers and Mennonites from the Krefeld region of the Rhineland who would help build the first recorded German settlement in the English colonies, naming it, appropriately enough, Germantown.20 In the coming decades, tens of thousands of Germanic people streamed through Philadelphia and settled the vast colony, quickly outpacing mere subsistence farming to make Pennsylvania “the Bread Colony,” exporting fur, fruit, livestock, and grain (wheat, corn, rye, oats, and barley). Penn’s “holy experiment” was to become one of the cultural and political centers of American life and the birthplace of the Constitution.21

  It was in this historical current that a young man named Martin Meylin was swept up when he left his home in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1710. Along with about a dozen fellow Mennonites, Meylin ended up in the German-speaking area of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Though setting up in a town teeming with pacifists, Meylin would be credited with being the first great American gunmaker and inventor of the Pennsylvania long rifle—which was to become known as the Kentucky long rifle (“Kentucky,” in those days, being anything in the wilderness west of Lancaster). Meylin’s small cobblestone cabin still stands off a two-lane road in Lancaster. Local schools are named after him. Plaques have been erected in his honor. State politicians have even written legislation commemorating his contribution to American life. The gun sparked a revolution in gun technology.

  The problem with Meylin’s story, like with so many others in the early history of the gun, is that it seems to be predicated on lore rather than tangible historical evidence. Although a “Martin Mylin” (the spelling would vary over the years) was one of the German-speaking Mennonites to emigrate to Lancaster County in the early 1700s, little else can conclusively be said about the man. In fact, there were likely two Martin Meylins, father and son, both blacksmiths, who emigrated to North America at roughly the same time. There are also two surviving early specimens of Pennsylvania long rifles that have the stamp “MM” on them. One of these rifles is currently held by the Lancaster County Historical Society and dates to the 1740s. It is inscribed “Martin Meillin Germantaun 1705.” Which raises the obvious question: How did Martin Meylin (or Mylin, or Meillin) construct a rifle in Germantown in 1705 if he emigrated to America five years later, in 1710?22

  Rather than get bogged down in the debate over the veracity of Meylin’s tale, it’s probably the case, as we have seen elsewhere, that numerous inventors and blacksmiths engineered the Kentucky rifle over a period of decades. In early colonial times, new inventions were a collective effort developed by communities and driven by necessity.

  Kentucky rifle

  What’s indisputable is that the invention created by these German-speaking immigrants like Meylin and their children changed the way Americans hunted, fought, and explored. Captain John Dillin, author of a popular book about the Kentucky rifle in the 1920s, would claim that the gun “changed the whole course of world history; made possible the settlement of a continent; and ultimately freed our country of foreign domination. Light in weight; graceful in line; economical in consumption of powder and lead; fatally precise; distinctly American; it sprang into immediate popularity; and for a hundred years was a model often slightly varied but never radically changed.”23

  Dillin was not wrong. It’s true that few American inventions were as adored and idealized in our history as the long rifle. Dillin’s sentimentalized telling of the Kentucky rifle’s story is laden with patriotic imagery for good reason. The invention involved reengineered and reimagined Old World technology and was adapted to the rigors and uniqueness of frontier life. For the first two hundred years of colonial life, the gun was an extension of European efforts in technology, design, and purpose. With the Kentucky rifle, the American colonialists, perhaps for the first time, had created a weapon of their own, specifically designed for their unique lives.

  Lancaster would become the center of gun innovation for more than a century. The settlement the Meyl
ins helped establish in the 1700s quickly grew to become one of North America’s first real inland cities. (It was the capital of the United States for a single day in September 1777, after the Continental Congress was forced to flee the British in Philadelphia.) The town stood within reasonable distance of the coastal ports but was also a gateway to the unexplored continent that would lure millions in the coming centuries. With nearby iron ore and plentiful lumber and abundant serviceable farmland, it was the perfect location for the invention of the American rifle.

  Inasmuch as men like Meylin were not merely dissenting Christians but pacifists as well, it can be safely assumed that most were disinclined to pick up gunsmithing as a means of war and violence. But the fact was that firearms played an essential role in the everyday lives of most families in America, even of those eschewing violence. All of which makes the story of the American rifle even more improbable.

  The first German gunsmiths of Pennsylvania produced traditional Jäger rifles. These guns, expensive and often ornate, were short, easy-to-carry, large-ammunition flintlock guns built to be quickly reloaded so that the carrier could hunt big game in dense German forests. The rifle—the word derived from the German riffeln, meaning to cut grooves—was first developed in Europe as a sporting weapon for noblemen to hunt with more precision. Meylin almost certainly knew of this technique before arriving in Lancaster. The invention of gun barrels with spiral grooves on the interior is often credited to a Viennese gunmaker named Gaspard Kollner, but it probably first originated among a number of blacksmiths in southern Germany and Switzerland. By 1520, Nuremberg gunmakers were proficient in the technology.24 The physics of spinning propulsion as a means of improving aim was known to weapons makers for thousands of years—ever since feathers were placed on arrows to make them spin.