There are apparently good reasons to assume that there were already hundreds of guns in circulation among the Indians by 1650, at least by what is presented here:
http://www.amazon.com/Most-Pernicio...WJ0_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1407220265&sr=1-1
I was talking about 1590.
And indeed pretty much the only reason bows would have been preferred over guns, of any kind, was the lack of availability. And as long as there were multiple rival european factions present and providing trade and gifts, availability of guns and ammunition wasn't much of a problem, apparently.
Depends on the timeframe. In the 16th and 17th centuries, there was not that much of a firearm trade with the natives, and in any case firearms were not automatically a better weapon than a good bow in the hands of a skilled archer, of whom the natives had plenty. This is not a sign of native "primitiveness," since the English themselves clung to the bow well into the 16th century!
Even later, firearms and ammunition were not always that plentiful, since even at Little Bighorn many native men wielded bows, clubs, hatchets, and spears.
I'm not so sure the Comanche are making any kind of repesentative case, if that story is indeed correct. On the northern plains, guns, any guns were prized possesions, and even small numbers had a significant impact.
As far as I can tell, the Comanches preferred traditional weapons. Firearms in the late 18th and early 19th century were often clumsy to use from horseback, and the Comanche always fought mounted when possible. They seem to have done just fine with bows and spears, since they terrorized and devastated northern Mexico for decades and were done in more by disease than anything else. Indeed, at the same time plenty of European cavalry used lances and swords as standard weapons quite effectively in a more dangerous environment.
From what I have read on the French and Indian War, bows were pretty much obsolete by that time, and securing guns and ammo supply for the Indians, and trying to cut it off by their respective enemies were extremely important objectives.
By the mid-18th century, societies which fought on foot and had plenty of trade with firearm-producing societies definitely got as many guns as they could. Nobody's disputing that.
I never quite got those arguments. The historical record seems to show that almost anywhere where there was a real choice between guns and bows, guns were used, even by "warrior peoples" where the time for training wasn't an issue. Certainly so by the time flintlocks came around.
How exactly are bows, of any kind, outranging guns, of any kind? Even crappy guns have a much, much higher muzzle velocity than the best bows. A lead ball is much less affected by wind and foliage than an arrow.
Even a smoothbore musket with a very large windage will put about half of the shots into a man sized target at hundred yards on the shooting stand, a distance where an Indian archer would probably not even try to hit a target.
Higher rate of fire is the only argument that makes sense to me, yet this would be more than counterbalanced by a much, much large wound effect of a musket ball compared to an arrow.
And for the skirmish and ambush type of warfare in the eastern woodlands, rate of fire is probably not much of an issue in the first place.
Arrows won't penetrate armor and shields in most cases, where only under rare circumstances armor or shields would be effective against guns.
Guns do indeed tend to have better range, power*, and accuracy than bows, but you're focusing on mid-18th century Eastern Woodlands combat and I'm not. Armor and shields were rarely significant factors in fighting between native peoples, and by the time a lot of natives got guns, few if any Europeans used them anymore.
*It's not entirely relevant to who wins the engagement, but arrows can cause pretty nightmarish wounds. The American Dr. Joseph Howland Bill's 22-page essay "Notes on Arrow Wounds" was written in 1862, and contains some pretty cringeworthy sections,
as summarized here. He treated dozens of cases, and noted that arrow wounds were often more lethal and harder to treat than gunshot wounds. Of 36 men hit in the torso, 22 died. He also noted that the bow's rate of shot meant that his cases were almost always hit multiple times; three unlucky soldiers had 42 wounds between them. Yet the bow's low stopping power meant that even with so many wounds, people often survived.
Still, this shows that bows were still used frequently in combat well into the mid- to late-19th century, and that they could be lethal. Obviously, natives who fought on foot preferred guns by this time period, but I was originally discussing the 16th and 17th centuries, not the mid-18th century onward.
