Gratuitous Llama Follow-Up Historickal Posting (TM)

A while back I mentioned that I had just purchased this book:

White Devil: A True Story of War, Savagery and Vengeance in Colonial America, by Stephen Brumwell.

Well, I read the book yesterday while recovering from the 48 hour bug that came through the ol' Llama hide. My quick two cents on it is that while interesting, it might have been better organized. It's kinda-sorta a history of the French and English struggle for imperial control of North America, primarily as fought out in the French and Indian War, it's kinda-sorta a biography of Major Robert Rogers, the founder of Rogers' Rangers, a bush-fighting unit which was the forerunner of all modern Army Rangers (including our own LMC), and it's mostly-sorta an account of Rogers' raid on the Indian village of St. Francis in October, 1759. While informative, I feel the book doesn't sufficiently establish its priorities and stick to them. As a result, it falls between the stools - the general history and biography ought to have been either greatly expanded or else cut down significantly. Nonetheless, I enjoyed it and believe it was an excellent primer for taking on The Annotated and Illustrated Journals of Major Robert Rogers, which is why I purchased it in the first place. So all is well.

Aaaaaanyhoo, I bring this up again mostly for this: commenters to this post (and another previous one linked therein) had been batting around the question of gun safety back in Colonial times. (The question was prompted by one reader who had seen some re-enactors leaning on the muzzles of their flintlocks being scolded for such dangerous behavior.) Well it just so happens that White Devil has some information on the matter. According to Brumwell, accidental misfirings were quite common, indeed almost endemic among frontier fighters, so much so that a number of directives about handling of firearms were handed down from commanding officers such as Rogers. Apparently, such official reprimands and instructions did little to curb such incidences, however.

I suppose that if one was in the Champlain Valley in the late 1750's, one more or less constantly had to have a loaded gun quick to hand. Given this, accidents were bound to occur. But with everything else to worry about, I'd imagine your average Ranger probably didn't give safety matters much thought.