All objects tell stories.

Every place we stop along the trail that we're walking, anywhere, here in this county, this state, this country, this world, there exists layers of time and these layers of time - you think about it, through the human population, has traveled - they travel, it's just one of the instincts that we have as people is traveling, discovering, seeing things.

You could stop and there will have been something that occurred most likely at that particular spot in history.

I believe that.

Okay, I'm Ray Nelson and a local sort of historian.

I don't really call myself a historian but other people do.

You're in the Crow Wing County Museum in Brainerd, Minnesota.

Why I'm here today is to talk about this relic gun stock that I came upon here in the museum in the 1980s.

In the 1980s I was into muzzleloading, shooting, the muzzleloading firearms, rendezvousing, all those type of fun things to do.

The director here at the time asked me to come in and kind of look at the gun collection and maybe do some cleaning of the guns.

So I came in and they had this big old wooden box came out of storage and in this box this was part of the collection.

And I looked at that and I said "Wow" and my mouth probably dropped a foot.

I saw that and I immediately knew that this was something very unique, very unusual, to be here as part of an object that was found in the fur trade area of Minnesota and all it said on the card was F.T.

Gustafson - found in Lower Hay Lake.

Lower Hay Lake is in Crow Wing County north of here, part of the Whitefish Chain of Lakes.

14 lakes all connected by water.

Those lakes were connected before the dam was built.

There's a big dam that I know a lot about because I managed it for about 30 some years and Lower Hay Lake is a big lake.

It's not one of your smaller lakes.

There is no description saying "I found it here", you know, in this location.

There was no GPS units, just Lower Hay Lake.

Well, F. T. Gustafson - he is an interesting person because he collected a ton of artifacts here in Minnesota and Crow Wing County and Cass County.

So I did a little research into Mr. Gustafson and found out that from between 1920 and approximately 1931 is probably when this artifact was discovered on a low water condition on the Lower Hay Lake, part of the Whitefish Chain Reservoir.

His recording of information was a little lacking.

Back then - when they wrote in journals and narratives they assumed everybody knew what they were talking about.

They were not leaving a little bit tidbits of information that said that was a 30 caliber rifle or a 20 gauge shotgun or anything - we just called it a gun typically and that was it.

You're supposed to know what we're talking about.

Amateur archaeology goes back a long long time.

In doing research on this particular gun, I came across an article about - from Kelly - who on Sunday afternoons, many Sunday afternoons, the neighborhood would get together for a picnic and they would visit Indian sites and collect artifacts.

They were kind of, in my opinion, like the beginning amateur archaeologists and nobody thought about documenting these sites "Found Along the Mississippi River" or wherever.

They just collected them, put them on the wall, and some displays, and called them generic Indian artifacts.

That's not how we should be doing things today, anyway.

But - to quote Mr. Gustafson and the information I got from the Minnesota Historical Society, he said "What we might classify as junk, which merits only the waste basket, the historian of a hundred years from now may pounce upon with glee since it's obvious that the historian needs all types of literature in his search for hidden facts.

Thus it is obvious that the historical library which collects only substantial and finely printed volumes is not a working library."

And I, as I have a lot of "Aha" moments, you know, in this whole thing that's been going on for 30 some years here.

I looked at this here and the previous director here she said "we were thinking about throwing it away because it's kind of just there, you know, it's kind of an old thing that really means nothing. "

I about had a heart attack, of course, you know.

I thought "wow" this is an object that, you know, and she wasn't aware at the time that I was, you know, in my pasttime, trying to come up with information about this and I said, "Let's start talking about maybe I should get my act together and produce something," and luckily, through this whole process ,one of my archaeological friends, Doug Burke, who passed away about a year ago at a young age of 72, I think it was, had encouraged me to write up this stuff and have it, you know, available for people in the future.

Just like what he's saying here, you know, 100 years from now somebody might look at that and say with glee "Wow", you know, I've been looking for that type of information."

This was in relic condition.

It's what people mostly throw way.

Like another piece over here, which is part of a another project.

What these people that found out had the same idea.

Is this something we just throw in the garbage or or is it something worth, you know, keeping and saving?

And I usually say "let's save it first, you know, because there may be a story with it.

It seems like most objects do have a story to tell.

Okay, getting on to this one here but I looked at this and and I said it was unique and so unique from different muzzleloading firearms of the time period.

And the time period that we're talking is the 1700's.

Somewhere between 1730 and 1780 and that's a long time ago - almost 250 years ago.

And, in studying this I had to learn a lot.

I thought I knew a lot in the 1980s but I discovered in researching this I knew very little and had to keep learning every day of my life almost.

But, what was really unique here, you look at it - it's got a nice slim looking appearance.

