Fusil de Chasse

Origins

New France was governed through the French Ministry of Marine, which ran the navy and the colonies, and the ministry bought its small arms separately from the army. From about 1691 much of that work went to gunmakers at Tulle, a town in the Limousin region of France. Tulle supplied military muskets for the colony's regular soldiers, the Compagnies franches de la Marine, and a lighter civilian pattern called the fusil de chasse, which simply means hunting gun. Contracts with Tulle ran until about 1741, after which Saint-Étienne supplied much of the Marine's needs. Guns of the same general form were also made by other French makers.

The hunting gun mattered in Canada because of the militia. From 1669 every fit man in the colony between about 16 and 60 was enrolled in a parish militia company and was expected to own a gun. Guns from the king's stores were sold or lent to men who had none. Similar guns, along with cheaper trade guns, reached Native peoples through the fur trade and as gifts to allies.

Design & Construction

The fusil de chasse was a smoothbore flintlock, lighter and slimmer than a military musket. Its long barrel was octagonal at the breech and round toward the muzzle, and it was held to the stock by pins rather than by barrel bands. The bore was commonly described as caliber 28, meaning 28 lead balls to the French pound, which works out at roughly .60 to .62 of an inch. That was smaller than the bore of the French army musket or the British Brown Bess Musket, so a man could carry more shots for the same weight of lead.

The stock was usually walnut, with a deeply curved butt that the French called the pied de vache, or cow's foot. The mounts on the plain grade were iron; finer grades had brass mounts and better finish. The ramrod was wood. There was normally no fitting for a bayonet and no sling, because the gun was meant for hunting and for travel by canoe and on foot. It could fire a single ball for large game or war, or a charge of shot for birds and small game. Like any smoothbore it was accurate only at short range, perhaps 50 to 75 meters against a single man, though exact figures depend on the gun and the shooter.

Combat Use

Canadian militiamen and Native warriors used guns of this kind in the raiding warfare of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The fusil de chasse suited that style of fighting. It was light enough to carry for weeks, quick to point and well made. Canadian militia were known for aimed fire from cover rather than volleys in line.

In the French and Indian War the hunting gun was in the hands of many of the Canadians at the Battle of Fort Necessity in July 1754, where they fired from the edge of the woods into Washington's flooded trenches. A year later, at the Battle of the Monongahela, Canadian militia and several hundred Native warriors, many of them armed with French guns, spread along the flanks of Braddock's column and shot it to pieces from behind trees. Militia with hunting guns also served at the Siege of Fort William Henry in 1757, although that siege was decided by French artillery.

The gun's weaknesses showed in open battle. Without a bayonet the militia could not stand against a charge by regular infantry, and their habit of taking cover to reload did not fit the tight ranks of a firing line. Historians often give this as one reason for the disorder in the French line on the Plains of Abraham at Quebec in 1759, where militiamen had been drafted into the regular battalions.

Legacy

Parts of French hunting and trade guns have been dug up at fort, mission and village sites across the Great Lakes, the Mississippi valley and the Gulf coast, and they are an important guide for archaeologists dating French-period sites. Complete original Tulle hunting guns are rare, and much of what is known comes from the surviving contracts and from excavated parts. Among the Native peoples who carried it, the gun served beside older hand weapons such as the Tomahawk and the Gunstock War Club. Reproductions of the Tulle fusil de chasse are popular today with re-enactors and black powder shooters who portray Canadian militia. The gun belongs with the other French Arms & Weapons of the colonial period.