The ‘gun that won the west’ could also be said to have devastated its fauna, being instrumental in the extinction and near-extinction of several bird and mammal species.
32 : Winchester shotgun
1887
The ‘gun that won the west’ could also be said to have devastated its fauna, being instrumental in the extinction and near-extinction of several bird and mammal species.
Before good quality optics, the only way to get close to birds – unless you were St Francis of Assisi – was to shoot them.
Inevitably, this was usually performed for the purpose of hunting for sport or for the pot, and the history of ornithology is far more closely tied to the history of firearms than today’s conservation-oriented birders might care to admit. Equally as inevitably, the corpses of such fascinating and beautiful creatures led to curiosity about their plumage differences, relationships and habits.
It could be argued that, for some at least, hunting skills gradually matured into pure field skills. Hunting was used to collect specimens for trophies, and amass curiosities from expeditions overseas and specimens for private collections. The invention of the shotgun enabled specimen collection to develop into a multi-national, multi-million pound trade, as well as the only accurate way of discovering and evaluating the variation and different plumages of each bird species.
Pre-19th century hunters tended to use less accurate ‘fowling pieces’, with internally smooth, long barrels able to carry lead shot or round bullets like musket balls. The development of smaller-bore barrels with rifling – spiral grooves along the inside length of the barrel, giving spin to the projectiles to increase accuracy – created the shotgun, a term first recorded in 1776 to cover both rifled and unrifled guns using lead shot (though now generally only used for smooth-bored weapons). By the mid-1880s, big ‘punt guns’ – essentially ‘shot cannons’ mounted on boats – were being used for commercial wildfowling. But it was double-barrelled shotguns that gained overall precedence in hunting, collecting and indeed warfare, and they are still the weapon of preference today for some game hunting.
Pump-action shotguns, in which the grip is slid or pumped forward and backward to expel a used shot cartridge and push a fresh one into the chamber, became very popular in the late 19th century due to the speed in which rounds could be ejected and refreshed. With the Winchester’s improved accuracy in particular, this meant that it could be used as a very efficient weapon.
Winchester repeaters were ‘the guns that won the West’, but the arms-maker’s shotguns could easily be called the ‘guns that over-hunted the west’. Precision was unnecessary to make the Passenger Pigeon extinct – the scatter of a Winchester’s shot was able to bring down 50 at once from the birds’ famous sky-darkening migrating flocks.
Despite this and the many other ecological tragedies of ‘manifest destiny’, hunting has a close and perhaps unique relationship with conservation in the USA that it doesn’t have in Europe. American hunters were quick to realise that wildlife needed to be preserved if they were to keep enjoying their sport. Hunters, led by Theodore Roosevelt among others, pressurised government for regulations to be drawn up and enforced, and conservation clubs and societies were formed to lobby and pay for the protection of habitat, often with the express philosophy that the land and its wildlife belonged to all Americans.
Huntsmen are still one of the largest funders of conservation in the United States, through taxes on guns and ammunition, a fact that makes many conservationists understandably uneasy.