TV "Programming"

[Ninurta]

@"Michigan Swamp Buck" 

Another thing I noticed is that the earlier westerns portrayed the Native Americans as violent dangerous savages

I appreciated how they were depicted in "The Revenant".  Good illustration of how the superiority of firearms over bows and arrows wasn't so pronounced in close terrain and poor visibility.

Cheers

A lot of Indians didn't transition to firearms until long after the switch to repeating weapons. It seems that a bow and arrow was a lot faster to reload than a single-shot muzzle loader, so they preferred to put rounds downrange and only used firearms initially for hunting, where the game was not trying to kill them right back. Flint locks stayed in vogue long after the transition to percussion firearms for a similar reason among Indians and hillbillies. We could make our own flints for a flintlock, but caps were often harder to come by out in the hinterlands.

That is why some Confederates, even as late as the early part of the Civil War, were still using flintlocks when they had to bring their own guns with them - that was the only thing they had at home to bring. It wasn't a matter of hillbillies being "backwards" so much as it was a matter of practicality in the wilderness, where there were no handy convenience stores if you ran out of stuff to make your gun run.

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