When I talk about slim and architecture, I'm going to compare to some other firearms over here but he's got a wrist here, very narrow, 1-3/8 inches.

When I started doing this documenting of this and making a tracing a pattern of it, I thought, well I 'll get it all, all this information.

I'll put it down and I call that information a "material analysis".

But this butt plate here, that measures 1-3/8 inches in width.

The wrist is 1-3/8 inches in width.

It has what's called a cheek rest up here, cheek piece, very prominent.

It has a side plate here, flat brass.

It has engraving on it, as does the butt plate at the top.

Not what we would call highly high quality engraving but engraving, and it has a lock plate.

This is where the flint lock is.

This is what - right here, that's what the flintlock looks like when it's all in one piece.

And this particular shape is very unique and that's why when I saw it with a combination of these things in a sliding wooden box, I said "this is something that may be valuable and rare."

The shape of this is called banana shape.

If you can look on this one maybe you can see it easier but it's got a little bit of a arc to it on the bottom of it and it curves around like the shape of a banana, and that particular shape basically goes back around 1730 to 1760.

Guns of the 1700's was an evolutionary time in gun making.

Flintlock making guns in particular.

But here's the standard.

Everything being built in the 1700's basically was coming out of Germany, France, some out of England.

The only people coming to Minnesota in the 1700's were fur trade trappers typically, or some early explorers.

And that didn't really start till about 1730 with some French traders and trappers carrying French trade gun type "fusils" or "fusees", as they were pronounced, and the gun makers in Europe - France and Germany, England in particular, and if you look at these butt plates here you'll see that they're all not shaped, or identical.

That's because there's an evolutionary process going here.

This one here is a French piece that dates around 1730 -1740, and I've drawn on it in marker here, the shape of this one - the back side 1-3/8 inches in width - and if you look here, all these butt plates have wide distances between here - pear shapes.

We call these top pieces here "tangs".

The early pieces in particular that came through the fur trade here, the French and even most of the English had a tang of 4-5-6 inches in length.

The typical butt plate that came in the 1700's looked more like this on what are called northwest trade guns and this here is an example of a northwest trade gun right here, from the British time period - British era.

And, you can look at this and see a side plate that's got kind of a serpent-type design to it.

The lock is round faced, kind of like the the Lower Hay Lake one, but it does not have the banana shape.

Things are changing again, evolving a little bit.

If you notice the trigger guard is a big old screwed-on, big-bow thing, and a butt plate that's nailed on.

This was a typical trade gun, or smooth bore, that was produced by the British and traded to the local native peoples that lived here in this region of Minnesota.

And if you're going to find artifacts here, 90% of them are going to come off of a firearm like this, it seems like typically.

And this has an octagon-to-round barrel for a certain length, usually about 7 - 8 - 9 inches and a couple of wedding bands, circles on here wedding bands.

Now there's two original gun barrels that are here that show that.

There were Northwest guns found in our area.

I know the museum here has examples of lock plates, side plates, several artifacts from the time.

Now here's one that's you look at it and you say "This is the similar Northwest trade gun".

Remember I talked about the French coming in the early 1700's to about 1760 when the French and Indian War ended - then the British became the land owners of this particular area here in Minnesota.

But when you do the measurements and then do the calculations, this gun barrel has an octagon length much longer and one single band on it.

And when you do the measurements on the inside of the bore, with the dimensions of the breech - the width of the breech, it comes out a French trade gun barrel, and having examples of French and British, I think are kind of cool, because to explain to people these little subtle differences of gun development in Europe - France, England, and Germany in particular.

Now this gun over here, the Lower Hay Lake artifact, and the asymmetric top of the butt plate - the engraving and so forth on it, it's an important little key in identification because it ties to an evolution that started with Germanic rifles.

Now, Germany is a big area.

A lot of ties on the display here - we have two important pieces of the puzzle on the identity of the Lower Hay Lake relic.

We have the Germanic rifle that evolved into different types of guns, but, generally speaking, the Germanic guns have a characteristic heavy, large, butt stock area about the width of it, and the long tang on top and so forth.

The early German people that did come to this eastern coast, not necessarily here to Minnesota yet, came carrying firearms similar to this.

This one I call a transition piece, because it does carry, if you look at it, the very large cheek rest again that I talked about that's on that Lower Hay Lake relic, some very restrained carving.

This happens to be "in-size" carving, "in-size" carving here as well.

It has a patch box on the side and this was the early brass style of patch block.

It's meant to open this way instead of a sliding wooden box lid like it's on there, which this is replacing, this is replacing.

It's a newer technology.

