The Repeating Rifle (Transforming Power of Technology)

TRANSFORMING POWER OF TECHNOLOGY GUNPOWDER THE INTERNET THE PERSONAL COMPUTER THE PRINTING PRESS THE REPEATING RIFLE THE STEAM ENGINE

TRANSFORMING POWER OF TECHNOLOGY THE

REPEATING RIFLE Samuel Willard Crompton

Philadelphia

Frontis: Rifles line the walls at Springfield Armory.

CHELSEA HOUSE PUBLISHERS VP, NEW PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT Sally Cheney DIRECTOR OF PRODUCTION Kim Shinners CREATIVE MANAGER Takeshi Takahashi MANUFACTURING MANAGER Diann Grasse

Staff for THE REPEATING RIFLE EXECUTIVE EDITOR Lee Marcott ASSOCIATE EDITOR Kate Sullivan PRODUCTION ASSISTANT Megan Emery PICTURE RESEARCHER Amy Dunleavy SERIES AND COVER DESIGNER Keith Trego LAYOUT 21st Century Publishing and Communications Inc. ©2004 by Chelsea House Publishers, a subsidiary of Haights Cross Communications. All rights reserved. Printed and bound in the United States of America.

http://www.chelseahouse.com First Printing 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Crompton, Samuel Willard. The repeating rifle/by Samuel Willard Crompton. p. cm.—(Transforming power of technology) Contents: Kentucky rifles versus British rifles—Anatomy of the gun—Inventors and inventions—The American Civil War—The Wild West—Arms for empire— The Great War—Gangsters and G-men—The arsenal of democracy—Hunters, sportsmen, and regulators. ISBN 0-7910-7452-8 1. Rifles—Juvenile literature. [1. Rifles—History.] I. Title. II. Series. TS536.4.C76 2003 683.4'22—dc21 2003014060

CONTENTS

1

Kentucky Rifles versus British Rifles

2

Anatomy of the Gun

14

3

Inventors and Inventions

24

4

The American Civil War

34

5

The Wild West

44

6

Arms for Empire

54

7

The Great War

64

8

Gangsters and G-Men

72

9

The Arsenal of Democracy

80

Hunters, Sportsmen, and Regulators

88

10

Chronology of Events Notes Bibliography Further Reading Index

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96 100 102 104 105

1

Kentucky Rifles versus British Rifles Like lightning, the flashes; like thunder, the noise; Our rifles struck the poor Tories with sudden surprise.

AT ISSUE

— From a popular ballad

Guns have played an important part in American life from the earliest days of the colonial settlements. During the Revolutionary War, many Americans fought with the new Kentucky rifle (which was really first made in Pennsylvania). Most British soldiers were armed with the “Brown Bess” musket. But on at least two occasions, the British were armed with the new Ferguson rifle. Do such battles tell us anything about men and the weapons they use? Do men win battles, or do their weapons do the job?

The Revolutionary War was in its sixth year with no end in sight. Around noon on October 7, 1780, a large force of American militia gathered around the base of Kings Mountain, South Carolina. They had been pursuing British Major Patrick Ferguson and his Loyalist (Tory) recruits; now they had run them down to earth. But Ferguson and his men held the high ground, and with their new rifles they enjoyed a potential superiority in firepower. What the Americans had was a gritty resolve to defeat Ferguson and his Loyalists. Charles Town, South Carolina, had surrendered to the British army under General Henry Clinton five months earlier, in May 1780. More than 5,000 American Patriots had laid down their arms in what was the greatest victory for British forces in the Revolutionary War. General Clinton had sailed back to New York City, leaving General Charles Cornwallis in charge of the southern front. Cornwallis was a skillful and daring leader.

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Kentucky Rifles versus British Rifles

In October of 1780, Loyalist recruits were massed at the summit of Kings Mountain. Armed with the new breech-loading rifle, they believed their defensive position was impenetrable. But American frontiersmen, armed with the new Kentucky rifle and a fierce determination, won the day.

