Posted on 10/19/2018 5:01:39 AM PDT by w1n1
Flintlocks weren't the only weapon at the disposal of early American settlers – Indian tomahawks had a place and were even part of Revolutionary War soldiers' fighting kit.
Tomahawks were general-purpose tools used by Native Americans and European colonials alike, and often employed as a hand-to-hand or a thrown weapon.
I have always loved tomahawks. I got my first one 30 years ago. Dixie Gun Works had a sale on hand-forged heads for the ridiculously low price of $6, as I recall. I bought one and fitted a sturdy hardwood handle to it.
It is no work of art, but it does look like something you’d expect a frontier blacksmith to have hammered out in 1730.
You can’t get too much more American than the tomahawk unless you’re eating apple pie at a baseball game. The name itself has its origins in the language of the Algonquian Indians as interpreted by the ears of the early English colonists, John Smith of Pocahontas fame among them.
The colonists identified the word with their own iron-headed hatchets, but exactly what the Indians meant by it in the early 1600s is hard to pin down with certainty.
With the outbreak of the American Revolution, the Continental Congress specified that patriots answering the call to arms equip with either a tomahawk or sword in addition to a musket.
Of the two weapons, the tomahawk is the more savage and frightening, capable of delivering grievous, deep, bone splintering wounds. Read the rest of Indian Tomahawk.
Mel Gibson approves.
IIRC no less of an authority on CQB than the legendary Fairbairn said the tomahawk was the ultimate hand to hand weapon
I wonder if Lizzie Warren has one.
“Mel Gibson approves.”
Elizabeth Warren has one on the wall of her tool shed...uses it for yard work.
Beat me by 5 seconds...
Does the Russian army still train in the use of the entrenching tool as a thrown weapon? Old Soviet footage shows them sharpening the edges and hurling it like a tomahawk into a wood backstop.
One of the first deaths of the American Revolution was wrought by a tomahawk. After the British were pushed back from the North Bridge and retreated towards Concord a militiaman slaughtered and scalped a wounded British soldier.
LOL
A very up close and personal form of havok.
This sounds dangerously like cultural appropriation.
Probably.
I have one of these and have chopped a lot of firewood up with it as well as digging. https://www.coldsteel.com/special-forces-shovel2.html
Motto of the early Army Rangers: “Finish them with your tomahawk”.
Love the video: Looks like: “and guess what? you can use it as a shovel, too!”
Midway had a sale on these
sometime back and
I got several.
XLNT Hardware!
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