But look at the width of that the wrist again, instead of being a skinny 1-3/8's inches, you're looking at 1-5/8's or 1-3/4's inches in width, much heavier, but also take note of the side plate is sort of a serpent example again comparable to the flat serpent side plate over there on the Lower Hay Lake.

In the trigger guard, pretty massive, pretty big, pretty wide, nice grip on it and so forth and the barrel is octagon-swamped and not octagon-round, like we showed on the trade gun earlier, which is to reduce weight and the length, of course, is short - this has about a 31 - 32 inch barrel on it.

And, if you do some research into German history and this firearm, they used it in the mountains in Germany and there's a lot of wild boar running around.

It has sling swivels on it here to attach a sling for carrying over the shoulder and so these are kind of some key identification things that I want to point out now- as before we get into some of the other details I'm working up to here.

That's the German piece.

Now we have the French type of gun that was very common and brought here to the Minnesota regions.

And if you look at the profile, the stock profile - the architecture of it, the buttstock looks a lot different.

If you compare the two, this has a very kind of swooping comb to it and grooved on each side here, and the butt plate is wide still.

The lock is more flat.

Not the typical really rounded one that we've been talking about so far in this presentation here and the trigger guard on it is something I call a special trigger guard because it's a rifle trigger guard.

This has a sliding wooden box on it.

They're dovetailed to just slide in and that's where they would keep little tiny tools for maintaining the gun.

Sometimes patches, I guess, would go in there too.

But it clicks in and is held there by a spring on the butt plate.

This rear sight on it, and anytime you put a sight on it, typically, it changes from a trade gun to a smooth rifle, and there's a little bit more weight, actually, to this too.

Smooth rifles tended to weigh more.

Smooth bore trade guns weighed less, and we're talking trade guns of 6 - 7 pounds and probably a gun like this, 7 - 8 pounds.

Rifle trigger guards are important to the accuracy of the gun because they get a grip for your hand, not the typical trade gun one, which has no ..it's just a smooth piece along the bottom of the wrist area here.

So they're important to identify the differences between those - and put on by attachment of one screw.

Usually one screw and then on the attachment in the front, there's a pin that goes through a lug that you can't see in the wood underneath the lock and so forth, that comes out on the other side to hold everything together as one piece.

So this is a French piece that was very common, used in Minnesota and came through this area.

But the artifacts are very rare, that's why I say this one matches out very well with that gun barrel, and those match out very well with the trade gun.

Now, this gun here, the Lower Hay Lake, has a few things that are.. Oh, I didn't mention, but the wrist on that French gun is about 1-1/2 inches in width and round-shaped.

This is round-shaped.

This is more like an egg, a little more egg-shaped than the rest.

These are subtle differences but they are part of the development process going on in Europe in the 1700's.

In searching for this, I took many photographs, and had photographs taken of it.

All these details, to do an analysis of this particular gun.

And, I would send these photographs off with my analysis of each part that I could take a photograph of here, and the measurements, and ask these experts to tell me what I've got here.

"What is this relic stock"?

And, I sent it to famous people that were really the experts of the time and one of them was Kit Ravenshear, on a Hstoric Arms Preservation Society in New Berlin, Pennsylvania.

And, Mr. Ravinshear had worked in London for years, came to Canada, worked for Parks Canada and did a lot of work identifying and interpreting firearms from the French period in particular, and English in Canada before going to Pennsylvania.

And his reply back to me says "Your curious rifle".

Dear Mr. Nelson, as dated in February 1989 - by the way, it says "Thank you for your letter and photos.

I don't know what this is.

I've never seen anything like this before".

And, I thought "Huh, I'm relying on you to tell me what this particular relic stock is", and he says I'm going to..

I'm going to gun shows on the east coast and I'll show these photos around and I'll get, reply back to you."

But I also sent to the Museum of the Fur Trade in Chadron, Nebraska.

Now Charles Hanson, in my opinion, was the person, the most knowledgeable person in the United States on fur trade firearms.

Charlie was in his 70s I think in the in the, well this is dated in 1994 in this particular letter.

But he says "I appreciate it.

On your relic gun stock from Lower Hay Lake.

This appears to be a fascinating gun.

It must be a rifle because it has the patch box.

The lock plate looks continental but the side plate doesn't ring any bell.

It seems to suggest that this might be a French rifle.

But I have no idea.

I will try to do a little bit more research".

So this is what Charlie was referring to, this side plate here looking French.

To look at the profile, you can kind of see how it's been blended together a little bit from the German and French.

If you look close and I know that I've been doing this for years and it might not be to the untrained eye so easy to see but things are being combined.

Well, later on I went to England because Kit Ravenshear gave me a bunch of contacts in England to visit.