He relied on the information given to him by two subordinates in particular: Banastre Tarleton and Patrick Ferguson. Tarleton and Ferguson were about as different as two British officers could be. Tarleton, who was about 26, was a cavalry officer, full of dash and unquestioned courage. He had, however, earned a reputation for brutality. When he and his troops had caught up with a retreating group of American Patriots at Waxhaws, South Carolina, Tarleton’s green-coated dragoons slaughtered well over 100 of the Americans, even those who had tried to surrender. Soon after the incident, Tarleton was nicknamed “Bloody Ben” and “Black Ben,” and the expression “Tarleton’s Quarter” became common in the American South. Tarleton became the man most hated by the American Patriots. Ferguson was quite different. About ten years older than

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THE REPEATING RIFLE

Tarleton, Ferguson had entered the British army at an early age. He rose through the ranks gradually, became a captain, and made his name through an invention rather than from his performance in any particular battle. Sometime around 1775, Ferguson developed the first successful breech-loading rifle known in the world. Other men had designed breechloaders before, but none of these guns had ever been considered or evaluated by the experts of any major European nation. Ferguson’s rifle (and it was a rifle, rather than a musket) employed a trigger guard that rotated 180 degrees. As the trigger guard rotated, it created an opening at the top of the gun, on the breech, allowing a soldier to insert a ball and powder.1 Simply rotating the trigger guard again closed the opening, and the gun was ready to be fired. This was a significant improvement over the traditional muzzle-loading muskets that were being used by every European power of the day, and by virtually all of the Americans, whether they were Patriots or Loyalists. Ferguson had achieved something quite remarkable. On June 1, 1776, Ferguson demonstrated his rifle to the British ordnance experts at Woolwich, England. Lord Jeffrey Amherst, who had come to observe the demonstration, was astonished by Ferguson’s ability to fire four shots a minute, even though there was a light drizzle of rain.2 This was significant because rainy conditions made the widely used flintlock muskets inoperable. Furthermore, because he was both something of an athlete and a fine marksman, Ferguson was able to hit his target three times out of four even when lying down. Such accuracy was unheard of with the flintlock. Despite the success of the demonstration, however, the conservative British army authorized the purchase of only 100 of the new Ferguson rifles. The rifles were made that year, and in 1777, Ferguson crossed the Atlantic to serve under General William Howe in what the British hoped would be the final campaign against the American rebels. At the Battle of Brandywine Creek, fought in Pennsylvania in September 1777, Ferguson briefly had American General

Kentucky Rifles versus British Rifles

Breech-loading rifles were much easier to load than the old muzzle-loading rifles. The Ferguson rifle, pictured here, had a trigger guard that could be rotated to open or close the chamber that held the ball and powder. With this time-saving device, soldiers were ready to shoot more quickly.

George Washington in his sights. The American leader had come dangerously close to the British lines, and Ferguson could have dropped him from the saddle. Something stayed Ferguson’s hand. Whether this was old-fashioned British chivalry or simply hesitation, Ferguson let Washington ride away. Historians ever since have remarked that the fate of the American Revolution might have been different had Ferguson made the shot. During the battle, Ferguson suffered an injury to his right elbow. He was unable to serve in combat for some weeks. While Ferguson was recuperating, General Howe disbanded the Ferguson riflemen and put the Ferguson rifles in storage. In his younger years, General Howe had been a daring officer, but he now suffered from the inborn conservatism of the British army. He hoped to hear no more about new rifles, or about Major Ferguson. In 1778, General Howe was replaced by General Henry Clinton. The new commander was intrigued by Ferguson and with the promise of the new Ferguson rifle. Thus, Major Ferguson accompanied General Clinton on his voyage south in 1779, and played a part in

