[John Rogers]

As I noted in an earlier post, I watched the movie for the way they portrayed the rifles that were used and from what I saw they were pretty close to the way things work in real life. The biggest thing to get is that the Indians can shoot arrows much faster than a white man can shoot a flint lock! I am not so sure about the power their bows had but I did notice they took their arrows from the dead men after the fighting stopped since it was hard to make them. As for the rifles, most all were smooth bores and they can shoot a single round ball or shot depending on what you want to kill. If you watch closely in some scenes there are people that keep the frizzen covered with some cloth to prevent the snow from wetting the priming powder. We do that if we are shooting a muzzle loading match and there is any mist or rain as we don't want misfires either. You'll also note that in many cases the shooters seemed to just dump powder down the barrel but in reality the hole in the powder horn was set so if the shooter counted to 3 he would have 70 or 80 grains of black powder which was a good hunting load. The calibers were probably either 69 caliber for the military muskets or 50 caliber for the Hawken rifles which were just being started back then. The final thing to note is the black powder they used then was much cleaner burning than what we have today mainly due to the hardwood used as the base to make it.