This was the first letter was prior to my visit and I was going over there with a friend, Pete Humphrey, who was the Anthropologist here at the college and he had an invitation to the British Museum to look at Native American artifacts collected in Minnesota and northern Minnesota and Canada and I was going to accompany him to be the photographer.

So, I was doing a duo thing here.

But, this is after you took the pictures to the shows on the East Coast, all the gun shows.

And there's an opinion he says but I think I concur that it was a European Export Trade Rifle and he said not necessarily anything to do with a fur trade.

It has much northern Germanic influence and may even have been Scandinavian. "

He says "I've seen Danish so-called guns that have very narrow almost parallel sided butt plates."

And then he said "Well, Scandinavians settled in Minnesota , so they must have brought one."

Well, it makes sense if this gun was brought in in the late 1800s perhaps but it would not look like this I guarantee you being brought in and when the Swedes came in the 1850s and 60s in particular.

But he did give me another clue.

So these export guns regardless of their origin, low countries over there, they rarely ever seems to have marketed at home.

There's a raft of cheaper guns.

Well, that makes total sense.

Remember I'm talking about the engraving not being highly fine engraving, is more crudely.

Well, when you start examining the engraving to examples on chief's grade guns being produced by the British like this one here.

This one dates about 1790.

This is an original.

But if you start looking at engraving and this is another type of serpent type side plate engraving on the top.

It's more simple simple engraving, not the real high fine guns that you find in museums.

These were usable guns and when I was in England in the British or in the Tower of London, I saw similar guns to this on display along with their very fine high art firearms collected from the royalty and so forth.

Well, anyway, I was not happy with the response I guess because it to me it was off base.

You know, it could be Scandinavian but it did not come in with the with the Scandinavians in the 1850s and 60s.

That didn't match out because they didn't make guns with butt plates and lock plates and like that that late.

That's a hundred years too late.

So I was kind of frustrated.

I got back to the States and all the experts that failed me is what I was saying to myself.

Well, AHA!

You know little AHA's started peeking all around because I had to grow as a person for one thing and learn more and learn more about history, and the times and guns and themselves.

I made one more contact with Mr. George Shumway, who published books and he did publish books about German guns, Germanatic rifles and so forth.

And I called him on the phone and he said "Well, what you're describing sounds like some firearms that may come from a part of Germany that I have not really researched yet.

But I know there's some items out there.

There's one in some museums in Philadelphia and such and such.

But it's in the southwest corner of Germany."

So I started looking at maps and when he did publish his book, there was some information about this area down here on this illustrated map and actually I ran into a German traveling last winter, told me how to pronounce it and i cannot remember how to pronounce.

It's spelled o d-e-n-w-a-l-d - Odenwald.

He had a German name for it.

But, it's a little area down here between the Neckar River and the Rhine River and there's kind of a forested area in there and a valley and a community of gunsmiths he found were making firearms in Germany that had narrow butt plates, tangs like this and side plates with some similarity and a trigger guard that is on here.

But this is a casting of what I used to make a copy here.

This was a very common denominator in those particular firearms just about every one of them that those gun makers were making there had a trigger guard that looked very much like this, mounted on their guns.

That trigger guard was popular all the way to the 1800s, because here's another one off an original from the same area, Belgium.

This was from the 1850s and 60s in a time period there.

So the same design hung on in that area for hundreds of years.

Well, anyways the Odenwald region is what I started calling this particular gun and I was pretty much sold that it was totally there until I ran into some Swiss people in Maine last year.

He recognized all these names on that map and he was rattling off stuff, you know, and I was saying "how in the world, you know, would a relic gunstock get from there to America and Minnesota" and he said "Well.

you know there's an old road."

I said "No I don't know there's an old road", but he said on on his map he pointed there's an old road that goes way back and from Switzerland all the way up to the ports.

"You know where trade would be so they could go that road or they could go by the Rhine river. "

You know that helps me a little bit because I had discovered through Kit Ravenshear that this town of Hanover there in Germany, Northern Germany, was a major exporter of German guns to England.

Going back as early as 1746-47 era.

And I thought "holy smokes" there's a few little pieces that are kind of gelling here.

Moving on to this Casper Wistar now.

Now Wistar, I found out was a forester right from that Palatinate, that same exact area, who moved to Philadelphia around 1720 and in around 1730, he got the bright idea because rifles were short in America at the time.

They didn't have many rifles.

All the guns that were coming were similar to this German piece here, but he said the American hunters want longer gun barrels on their guns.

He had relatives and friends that still live back in that particular area and so he sent orders back there for custom specific dimensional guns to be produced.