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THE REPEATING RIFLE

the siege of Charles Town that ended in May of 1780. Ferguson was then authorized to raise a regiment of American Loyalists and arm them with his new weapon. Ferguson proceeded apace, gathering loyalist recruits, but his efforts were derailed by news of the Massacre at Waxhaws where Banastre Tarleton and his dragoons had slaughtered American soldiers. Many American Loyalists became too frightened to join the British army, and the fury of the American frontiersmen knew no bounds. They were ready to fight Tarleton, Ferguson, and whoever else might come along. The men who gathered to fight the British have been described in a publication of the National Park Service. Written in 1945, these words echo the spirit of the mountain men of North and South Carolina during the Revolution: The pioneer mountain men ordinarily were tall, gaunt, saturnine, somewhat indolent, but fully capable of sustained, severe activity. They were of strong will, adventurous, and highly individualistic, leader less, resentful of discipline, but vigorous, sturdy, and thoroughly adaptable to the country in which they elected to make their homes. Even to this day the mountain people are stout individualists, independent in their thinking, and intensely loyal to their country. The introduction of schools, roads, and automobiles and the vast complexity of modern life have markedly changed their customs. They have passed in less than one generation from pre-Victorians, living in glorious simplicity, to the current age of speed. This pioneer stock, however, remains even today unmixed with foreign elements. They are, excepting the Indians, our purest-blooded Americans.3

The men described in the publication were men like Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett. They were women like Nancy Ward who had chased the British out of her home during the Revolution. They were even men like Andrew Jackson who fought four duels in his long life, and who became president of the United States

Kentucky Rifles versus British Rifles

at the age of 59. These were the men and women who first used the Kentucky rifle. As the news of the Massacre at Waxhaws spread, many of the Carolina mountain men came out in force to resist the British. One group of them won a skirmish against Ferguson’s Loyalist troops at Ramsour’s Mill, South Carolina. Furious, Ferguson sent a message to the mountain men, urging them to lay down their arms and act peacefully. He warned that if they refused, he would travel through their land and wreck destruction on their homes. In September 1780, British General Cornwallis led his army in a full-scale invasion of North Carolina. Major Ferguson and his Loyalist soldiers were given the honor of conducting the left wing. But as they moved into North Carolina, Ferguson and his men did not realize that they were being tracked by a large group of Carolina mountain men. Led by men with names like Campbell, Sevier, and Shelby, many of these mountain men were sons or grandsons of Scots Highlanders who had fought for Bonnie Prince Charlie in the Scottish uprising of 1745. The Scots had been crushed by the English at the Battle of Culloden in 1746, and their descendants bore no love for King George or the Union Jack. Even so, they might have stayed out of the conflict had it not been for Ferguson’s threat, which they considered a great insult. When he realized how close the mountain men were, Ferguson took up his defensive position on Kings Mountain, located just one mile south of the border between North Carolina and South Carolina. There he believed he could withstand the attacks of all the mountain men in the world. He held the high ground, and his men were trained in the use of his rifle. The mountain men arrived at the base of Kings Mountain at noon on October 7 and commenced their attack at around three in the afternoon. Ferguson had placed his men in good defensive positions, but it availed them little. The Loyalist troops lacked the vigor and decisiveness of the mountain men. Within one hour, the battle was over. Ferguson was dead. His regiment had suffered enormous casualties. About 250 were killed outright; about 150

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THE REPEATING RIFLE

were badly wounded. All the rest, about 800, were taken prisoner. It was a resounding victory for the mountain men.4 Ferguson’s disastrous defeat caused General Cornwallis to delay the invasion of North Carolina. When he moved north a second time, in January of 1781, Cornwallis’ left flank also suffered a severe defeat. This time it was Colonel Banastre Tarleton and his cavalrymen who were thrashed at the Battle of Cowpens, won by American General Daniel Morgan. A Pennsylvanian by birth, and a frontiersman to his fingertips, Morgan became the idol of

