Gunstock War Club

Origins

Wooden clubs were among the oldest weapons of the peoples of eastern North America. The best-known early form was the ball-headed club, carved from a single piece of hardwood with a heavy round knob at the striking end. The gunstock club is a second form. It is a flat board of hardwood with a sharp bend near one end, so that its outline looks like the butt and wrist of a musket.

How the shape came about is not settled. One view is that Native craftsmen copied the stocks of the European firearms that arrived in the seventeenth century, perhaps after seeing guns swung as clubs once they had been fired. Another view is that the angled shape grew out of older Native clubs and that the name is simply a later description by outsiders. There is no firm proof either way. Securely dated examples from the earliest colonial period are scarce, and most of the clubs now in museums were made in the nineteenth century.

Design & Construction

A gunstock club was cut from a plank of dense hardwood such as maple, ash or oak. Most are roughly 60 to 90 centimeters long, though sizes vary a good deal. The handle is narrow and the club widens toward the bend, which puts the weight behind the point of impact. The edges are fairly thin, so a blow lands on a narrow line rather than a flat face.

Many clubs carry a blade or spike set into the outer angle of the bend. On clubs made after European trade goods became common this is usually iron or steel, often a spear point or a knife blade, and some clubs have more than one. Earlier points are thought to have been made of stone, antler or bone. The blade turned the club into a weapon that could both break bone and pierce.

Decoration was important. Clubs were carved, painted and, from the period of the fur trade, studded with brass tacks. Some bear incised figures or marks that are thought to record the owner's deeds or his spiritual protectors, though the meaning of such marks varied from people to people and is not always known.

Combat Use

The club was a weapon for close fighting, used after guns and bows had done their work or in a sudden rush from ambush. Native warfare in the eastern woods relied on surprise, aimed fire from cover and a fast closing attack, and in that last stage a warrior fought with a club, a knife or a Tomahawk. By the middle of the eighteenth century the iron-bladed tomahawk was the more common hand weapon, but wooden clubs remained in use beside it.

In the French and Indian War most Native warriors carried firearms, including French trade guns and the Fusil de Chasse, and kept a hand weapon for close work. At the Battle of the Monongahela in 1755, warriors from the Great Lakes and Ohio country closed on Braddock's broken column after shooting it down from cover, and clubs of this general kind were among the hand weapons of those nations. The same peoples sent warriors to the Siege of Fort William Henry in 1757. Contemporary accounts of these actions seldom say exactly which hand weapons were used, so the part played by the gunstock club in any one fight cannot be stated with certainty.

In the nineteenth century the gunstock club was taken up widely on the Plains and the prairies, and many surviving examples come from peoples of those regions. By then it was as much a mark of a warrior's standing as a fighting weapon.

Legacy

As firearms improved and the wars of the Plains ended, the gunstock club passed out of use as a weapon, but it did not disappear. It is still made and carried as part of men's dance dress at powwows and in ceremonies, and older clubs are valued as works of art and as family and community heirlooms. Museum collections in North America and Europe hold many examples.

The club is familiar to many film viewers from The Last of the Mohicans (1992), in which the Mohican elder Chingachgook fights with a large gunstock club. It is described with other Native American Arms & Weapons and with other Maces & Clubs from around the world.