And, then for Germans because there was a tariff on all this sort of thing, taxes, he coordinated an influx of people moving to Philadelphia bringing these custom guns as their own to get away from having to pay taxes and bring them to him which he would sell to the American frontier people in Philadelphia area.

Amazingly, the butt plate design on those firearms that he was bringing and there are some examples that I came across, looked somewhat like this one and I thought "holy smokes" okay, because I was trying to prove too that, perhaps this gun might have been made by a U.S. gunsmith.

Well, there's also gunsmiths from Switzerland that were also moving to Philadelphia and one of his name was Jacob Dubs and Jacob Dubs set up business in the 1730s and produced guns using these butt plates that were being brought over as trade items to be sold to upcoming gunsmiths in the Philadelphia, Lancaster, Pennsylvania area.

That's on the east coast.

But we're still, this is in Minnesota.

Okay, 1730s, 1740s and maybe even 1750s I'm talking about on the east coast and the British and the French had a war, French and Indian War that was fought a little bit east of here.

But a lot of the fur traders that were in Minnesota at the time were called back to fight this war.

And when they lost in 1761, the British were right there and ready to take over this lucrative fur trade in this area here that the French had possessed for not quite a hundred years but close to and they knew the value of furs.

The beaver pelt was called soft gold because it was actually worth more than gold back in the 1700s.

There's a lot of records kept by British traders that really bare that information to truth.

When they sent these furs to Europe be produced into hats and all kinds of fineries that were, you know, like the top of the line blue jeans today, I guess.

You know, the same type of correlation.

So, I started looking at records in the 1760s for fur traders that came to the Brainerd Lakes area.

Specifically, trying to find somebody that was actually a fur trade post at Lower Hay Lake.

And, politics, there's a lot of politics still going on in the 1760s and one of the politics was the Pontiac, the Chief Pontiac War that was basically stopping traffic going forth to this frontier out here.

You know, the Mississippi area out here was a northwest frontier in that day and age and the traders were having a hard time getting here safely and the British leadership was actually saying "Don't go, don't go".

And, there is an account of a Lieutenant James Gorrell at Green Bay in 1762 that stated in it, Indians were traveling to Green Bay Michilimackinac with their broken firearms that they had gotten from the French and wanted the British, the English to replace them or repair them.

Now, the war basically stopped all this and the lifespan of these firearms on the frontier because of those harsh environmental conditions would maybe be ten years at the most before they deteriorated to become a relic or a piece that would be not usable anymore.

And so, Gorrell wrote that in his journal and of course relayed that to Michilimackinac and in 1762 and I run across an interesting biography of Lawrence Ermatinger.

Lawrence Ermatinger was Swiss and specifically right there Schaffhausen and he was a gunsmith by trade.

Well, in his biography, he had left Schaffhausen as a gunsmith, went to London, he met up with a James Tri.

They formed a partnership, a fur trade partnership , this is 1761 - 1762 just as this area is becoming under English ownership.

He moved to Montreal and he contacted a lot of the French trappers that had been into this area, to try to contract them to be part of his firm.

He would get the trade goods and get them provided with it to bring in to this remote region.

This was a very remote region for the white people at that time, the Europeans.

So, in 1762 and 1766 and 1767, there are some records that show up about trade goods being provided.

And, another trader moved to Michilimackinac at the same time, named John Askin and John Askin became like the commissary of the whole fort at Michilimackinac, kind of coordinated everybody.

Made sure, you know, that they had 100 trade guns here, they had rum in this one or they had whatever they were trading blankets and so forth.

Plus, you know, you want to make money, is what their plan is.

All these guys have this big thing in the sky but we're going to make all this money off the fur trade and he was no different.

And so, he began making more connections with inbetween people in Philadelphia, New York, Montreal with connections in London but also in other countries.

Because as he stated in his journal, he was actually trying out new types of trade goods and items to see how they would work in the frontier.

How the Native people would perceive them because the Native people were actually in charge of the type of goods that were being brought in.

They did not want cheap goods that didn't work, gave up.

So they would complain, ask for a new one to come back next year that had their specifications to it.

Time after time and the British, anyway, tried to meet their expectations but at the same time they tried to show them new technology that they might like.

Now, the rifle, remember I talked about rifle technology versus smooth bore.

The difference between the two and the weight factor.

Well, if you're living in the Minnesota frontier in that day and age, you're traveling by canoe.

You're traveling on foot and weight makes a difference.

You don't want to have anything terribly heavy to lug around if you don't have to.

So a rifle had a problem because it always weighs more because it requires more metal around the bore size to shoot a round ball projectile.

It creates more pressure.

You don't want these barrels to burst or or crack or anything.

The smooth bores, on the other hand, because they have no rifling resistance had less issues with that and they were more versatile.