The Kentucky Rifle It was a misnomer from the very start. The “Kentucky” rifle was actually manufactured in Pennsylvania, by German and Swiss gunsmiths who never saw the Kentucky bluegrass. But the name stuck, and the Kentucky rifle became one of the most famous of all early American guns. Sometime around 1720, a handful of gunsmiths in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, began to experiment with making rifles rather than muskets. Rifle comes from the German word riflen, meaning “to groove.” By making grooves in the barrel of a gun, a smith was able to provide a countervailing force against the randomness that came from a smooth-bored barrel. By about 1750, the Lancaster County smiths had perfected the Kentucky rifle, which became the mainstay for the American frontiersmen until the time of Davy Crockett. The Kentucky rifle was much more accurate than the smoothbore musket that preceded it. An American rifleman could hit his target — often a turkey or pheasant — at a range of 200, and sometimes even 250 yards, while the musket was reliable only at a range of 50 to 100 yards. The only weakness of the Kentucky rifle was that it took a long time to reload, perhaps as much as three times as long as it took to reload the smoothbore musket. This did not make a difference in hunting, but in warfare, riflemen were kept back from the front lines so that they could fire without being exposed to enemy bayonet charges. Long, lean, and light, the Kentucky rifle resembled the frontiersmen who held it in their hands. A thing of beauty, it remains a major collector’s item today, and it speaks volumes about the resourcefulness of early American craftsmen.

Kentucky Rifles versus British Rifles

the rugged Americans who fought the British in the south. General Cornwallis moved his forces to the coast of Virginia, where he thought he would have greater success. Instead, he ended up at a tobacco town called Yorktown, where he met his nemesis. In October of 1781, Cornwallis surrendered and the Revolutionary War ended. The Battle of Kings Mountain highlights some of the different social and military forces involved in the Revolutionary War. A group of American frontiersmen, bound together more by family and clan loyalty than by loyalty to a new country, met and defeated a group of American Loyalists. The Kentucky rifle, carried by the Patriots, defeated the Ferguson rifle, carried by some of the Loyalists. It was a conflict between order and discipline on one hand, and vigor and individualism on the other, and it would be echoed throughout the history of the rifle. Even today, Americans are divided between those who firmly believe in the right and need of the individual citizen to bear arms and those who believe that those arms have become too dangerous for common use. These contrasting beliefs, in their infancy, were seen at the Battle of Kings Mountain. A popular ballad about the battle ran: We marched to the Cowpens, Campbell was there Shelby, Cleveland, and Colonel Sevier; Men of renown, sir, like lions, so bold— Like lions undaunted, ne’er to be controlled. We set out on our march that very same night; Sometimes we were wrong, sometimes we were right; Our hearts being run in true liberty’s mold, We valued not hunger, wet, weary, or cold. On the top of Kings Mountain the old rogue we found, And like brave heroes, his camp did surround; Like lightning, the flashes; like thunder, the noise; Our rifles struck the poor Tories with sudden surprise.5

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AT ISSUE

2

Anatomy of the Gun

No one knows exactly who first invented guns.The inventor or inventors are lost to history. The progression from matchlock to wheel lock and then to flintlock parallels other movements in world technology. At the same time that Europeans discarded the matchlock in favor of the wheel lock, seamen abandoned the caravel for the galleon. Later, when European soldiers discarded the wheel lock for the flintlock, naval shipwrights stopped building galleons, and began building ships-of-the-line. What do these changes in military and naval technology suggest about weapons development? Did weapons development help or impede in the growth of other technologies?

No one knows exactly who coined the expression “lock, stock, and barrel,” but the words are now synonymous with the phrase “the whole darned thing.” It is interesting that an expression concerning firearms has been applied to purchases and the exchange of goods; perhaps this indicates the meaning and value that Americans give to their weapons. The “lock” is that part of the gun that strikes the match, flint, or percussion cap, thereby igniting the gunpowder within the pan. The stock is the part of the weapon which the person shooting holds closest to himself, usually to his cheek. The barrel is the part of the gun that holds the gunpowder and cartridge. Every gun is made from these three rather simple units, but the variations on these three units have been extensive over the centuries.

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Anatomy of the Gun

15

This modern rifle, displayed by an Olympic athlete, shows that the basic design of rifles has not changed much since the Revolutionary War era. The lock strikes a percussion cap, igniting the gunpowder. The athlete holds the stock braced against his shoulder. The cartridge is fired through the barrel at the front end.

