How did settlers make gunpowder?

The first documented use of a firearm was a matchlock musket in 1364, but gunpowder has been around since as early as the 9th century when it was first discovered in China. When European colonists established their first North American settlement in 1607 (Jamestown), gunpowder-based firearms were the weapons of choice because of how easy they were to use and the massive damage they could inflict on the enemy, but all these guns were completely useless without the explosive propellant known as gunpowder. It took close to three months to sail one way across the Atlantic and waiting a minimum of six months for a resupply of powder was out of the question, so they had to produce it themselves with the land they had.

(The flintlock firing mechanism was used for over 200 years and relied entirely on the production of gunpowder)

Gunpowder is the name given to the explosive propellant that fires the bullet forward, but there isn’t a set recipe for gunpowder and it’s nothing more than a name. Modern firearms still use a propellant referred to as gunpowder but it’s completely different from what was used in the days of the musket. A more accurate name for this early form would be black powder which is always made with the same three ingredients, charcoal, sulfur, and something called saltpeter which has the chemical name Potassium nitrate.

The three ingredients were mixed in various ratios but during the 1600s it was discovered that a mix of 75% saltpeter, 15% charcoal, and 10% sulfur was the most reactive. Charcoal can easily be made anywhere in huge quantities and sulfur can be mined from around volcanic areas and hot springs. Saltpeter was the main problem because it cannot be found in a mineable vein anywhere in the world apart from two small regions, with one in India and one in Indonesia.

Production of Black powder is all about obtaining saltpeter since it’s not only the main ingredient but also the most important, causing the whole reaction to take place and can’t be substituted for anything else available at the time, so where did it come from?

The short answer

It is extracted from soil using urine

(A bowl of Saltpetre, a substance that looks just like large flakes of regular salt)

Saltpetre is found naturally in soil all over the world, but it is very well mixed in and can’t even be seen with the naked eye, appearing in tiny amounts throughout the soil. In the areas of the world that colonial Europe occupied, there wasn’t a single SaltPetre mine that the mineral came from, and wherever European settlers went they made their own, and here’s how.

Step one – Create your extraction pile

A mound of earth would be made that consists of 50% soil, 25% animal manure, and 25% plant matter like leaves, grass, plant tops, etc… It would then be well mixed together and formed into a pile, usually no more than six feet high or wide. If the pile is too big the saltpeter in the center will have to go too far from the middle and won’t be able to reach the outside to be gathered.

Step two – Urine and covering

The Saltpetre forms crystals through the decomposition of plant matter and feces, boosted by the addition of urine. The bacterial reaction makes the substance group together and comes to the surface of the pile, but this reaction needs fresh bacteria and ammonia to help keep things going. Every day someone would come along and empty a bucket or two of urine all over the pile, which normally came from people saving up the contents of their chamber pots. The urine would be poured on each day which would keep the reaction going at an optimal rate, and after each pouring a cover would be put over the pile to protect it from rainfall which would dissolve any saltpeter that formed and wash it back into the soil.

Step Three – The wait

This was the only way that people had to mass produce Saltpetre but it wasn’t exactly the fastest way to do it. The whole process would take between two and three months and would need to have urine added each day, so some poor villagers would have the job of going around everyone’s house with buckets and collecting the contents of people’s chamber pots before walking back to the pile to pour it on. Saltpeter production would be done locally and according to the amount of urine available, so a small village would be expected to have a pile or two on the go while a city would have entire teams doing nothing but collecting and pouring urine on dozens of mounds of soil. In farming areas, the process would be aided by keeping animals in barns with stone floors that run off into a drain, as a single cow would produce around 3.5 gallons (ca. 13 liters) of urine per day compared to the average of 2 liters for a human.

Step 4 -Collecting

How long the urine pouring part of the process would take depends on the Saltpetre content of the soil and what it’s mixed with, along with the ambient temperature and several other factors, but generally, it would take between two and three months. After this, a layer of white salt-like crystals would form on the surface and someone would have to scrape it all off into a bucket. Due to the reaction, most of the saltpeter would be forced to the surface and very little would be left inside the pile, so people would usually just collect what they could see and not bother going through the inside to collect a little extra. Saltpetre doesn’t expire and if kept dry will technically never go bad, and because all it needs is soil, manure, plant matter, and urine it can be produced constantly anywhere there are people, with the ingredients being produced whether you want them to or not. There was never really a shortage of saltpeter so people simply didn’t bother going through the trouble of digging through the pile to get that tiny bit extra.

Step Five – Cleaning

Scraping the Saltpetre off the surface would inevitably cause soil and other bits to get into the mix, so it had to be cleaned before it could be used. To do this they would mix what they had gathered with water to dissolve the Saltpetre before running it through a series of cloth filters to remove any dirt and bits. The cleaned liquid mix would then be left to evaporate or gently heated to remove the water, leaving behind a white substance that looks like flaky salt.

There you have it, the process for making Saltpetre in colonial times, or in fact any time up until they started to use self-contained bullets in the late 1800s which used a different mix for their gunpowder. The charcoal, Sulfur, and Saltpetre would be ground up and mixed into a powder, with how fine its ground dictating the reaction speed, but grinding it too fine would cause it to react too quickly inside the gun and might cause it to explode.

The hardest part of making black powder was obtaining the sulfur as the process of extracting it from the various sulfur-containing minerals was difficult and finding it naturally meant having access to the right areas. Fortunately, when it does occur naturally, it’s often found in large quantities and is normally sitting right on the surface, making it easy to mine in enormous amounts.

How Black powder was discovered in the first place is anyone’s guess, but personally, I think it was from people emptying their toilet pots on the same piece of soil for so long that Saltpetre started to form on the surface, but how they came up the idea to take that and mix it with sulfur and charcoal is beyond me.