That's why the smooth bore trade gun was so popular.

The Indians, they didn't weigh, much six pounds, seven pounds and you could shoot a round ball and you could shoot shot if you wanted to shoot geese, ducks, grouse and a round ball to shoot a deer or a bear.

So, it's more versatile and it was and they continually asked for these guns to be shorter.

That long barreled one up there was like the beginning of it.

45 inches long, then it goes to 36 inches long and eventually down into the Germanic rifle length, around 30 some inches long.

How does this fit in there now?

Well, luckily in 1769, I stumbled upon a fur trade record related to Lawrence Ermatinger.

Hey, here it is, chronological.

What I do is keep everything, timeline chronologically speaking, so that everything that I'm talking about should fit historically.

Anything happening in historic time, it should be correct okay.

Should not be out of place.

That's why this is not a Scandinavian gun coming in in 1850 because the thing the items on here were not produced in 1850.

They're produced in 1700.

In 1769 in Lawrence Ermatinger's records which includes liquor and guns.

Among the goods he traded to the Indians, his outfit of two canoes and 15 men took 160 gallons of rum and brandy, 32 gallons of wine, 500 pounds of gunpowder and 1,000 pounds of ball and shot.

And this was the big item, and 16 rifles to the upper country trade.

This was that area they're talking about.

And he later wrote a supplier, when ordering 100 Northwest guns and a thousand ball, "You will know that these are absolutely necessary for the Indian trade."

Now, this is the first historical record of a journal or narrative that I have ever found that mentions the rifle and the reason I believe him, because he was a gunsmith from Schaffhausen, Switzerland who had contacts over there to get him these type of goods.

Now, remember I was just talking earlier about the scarcity of repaired firearms and firearms for trade at the Green Bay post?

This was right after the French and Indian War when the British discovered that the American use of the rifle, because George Washington was actually involved with that war, but the rifle was used for the first time in warfare and they started to see like there might be a possibility that this might be another type of firearm that would be useful on the frontier to the Native people and the fur trader of course, but the Native people in particular because that's where they were trying to make their money out of the furs.

Based on all of the literature that I could find then, only one other rifle I could find anywhere in any trade goods and it belonged to John Askin, who I talked about a little bit earlier, about how he coordinated things.

He had one in his personal inventory in 1776.

It was called an English rifle gun.

So that was approximately seven-eight years later and interestingly enough in that period from 1769 through 1775-76 in researching the history of this area and traders that came here.

One of them that come up was James McGill.

James McGill actually had McGill University in Montreal named after him.

But, in his biography it mentions his first trip to the wild was 1766 and he recorded a post, the only post that I know that he recorded was at Crow Wing, Old Crowing State Park today, 1771.

Okay, and he was known to have contacts with Ermatinger and Askin because they all coordinated this goods, you know, and and tried them out with the Native peoples and tried to think of ways that they could make money again, make money again.

In 1774, the traders that were in this area, Peter Pond was one of them.

Edward Chen.

I'm trying to think of another one, Blondo.

They came back to Michilimackinac and said to the commandant there, there's war.

There's a big battle going on, has occurred between the Ojibwe and the Dakota.

This whole, the land was Dakota at one time before the Ojibwe moved in from the east.

But they recorded this conflict.

This is an important little piece of history in my opinion, because 1768 is the oral history of the of the Ojibwe stating there was this battle, big battle at Crow Wing and so forth that created this atmosphere where traders would not come in.

You stayed away.

You know you didn't want to lose your goods or get caught choosing sides basically.

So the commandant depister told the traders Pond and these others, okay I want you to go back to this area and talk to these chiefs and have them come back to Michilimackinac the following year in order to settle this dispute because we want to have peace, friendly conditions.

We don't want to going in there and having all this conflict and having to worry about you're on this side or that side.

We want to have a distinct line that says Dakota people, you're on this side of the river.

Ojibwe, you are on this side of the river.

And, lo and behold that did occur.

Those Indian chiefs did come to Michilimackinac.

And, I don't know if you've read about these peace relationship type discussions or whatever, but you know you have the sides and so forth and you discuss it and you agree.

The Indian people have a very good way of doing that, you know, discussing and making sure everybody's in agreement and so forth before they actually put an x or a mark or whatever it is that they're agreeing to.

Well, they agreed to the Mississippi River right here in town, the Crow Wing River, just downstream a little bit, and they agreed that the Ojibwe people could live peaceably on the east side of this river, the line and the Dakota would live on the west side.

And if you can look at the history of the Indian people which is included here, you notice how the Dakota kept moving further to the plains and further to the south down to Minneapolis-St. Paul today, Minnesota River regions and so forth.

