The Myth of the Hunting Frontiersman Debunked

Posted on July 28, 2007 in History Reading

From Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture by Michael A. Bellisiles:

….one of the most popular and persistent visions of the American past is that every settler owned a gun in order to hunt — “to put meat on the table” is the oft-repeated phrase. This is a very strange perception. Hunting is and always has been a time-consuming and inefficient way of putting food on the table. People settling a new territory have little time for leisure activities, and hunting was broadly understood in the European context to be an upper-class leisure activity. One of the most significant advantages that European settlers enjoyed over their Indian competitors for the land of North America was their mastery of domestic animals. If a settler wanted meat, he did not pull out his trusty and rusty musket, inaccurate beyond twenty yards, off the hook above the door and spend the day cleaning and preparing it. Nor did he then hike miles to the nearest trading post to trade farm produce for powder and shot. To head off into the woods for two days in order to drag the carcass of a deer back to his family — assuming that he was lucky enough to find one, not to mention kill it — would have struck any American of the Colonial period as supreme lunacy. Far easier to sharpen the ax and chop off the head of a chicken or, as they all did in regular communal get-togethers, slaughter one of their enormous hogs, salting down enough meat to last months. Colonial Americans were famously well fed, based on their farming, not their hunting. [p. 103]

Quote that to your friendly NRA mythologist.