First your story is none. Now its " not in sufficient numbers. " You are weaseling, a common debating tactic. Oh, and supposedly its not west of the Appalachians, as if the Indians had to pay a toll, or register, to go over the crest! We have seen guns show up all over the Eastern United States and Canada, and they may have traveled back and forth.
Sorry, Guns don't check in with historians, before they are moved. They are tools. People use them, just like we do today.
The first thing I was taught about History, in College, is that what we read about can only be a close proximation of what happened, because most history is written a generation later, when the people involved in events are often no longer on hand to tell their stories. We do supplement history with Archeology, but again, that only gives a part of the picture. New evidence found in all kinds of places unknown by historians, changes what they have written, and it happens all the time. The oldest such discovery now known is the finding of a huge archeological site in the Western Egyptian Desert, that indicates a 4th pyramid, and gives information that changes our understanding of the Great Pyramids.
The Dead Sea scrolls are another example of new information found 2,000 years after the Bible was written, that modifies what we thought we knew.
When I was in college, NO ONE could read the hyrogliphics in the Mayan, and INCAN tombs. Today they can. It has completely changed what we knew back 30 years ago about these civilizations and how they dealt with their environment.
You seem to grab onto books, and legers as if they were the Ten Commandments, written by God. MY fellow classmates and I were dispelled of such grand ideas before I completed my first history course.
Please don't let your own experience, knowledge, and practice be set aside for what someone writes in a book, be it history, or archeology. If you knew some of the GOOFs who are now " noted " historians, that I have met, you would not be so married to the idea that any book can give you " Historically Correct " anything. History is constantly being re-written as more artifacts are found, in more places. Many of the histories I have read when in college 35 years ago have been re-written with discoveries made since then.
I even had one pompous Professor who claimed that he had the definite " Histories" on everything that happened during the Civil War. During the course of a 2 semester Course on American Constitutional History, he was presented with " new " information by some of us undergrads, and by his grauate students that contradicted most of his early published writings. The last day of class, he admitted that many of his earlier works were wrong, and that he was going to have to reexamine them in light of the new research he had been shown. My respect for the man grew mightily, although he was still insufferable in person.
The same is going on all the time with the history of gun usage. I was merely trying to point out that while guns have changed, People haven't. I wasn't there, either. But, my experience about how people act around guns, and in fighting, tells me that the historical accounts of people picking up weapons on battle fields from the fallen friends and foe going all the way back to Babylonia, and before, are true.
American settlers went west of the Appalachians, in spite of British laws that forbade it, to find new lands, and make new futures for their families. They were there before the French and Indian wars. They went there after that war. In 1777, they were slaughtered by Indians raiding out of the North by the thousands, in lonely homesteads, where their graves were unmarked. What they had with them, who they were, and what guns were taken from their bodies by the Indians can never be known.
But, a lot of Hessian, and British soldiers deserted over those years, and fled inland to avoid arrest and execution, finding wives, and making homes in the wilderness. They were the same kind of " outlaws" that have always lived at the fringe of civilization. They didn't desert the army over cowardice. Ill treatment, bad food, or the love of a bondservant might be motive enough, but they were hardly cowards.
I know these facts are true because of the scant written historical records that do exist, and comments by contemporary writers. But they were writing about people, not guns, and what Indians " preferred". It is the history of people that tells me that people were no different then than they are now. And that is why our common experiences tell us that anyone who says " never " about anything doing with humans is kidding themselves.
My father, who did not go to college, was fond of saying, " Believe only half of what you see, and nothing of what you read, and you will be okay". His advice still is not too far from the truth.
Completely irrelevant to the subject at hand. :slap: 