Humans have been using projectiles of different sorts for thousands of years. The Romans made catapults; the Byzantines employed a type of naphtha called “Greek fire”; and the Chinese were master builders of the mangonel, a sophisticated siege weapon. But no one used gunpowder until around 1,000 years ago, and it only came into general use in Europe in the fifteenth century. Guns and gunpowder first appeared in Europe in the middle of the fourteenth century. They had been invented in China and had made their way west. The first recorded use of cannon came at the siege of the city of Calais in 1347, during the Hundred Years’ War between England and France. 6

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THE REPEATING RIFLE

Although the armored knight would play a role on the battlefield for another 200 years, the primacy he had enjoyed during the Middle Ages was coming to an end; a trained musketeer would soon be able to bring down the greatest and best trained of knights. Cannon came first, but were followed by the earliest firearms in the middle of the fifteenth century. The very word “firearms” comes from an “arm that fires,” which can be loosely translated into “gun.” The matchlock gun was the first to appear, shortly before Columbus sailed to the Americas. The matchlock resembled the guns of today; it was carried by a single individual, who could fire, move, load, and fire again. All this was an improvement over cannon, which were too heavy to move and required cannoneers that stood in one place. The matchlock had the three components that we still identify with any form of gun. The stock was the wooden part that included the back section held to the gunner’s cheek as well as the wood that ran up to the gun’s muzzle. Stocks were highly valued. Made of brown walnut, they were often pieces of art in their own way; many gunners chose to embellish them with illustrated carvings. The barrel was made of bronze or iron parts and held the bullet and powder. Barrels were usually not ornamented, and gunners did not mourn the loss of a barrel in the same way they would the loss of a stock. The barrel could be more readily replaced. That left the lock, the most complicated part of the gun. Nearly always on the top part of the gun, the lock was positioned where the gun began to slope down to the part held to the gunner’s cheek or shoulder. The word “lock” comes from the resemblance between the operation of a clock and the operation of the early trigger and firing systems. The lock had an opening, which led to a pan where gunpowder was placed. This design remained the same for

Anatomy of the Gun

several centuries. What was often altered was the method of igniting the powder within the pan. The issue of how best to accomplish this led to three distinctive types of guns between about 1450 and 1750. They were the matchlock, wheel lock, and flintlock. First designed in the fifteenth century, the matchlock involved the use of a slow-burning fuse. The gunner carried a number of fuses on his person, and in battle (or while hunting), he lit the end of the cord near the gun. When the trigger was pulled, the match and fuse quickly descended and ignited the powder within the pan. For all its cumbersome process, the matchlock was a fearsome weapon; it let off a tremendous noise and may have frightened as many people as it actually harmed. One of the most telling examples of the use of the matchlock comes from North America. In 1609, French explorer Samuel de Champlain traveled down the lake in New York that now bears his name. He made friends with a number of Algonquin Indians and agreed to fight with them against their traditional enemies, the Five Nations of Iroquois. Near the head of Lake Champlain, the Frenchman and one of his fellow colonists fought with the Algonquins against hundreds of Iroquois. Champlain later related how the use of just two matchlock guns had terrified the Iroquois: “He loaded his arquebus with four bullets, drew a bead on the three chiefs, and fired. All three fell, two dead and the third mortally wounded.” 7 The Iroquois fled in great fear. Champlain had won an important victory, but he had also turned the Iroquois into mortal enemies of the French. When the Iroquois obtained their own guns, they were swift to use them against the French in Canada. The matchlock was a terrific weapon in good weather, but the presence of the slow-burning fuse made it vulnerable to rain or snow, and gunners were sometimes injured when the matches and powder they carried exploded. Therefore, European gunsmiths