And so, that was one of the early agreements that was made and what I would like to point out here too, is that war that they called in the Warren's book on the Ojibwe history that occurred at Crow Wing State Park in 1768, I think occurred in 1773 or 4 actually and historians recorded these pits that were used in the battle where they were on this high bank ,because the Dakota had came up the Mississippi, slid up into the Crow Wing, up the Gull, up to the north, came around raided the Ojibwe people's camp at Sandy Lake.

Well, the Ojibwe went down to do the same basically but didn't find anybody home but when they came back stream they found the indications that the Dakota had came up here and was doing the same to their people.

So, they stopped at Crow Wing and on this high banks that overlooks the Mississippi River and the Crow Wing Island, there's a current that comes out of the Crow Wing and they dug these holes in the ground to hide themselves.

When the Dakota people came canoeing downstream with the captives from their their family members and so forth, they fired upon them and this battle ensued there for a strike battle for two three days and they used up all the ammunition, they were throwing rocks at each other and all you know all this hand-to-hand type stuff.

But anyway, when it was all over and as recorded in history, they called these dug holes, these pits they called them rifle pits, not trade gun pits, not smooth bore pits, but rifle pits and I've often scorned that that whole description and saying it can't be a rifle pit.

It has to be a trade gun or something.

Well, now maybe my tune has changed because I have actually found that there were some rifles that came up here and this I believe to be one of them.

One of the early rifles brought into this area and I believe it is the oldest rifle relic so far discovered in Minnesota.

Even without all of the things that you need to 100 percent identify it, it has every characteristic of a rifle and Kit Ravenshear, Charlie Hanson, several people, all kind of concur with it had to be a rifle and if it was not a rifled barrel, it was at least a smooth bore rifle, kind of like the French gun there set up.

Okay, I believe that it, was could have been Dakota or Ojibwe all right because the Whitefish Chain of Lakes there's another battle that occurred up there later on that is dated as 1800, so it could be either Ojibwe or Dakota.

It could have been provided by the traders or it could have maybe came from the peace conference in 1775.

And the reason I think it was definitely Indian ownership, you see the way that everything's been forcibly broke off.

The lock plate.

The trigger guard has been broken on the bottom, the triggers broke off but what really is astounding on this whole thing, the sliding wooden patch box lid still exists right here and that one particular item is one of the first things ever lost on the frontier.

Usually these are never ever found anymore even on original guns.

This has been lost and replaced typically, but this one still exists.

So, there's another piece of information I got from Charles Hanson and it was a quote by John Askin, the traitor from Michilimackinac.

This is the document that I've developed all of this years of looking for answers and I got this as this asking paper information from Charles Hanson of the Museum of the Fur Trade.

"John Askin's personal papers provide more insight in the condition of the rifle relic and how it got broken and found as a butt stock missing the barrel and forestock.

Indians inhabiting the interior of the country ask and described, it is well known that the Indians always have the guns of their deceased relation deposited in a broken condition in their graves which deprives the rising generation from benefiting.

The stock of the gun and the barrel are directly broke ahead of the trigger guard."

So that little disclosure from him matches out well with this and it could have came from a grave that was above water before the dam was built by the Corps in 1886-87 and when the rising waters came up and over the course of time, there's the management of the Corps dams in headwaters here is to is to basically draw down in the fall, the lake level for the snowmelt in the in the spring so that it comes up.

So there's a period where the lake is going down and usually by December it gets down to its lowest level and then they try to try to hold it.

I think Mr. Gustafson who had property on Lower Hay Lake, walking the shoreline, all of a sudden there was this stick of wood basically with a butt plate on it sticking out of the ground, picked it up and said "Oh here's an interesting artifact from the fur trade days."

There's no account that I can find that there there was a grave but people die at different times.

You know you don't all die in war or die in camp or whatever.

Sometimes you're traveling and that's a major travel route through there Lower Hay Lake, Lower Hay Creek, the Whitefish Chain, the Pine River all the way down to the Mississippi.

There's all these connections and they could have been traveling to pick blueberries or they could have been traveling to hunt and people die and so a lot of times they buried people along these trails.

If they're buried for 100 years, you know it's hard to know that they were there.

But when I was up there as the manager for years I'd always have people stop in my office from time to time and say well I know there's this got to be a burial ground over there because I see bones, you know, sticking out of the banks and things like that from the water eroding it away so.

So, there are sites that are undocumented really, mostly undocumented and I assume that's probably one of those sites.

There's a lot of documented sites that under protection but you never know.

But, anyway that's kind of the story but I felt that this here does not tell the entire story unless you know what it really looked like, you know, trying to imagine the rest of it.

