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Updated: May 29, 2025
Then a group of seven, armed with muzzle-loading "trade-guns" bound in brass, set out for the marshes in hopes of geese. For the flight was arriving, and the Hudson Bay man knows very well the flavor of goose-flesh, smoked, salted, and barrelled. Now the voyageurs began to stroll into the sun. They were men of leisure.
Scattered about here and there on the flat roof of the bastion were five short bronze mortars of various calibers and two muzzle-loading smooth-bore cannon, mounted, like field-pieces, on clumsy wooden carriages with long "trails" and big, heavy wheels.
Red Cloud and his chiefs came in accordingly, arrayed in pomp, paint and finery; shook hands grimly with the representatives of the Great Father, critically scanned the proffered gifts, disdainfully rejected the muzzle-loading rifles and old dragoon horse-pistols heaped before him. "Got heap better," was his comment, and nothing but brand new breech-loaders would serve his purpose.
Two old muzzle-loading nine-pounder guns, their teams of powerful bullocks lying contentedly behind on the grass, formed the right of the line. Then came the cavalry, consisting of twenty sowars on squealing white stallions with long tails dyed red.
Breech-loading, which had been used centuries earlier, came in again with these first rifles, but after 1865 the British navy went back to muzzle-loading and stuck to it persistently for the next 15 years.
But Sanchez made a great mistake when he supposed that Captain Horn and his men fought with such arms as the muzzle-loading rifles and shot guns which the Arato's men had thought quite sufficient to bring with them for the work they had to do.
Has anything more wonderful happened in the world than this journey of a few farmers, cumbered with women and children, and armed only with old-fashioned muzzle-loading guns, into a vast, unknown land, peopled by savages and wild beasts? Yet, look what they did.
Their shredded parchments made ideal wadding for muzzle-loading scatter-guns, and sufferers from asthma tore them down, too, and burned them slowly and stood over the smoldering mass and inhaled the fumes and the smoke which arose, because the country wiseacres preached that no boughten stuff out of a drug store gave such relief from asthma as this hornet's-nest treatment.
Marston himself, as I have shown, was fond of hunting in his early manhood, and was the owner of an excellent muzzle-loading rifle, which was as good as when his keen eye glanced along the brown barrel and the bullet was buried in the unsuspicious deer, so far away as to be scarcely visible to the ordinary vision.
When he returned with the gun an old, muzzle-loading duck-gun, with a huge bore she accepted it with careless ease and held it as if it were a broom. But when he offered her the powder-horn and a little bag of buckshot, she hesitated. "What be them for?" she inquired. Joe Barren looked serious. "Mrs. Gammit," said he, "I know you kin do most anything a man kin do an' do it better, maybe!
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