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THE REPEATING RIFLE

began to look for a new type of weapon. They came up with the wheel lock sometime in the sixteenth century. The wheel lock operated on much the same principle as the matchlock, but had no fuse. Instead, the trigger operated a wheel-like device that brought a hammer or “cock” down to the pan and ignited the soft iron pyrites it held. The great advantage of this gun was that it could be fired in all types of weather, because the powder within the pan was protected from the elements. The wheel lock became very popular with the knights and nobles of Europe. Starting in the sixteenth century and up until about 1700, knights and lords used the wheel lock for hunting, dueling, and to impress their friends. The wheel lock was truly a work of art, and engravers made the metal stock as shiny and ornate as they could.8 This was the gun carried by the “gentlemen adventurers” who came to Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607 and to Plymouth Plantation in 1620. If there was a weakness to the wheel lock, it was expense. The “wheel” had to be kept in excellent condition, and smoky black powder sometimes obscured the instruments and caused them to function poorly. More importantly, there were about 50 distinct parts of the wheel lock gun, most of which could be fitted only by an expert gunsmith. The wheel lock was therefore of limited use on the battlefield, since repairs could not be made on the spot. The gun remained a treasure of the European elite, but it did not have a great effect on the lives of the common people or the warfare of the times. The need for a gun that could perform in all sorts of weather led to the flintlock. First made by a Frenchman around 1615, the flintlock built on the earlier success of the matchlock. The flintlock musket looked much like a matchlock, but there were no fuses or matches. Instead, the gunner pulled back, or “cocked” a hammer, which when released, struck sparks from flint rather than iron pyrites. The main difference was that the flint struck fire nearly every time, and the powder in the pan was easily ignited.9

Anatomy of the Gun

19

The wheel lock rifle was invented by European gunsmiths in the sixteenth century and was first used by the European nobility for hunting and dueling. The stock was often engraved with elaborate designs.The “gentlemen adventurers” who sailed to Virginia in the early 1600s carried wheel lock rifles.

By about 1650, the flintlock had replaced the matchlock as the weapon of choice for musketeers, and by about 1700 both the matchlock and wheel lock were considered obsolete. The relative ease with which the flintlock could be fired, and the low cost of its repair, made it the standard weapon of the European infantryman, whether he was British, French, Spanish, or Austrian. British soldiers began using the famous “Brown Bess” musket in the early 1700s. This musket was not any better or more effective than its continental counterparts; what made the Brown Bess famous was that the British were already starting to create colonies around the world, and the Brown Bess appeared in far-off places like the Caribbean, North America, Africa, and India. First issued in 1703, the Brown Bess remained the

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THE REPEATING RIFLE

British soldiers began to use the Brown Bess, the first breechloading musket, in the early 1700s, at the same time that Britain was establishing its vast colonial empire. The Brown Bess saw action in North America, India, and Africa. It played a major role in the Revolutionary War, as these men performing a historical reenactment illustrate, and was still being used during the Napoleonic Wars of the early 1800s.

Anatomy of the Gun principal weapon of the British soldier until about 1840.10 During that time span, the British fought the Americans in the Revolutionary War, the French in the Napoleonic Wars, and several other enemy armies in smaller conflicts. Perhaps it was the steady quality of the Brown Bess musket that prevented the British from capitalizing upon the new invention of Major Patrick Ferguson. We can only wonder what might have happened in the Revolutionary War had the British equipped thousands of their men with this new rifle that could be loaded and fired three or four times per minute. But the ingrained conservatism of gunmakers and of ordnance suppliers prevailed, and the British stuck with the smoothbore musket. The new rifle created by colonists in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, was used primarily in West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. The people who used it were the hardy pioneers of the Appalachian Mountains. Their descendants still exhibit their hardy spirit, and since so much of riflemaking in the United States is tied up with their story, it is useful to examine these frontier and mountain people. Daniel Boone is the archetypal American frontiersman. Born in Pennsylvania, he moved a number of times in his youth, and by the time he was a self-sufficient young man, the frontier had moved to West Virginia. Boone was not the first American to go through the Cumberland Gap (that honor goes to Dr. Thomas Walker), but he was the first to lead a group of settlers through the Cumberland Gap to Kentucky. In 1774, these settlers built the fortified town of Boonesboro. The Shawnee Indians of Kentucky already called the white men “Long Knives,” but they might as well have called them “Long Rifles.” Equipped with the Lancaster County-made rifle, the Kentuckians fired three rounds a minute with great accuracy. Employing the Indian tactic of fighting man-to-man, and relying on marksmanship, the white settlers won most of their battles against the Indians. The distance from Virginia to Kentucky was so great that the Revolutionary War in Kentucky had a

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THE REPEATING RIFLE

Hardy pioneers like Daniel Boone used the Kentucky rifle, which was first manufactured in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. It could fire three rounds a minute and was often used by frontiersmen to fight Indians in the wilderness. The Kentucky rifle shown here has a maple stock and is decorated with wrought-iron trim.

