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 youd expect a frontier blacksmith to have hammered out in 1730.
You cant get too much more American than the tomahawk unless youre 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.
I decided not to do so, but it was pretty close.
I was looking through my un-pc flintnapping tools just this morning.
Made by traditional indian blacksmiths?
“I was looking through my un-pc flintnapping tools just this morning.”
Cultural appropriation is everywhere. It’s so sad that the left can’t keep things racially pure, don’t you think? Why, the next thing you know, they’ll be marrying each other and then the husband will, patriarchically appropriate the wife’s culture.
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