How To Smoke A Turkey With A Blunderbuss
By Gary Lewis
Pilgrims, pirates and privateers. Pioneers, postal carriers and partridge hunters. They all had a need for the blunderbuss in the late 1700s and early 1800s.
The blunderbuss is often pictured in cartoons and illustrations associated with pilgrims and pirates and for good reason. It was fast to load and fierce in a fight. I confess, I never thought I would own one. But in 2021, I built one, and came to understand why this forerunner of today's modern shotgun and harbinger of the short barreled rifle was so important in the day of the pioneer.
Cheap to produce with a crude wooden stock and a short, often unfinished barrel, from the dirty streets of London to the mean back alleys of Boston and a lot of places in between, a blunderbuss was a gun for the carriage or the ship, and a defender of home and hearth.
I built the short bell-barreled smokepole from a kit from La Grande-based muzzle-loaders.com and by the time I was finished, I knew I would take it hunting.
One of the best hunting opportunities in Oregon now is the wild turkey which was not indigenous to our state but now exists in such numbers to justify spring and fall seasons.
In the middle of January, I slipped over the mountain to hunt turkeys near Junction City with my friend and fellow outdoor writer Troy Rodakowski.
HOW TO SMOKE A WILD TURKEY.
Pour 80 grains of black powder down the barrel. Follow it with a paper card to hold the powder in place. Pour 1-1/4 ounces of shot down the barrel then tamp down a fiber wad to hold the charge in place. The flared muzzle of the blunderbuss makes loading easy.
Next, pour a small amount of FFFFg powder into the pan then close the frizzen over it.
Late in the afternoon, a flock of seven gobblers strode into the open and paused to bask in the sunlight where I was able to stalk within 16 yards.
The first thing you notice when you shoulder a blunderbuss is it is hard to aim at the thing you want to shoot. Lining up the flared muzzle on the one bird that was separate from the others, I could not see it as I held the barrel steady and squeezed the trigger. The flint struck sparks into the powder and the powder fizzed for over a full second before it ignited the charge in the barrel. Boom! A white cloud of burnt powder hung in the air and a big gobbler lay stretched out in the sunlight.
It is a certainty that a lot of Conestogas and Studebaker wagons headed toward Oregon Territory (pronounced Oree-GONE by Missourians that were populating the new frontier) in the 1840s had a flared-muzzle shotgun tucked away inside. These were working guns, for close range self defense or to procure wild poultry for the larder.
The Traditions Flintlock Blunderbuss is available for $419
