Several years ago at Friendship, in an informal “Stump the
Experts” session behind Gunmaker’s Hall, I asked the Bevel
Brothers what I hoped was a tricky question. “If you traveled
back in time to 1770 and encountered a deer hunter in the
Appalachian Mountains what kind of powder is he carrying in his
priming horn?” As you fans of this column know, those boys are
smarter than they like to let on. My question was immediately
answered. “From everything we have seen we don’t believe he
would have a priming horn.” In my opinion that was exactly the
right answer.
Now a reader has sent in a question about priming horns and the
Bevel Brothers have asked me to come up with my own answer to
why I think there should be no priming horn in an 18th-century
shooting kit. Here goes.
There are two basic kinds of documentary evidence—positive and
negative. In the October issue John Curry wrote an article
documenting the positive evidence he had found that some men on
the frontier wore beards. This article caused a lot of
discussion but it all came down to having to agree that beards,
however rare, were not unknown. Negative evidence is a lot
harder to deal with. Just because in thirty years of research on
rifles and their use neither I nor the other historians who have
worked for the Colonial Williamsburg Gunshop ever found a single
colonial period reference to either priming horns or priming
powder doesn’t prove they didn’t exist. To me it does prove
that, if they existed, they were not common. Certainly not as
common as beards.
One way to validate negative historical evidence is to explain
where the search that didn’t find anything was conducted. There
are several kinds of public documents that list objects. Probate
inventories are common in Virginia will books. We have read
literally thousands of these documents and never found a priming
horn mentioned. Horns, bags, bullet molds and wipers are fairly
common. But no priming horns.
In merchant’s records we have searched inventories, account
books and newspaper advertisements. Stores usually list simply
gunpowder but some carry FFG and FG powder. None seem to mention
any finer grades. Other store records list their powder as
rifle, musket or, rarely, cannon powder. I belief there is ample
evidence that FFG was “rifle powder.” For example, in a 1758
letter to General Forbes, Col. Henry Bouquet requested “fine”
powder for the riflemen and clarifies that by adding “FF.”
During the Seven Years War, the Revolution and the War of 1812
there are numerous accounts in correspondence and other
government documents related to equipping and supplying the
riflemen. Some of these documents go into enough detail to
include a wire for picking the touchhole but none we have found
mention a priming horn.
Period books from England on shooting like An Essay on Shooting,
1789, Colonel Hanger to all Sportsmen, 1814, and Instructions to
Young Sportsmen, 1833, give instruction on shooting but never
mention separate priming horn or the use of a finer granulation
of powder for priming. Recently we have also noticed the absence
of a second powder container in even the more elaborate cased
sets of guns. Some of us believe that the gunsmiths who made
these cased sets and the rich gentlemen who could afford them
would have been at the leading edge of the shooting technology.
They, more so than a colonist, would have had separate priming
if they thought it to be an advantage.
And finally there is also some modern proof that there is no
significant advantage in using finer priming powder. In 1987
Larry Pletcher began developing a system to use electric eyes
and a computer to measure how long it took from tripping the
sear until the priming powder ignited. His research was
published by the NMLRA in Volume IV of the Journal of Historical
Armsmaking Technology (1991). In 20 trials each with 2Fg, 3Fg
and 4Fg priming he found the average for 4F to be only .004 of a
second faster than 2F. Later studies with a video camera that
took 1000 frames a second confirmed Larry’s work. There was more
variation from lock to lock and shot to shot than there was
between powders.
My conclusion from all of this evidence is that the common use
of priming horns and finer granulations of powder for priming
were developments of the mid to late 19th century.
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