So, that's why I built this particular gun using the architecture and profile of that.

I made up a pattern, dimensions and so forth like I had talked about earlier and I wanted to make what I would call a export trade rifle.

Kind of a chief's grade version of it, you know, a special gun with engraving and I did not match everything perfectly because in my research I found out that the gun makers never did that.

On pieces like this, they made them unique and not exactly the same.

So, I followed that same concept but I used the narrow butt plate one and three-eighths inches.

I used the tang dimension for the length.

I made using the trigger guard based on the information that that was the type of castings available of the time.

The banana lock plate, the site.

You know I did all this research based mainly on photographs of guns from museums which were highly ornate.

It's hard to find a plainer Jane gun like what I call this is a plainer Jane gun.

And, the engraving because of the it is rather not high art engraving, you know, the gun making in Europe at the time was comprised of many people doing different parts of the construction of making trigger guards, casting it, making triggers, making lock internals, barrels, casting the parts, inletting the stocks.

Usually, one gun maker did not make the entire gun himself with several people and he had journeyman workers as well.

And, a journeyman worker would be tasked with learning to engrave, you know, so it wouldn't be as high quality as which you would give to the Danish king or somebody else.

So, there's limited carving on it.

I call it restrain because that would have been correct for a piece given to the Indians but it would be fancy enough to be special.

So, it could have been a special gun given at an agreement at Michilimackinac settling the war issues.

I even made the nose cap out of horn because a lot of those guns were made with what are called horn nose caps, protect the muzzle.

And, one of the requirements of this particular gun that I developed was it had to weigh eight pounds is what I figured.

Now I used to, when I was earlier days owned an original gun barrel very much like this one.

It was a Germanic barrel.

Now, you can see this is all octagon, all the way around not the round octagon around but all octagon.

It had a 34 inch gun length barrel which is longer than what you would normally see in these Germanic rifles.

It fit the spec of rifles being produced by that description I was talking about in Philadelphia by Casper Wistar.

But this is one that was given to me by a friend of mine and it's interesting because this barrel has been cut off and rebreached.

Because they tell you stories too when you look at the bottom, you see little lugs here where pins go through to hold it to the gun stock.

You can see vacant ones where it's been removed and if you measure it out you know this measures out about four and a half inches.

What happens when in use, the breech end because it's loaded just about every day of its life on the frontier, gets what's called breech burn.

It erodes the interior of it.

It's a big hole in there and it gets very thin and it could burst and injure the shooter.

So, the frontier gunsmith which is another study I've got on here, would cut the barrel off re-breech it and move everything back in the stock and re-pin everything.

What's interesting about this, normally the breech end is always thicker in dimensions and width than the muzzle end.

This happens to measure 15 /16 at the muzzle and 7/8 at the breech.

You should have turned it around maybe and did it backwards when he re-did it.

It would have matched out a lot easier but he didn't.

The frontier gunsmith just moved everything back but when you add the measurements like four and a half inches back here and you add this on to here which was cut off, it comes out to about a little over 15 /16 diameter barrel which makes sense for a swamp barrel to start out about that and end up nearly the same or a little less at the muzzle.

Even a piece like this, an object like this, has a story to tell and is worth something I think at least historically maybe not in value, but historically.

And just so you know, I don't go out and buy these things, these artifacts.

That's not what I do.

You know, I don't consider myself a collector, but people, I don't know, they become friends, I guess.

Don't even know them but they say look your presentation, "I have this at home would you be interested in using it in your presentations?"

I said "sure" so the next thing you know they come up and here it's yours, you know.

Use it for education.

So, that's what I'm trying to do, is educate people because in the Brainerd Lakes area and I'm sure up in in Bemidji, as well, on the lakes people move in and they, I mean they're happy to move in and they go out and they mow their lawn they put a dock in and all of a sudden there's this piece of metal sticking out of the ground and they say what in the world is that.

They dig it up, must be something old that's for sure, but is it logging, is it, you know, sometimes it doesn't look like what it really is and i'm really trying to get people to at least show it to somebody in a museum, somebody that that might know a little more, you know, before it gets tossed into a wastebasket.

And, for you folks even in Brainerd and the county, you have to realize this is a gem.

This is one of the gems in the State of Minnesota and I could probably say that about every museum in the State of Minnesota.

They're a gem because they're collecting history.

They're collecting stories, objects that people have left for some reason that were some things were valuable, some things were nostalgic, whatever, but it's all related and connected and that's what's here.

History is so important that today's society, I'm afraid and I'm really a little concerned about it, is more into what is happening now and what is happening in their immediate future.

Not so much about the past or what's in the far future and I think those two areas have to be brought together more into their focus in today's society.