ash as gun stock wood

[Mike R]

I reading the Tunica Treasure and Tunica archeology books by Jeffry Brain of Harvard, I noted one Tunica burial contained a ca. 1730s French trade gun [maybe a 'type D', don't remember--most were, although several 'type C' parts were found too] that had wood stock material still attached.  The wood was typed as 'black ash'.  Was this a european wood?  Or is this an indication of a period restock in Louisiana? Any ideas? I tend to think of mainly walnut on trade guns...

[Mike Brooks]

Here's something about the black ash I found on the net. seems to be a northern grown tree. Couldn't find any reference to Europe. Must have been a Canadian restock, which is entirely possible I suppose.

   
Black Ash
Fraxinus nigra

The Black Ash has a tall trunk with a fairly uniform diameter up to the branches. The soft, ash-gray bark is fissured into scaly plates, which easily can be reduced to powder by rubbing. The Black Ash is a tree of wet places. It favors the wet soils of cold swamps, peat bogs, and stream bottoms that periodically are flooded. This is a northern tree, the most northern of the ash trees. It grows in much of southeastern Canada, the Great Lakes Region, and the northeastern-most states. In Ohio most records are from the northern half of the state, although a few local records occur in the southern counties. The wood of the Black Ash is soft but durable and it separates easily into thin layers. Strips of split wood are used in making baskets, barrel hoops and chair bottoms. This has given rise to alternate common names of "Basket Ash" and "Hoop Ash." Carpenters also sometimes use the wood for interior finish.

Personally if charged with the task of restocking a gun in Canada I would have chosen a piece of black walnut, I have always found ash less than desirable for stock wood, difficult to work with.

[Robby]

I can see a gun being stocked in red or white ash, but black ash would be very difficult. Sometimes the same variety of a specific tree will be known by a different name, based on locality. , Kind of like "Iron wood", it means a different tree to different people, to some its hop hornbeam, to some, its blue beech, and to others its something else, this all within a fifteen mile radius of me, and includes even more species, depending on generation.
Robby

[woodsrunner]

Not much I can add as the "self appointed duty forester". It's a North American species, not European. Baskets and chair bottoms are about the only uses for the wood which which the lumber industry grades somewhere down around "W" or "X" with White and Green Ash being around "A" and "B".

[Dan'l 1946]

I reading the Tunica Treasure and Tunica archeology books by Jeffry Brain of Harvard, I noted one Tunica burial contained a ca. 1730s French trade gun [maybe a 'type D', don't remember--most were, although several 'type C' parts were found too] that had wood stock material still attached.  The wood was typed as 'black ash'.  Was this a european wood?  Or is this an indication of a period restock in Louisiana? Any ideas? I tend to think of mainly walnut on trade guns...

Probably a re-stock. Beech was sometimes used to stock these guns, too.