A Look at History
Brown Bess
Tower of London and Fort Michilimackinac: Ties of Steel and Lead
BY FRANK STRAUS

Many American tourists to England go to see the Tower of London. This medieval castle, first built in 1067 by William the Conqueror and rebuilt many times since, has served since the time of Queen Victoria as a tourist attraction and home of the crown jewels of the former British Empire. When Mackinac Island was young, however, from the late 1600s until after the War of 1812, the Tower of London was the King of England's principle researchand development armory, the place where small arms were designed and prototypes built for battlefield use.

In the early 1700s, the foremost English infantry weapon was the relatively reliable Brown Bess musket. This .75-caliber, 10-pound flintlock smoothbore, with its ability to be reloaded quickly and fired in disciplined volleys, was a favorite of the officer corps. The officers would continue to issue guns like this throughout the century to the king's troops throughout the world; variants of the Brown Bess would be the standard guns carried by the British soldiers manning the Straits of Mackinac starting in 1761. Well before this time, however, the king's Native American allies had turned their backs on the broad-gauge musket.

Throughout the first half of the 1700s, American traders from the East Coast had begun to penetrate inland North America. Two major trails led inland. One, from New York City, went up the Mohawk River into the lands of the Iroquois, longtime friends of the British; the other, from the Potomac River, led up into Western Pennsylvania and what was to become Ohio Territory. Both trails, if followed to their end, led to the richest fur-bearing country in the world: the shores of the Great Lakes.

Several Indian tribes and bands became friends of the English, one of the westernmost of which was a Miami band that lived in a corn-growing village at Pickawillany, the modern Piqua, Ohio. In May 1752, a war band of 260 men, led by Mackinaw City's Charles de Langlade, left the Straits of Mackinac to chastise this threat to French dominance. They were probably armed with the standard .59-caliber French trade gun of the day, much lighter than the .75-caliber Brown Bess. Fittings from these guns, familiar to French and Indians, have been dug up at Fort Michilimackinac. On June 21, 1752, this mixed French and Indian expedition raided Piqua, killed the chief, and took five British traders as hostages.

The fur traders and the Indian friends of the English needed lighter weapons to defend themselves. In Indian country, the European musket was useless.

We have a snappish letter from Sir William Johnson, the Mohawk Valley grandee and de facto British ambassador to the Iroquois Confederacy, in 1755: "I have got up the guns you sent me, which will not answer at all; instead of being light Indian guns as I wrote for, I find they are Old Muskets vamped up anew. So large and wide a bore the Indians never use, neither would they carry them if they were to be paid ever so much for it. So I return them to you, in order to change them for light guns if you can; if not I don't want them."

The fur traders had already begun to demand what was called the "North West" gun, so called from the compass direction of the trails that they used to enter Indian country. Starting in 1753, the British Board of Ordnance contracted with the Tower of London armory to assemble 380 light muskets. These guns were also smoothbores, but with 48-inch "North West" barrels. Despite the barrel's length, these were lighter guns because their caliber, the width of the barrel, was narrower. The caliber of the 1753 gun is not stated in the requisition, but surviving similar guns from this period are 16-gauge and 20gauge; they have smoothbore calibers of .65 and .60.

The Tower of London guns were known in the English capital as "chief's guns." In contrast to the 10-pound Brown Bess, they weighed from five to 7.5 pounds. They were meant to be shipped to North America and given to friendly Native American "chiefs" as rewards for loyalty, symbols of alliance, and means of self-defense on the English-speaking frontier. It was characteristic of the time that even though most Englishmen and English-speaking Americans thoroughly shared the racist feelings of their generation, they were willing and eager to share with friendly Indians the best guns they had. The French, of course, had already learned this lesson. Indians were demonstrating, by hunting, birding, and fur trading, their eagerness to shoot sharp in what was becoming a war for the North American continent.

1753 was also the year that the young Virginia envoy, George Washington, took the North West trail up from the Potomac to the French posts of western Pennsylvania. The trail led to Lake Erie, which young Washington never saw. His way was politely barred by the French at Fort le Boeuf, 16 miles south of the lake in northwest Pennsylvania. In the summer of 1754, Washington returned, this time leading a war party of 300 men. He was surrounded and forced to surrender at Fort Necessity, in southwest Pennsylvania. In this battle,

Native American allies of the English and French fought on both sides.

With the help of their long guns, the English and Americans won the "French and Indian War." In 1761, the French flag flying over Fort Michilimackinac came down for the last time; but only 15 years after this date, the English and their American colonies would themselves be at war, and the Native allies of the King of England would be facing in a new direction. The Indians of the upper Great Lakes would be reacting to a new threat from the southeast.