Anatomy of the Gun

different character from that fought on the Atlantic coast. The Kentuckians fought a deadly, long war with the Shawnees, who were British allies. Thus, one of the last major engagements of the Revolutionary War was at Blue Licks, Kentucky, where the whites suffered a serious defeat at the hands of the Indians. The Shawnee were undefeated when the Revolutionary War ended, but the peace treaty between the newly independent colonies and Great Britain gave the western lands, including Kentucky, to the Americans. On paper at least, the young nation had acquired most of the land east of the Mississippi River. There was enough wildness and danger in the western lands to produce a whole new generation of restless and aggressive young white Americans. They now knew that their weaponry was superior to anything the Indians had, and they knew that given enough time they would make their way to the Mississippi River. This new generation of frontiersmen produced men such as Davy Crockett, Sam Houston, Jim Bowie, and Andrew Jackson. By 1800, something new and different had emerged in North America. A new, young nation called the United States of America had appeared. It might have looked fragile, since it stretched from Maine in the north to Georgia in the south and faced enemy Indians to the west and the Spanish to the southwest. But the most “forward-placed” Americans, the southern frontiersmen, had a firm belief in their right to the land, and they had adopted enough of the tactics of the Indians to become supreme wilderness fighters. Challenges lay ahead, to be sure, but the men of the mountains would meet them with courage and with ever-improving rifles.

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3

Inventors and Inventions

Three amateurs led the way in American gun development: Eli Whitney, Reverend Alexander Forsythe, and Samuel Colt. Not one of the three was trained in the development or making of guns, but each was a gifted inventor who took up the work as a personal passion and then contributed mightily to the growth of the firearms industry. What does this suggest about inventors and inventions? Are the best machines or guns those that come from industrial factories or major think tanks, or do they sometimes come from individual workshops and the driven pursuit of perfection?

At the very beginning of the nineteenth century, the gun remained much as it had been for the past 150 years. The flintlock musket was still the supreme firearm so far as generals, politicians, and contractors were concerned. Some small attention was given to the new rifles that were being produced in America, but nearly every authority agreed that the standard musket remained the most important battlefield weapon. This conservatism applied to the highest ranks of the greatest powers. The great Napoleon, who led more men in battle than any European commander since Roman times, never gave much thought to a replacement for the musket; his French soldiers continued to carry the Charlevoix musket, which had been a French staple since about 1765.

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Inventors and Inventions

Napoleon’s enemies were equally conservative. The British, by virtue of their navy and merchant marine, had access to the greater part of the globe. They were therefore in a position to know about the alternatives, yet they continued to use the Brown Bess musket, which had been standard issue to British infantrymen since 1745. Even the Duke of Wellington, Britain’s greatest soldier, disdained the idea of new weapons. What had served during the eighteenth century would continue to serve in the nineteenth. The Russians, Prussians, Spaniards, and Austrians also continued to use the weapons of the eighteenth century. The Napoleonic Wars, which raged from 1800 until 1815, were fought almost exclusively with muskets. This limitation did not prevent the wars from being deadly; some three million men perished during this time. But the gun was certainly not being pushed as far as it might; the burden of killing rested upon the single-shot musket, the bayonet charge, and the slash of the cavalryman’s saber. Because of the innate conservatism of the European leaders, it might be said that the eighteenth century, and its weapons, lasted until the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. On that battlefield, Napoleon’s career ended; so too did the rigid emphasis on straight lines of infantry and the exchange of single-shot volleys. When Napoleon lost his throne in 1815 and was exiled to the remote island of St. Helena, the European powers breathed a deep sigh of relief. Perhaps there would be peace for some time to come; at least, there would be no more interference from upstarts such as Bonaparte. One might think that the period of peace in Europe between 1815 and 1851, when the Crimean War began, might have been rather dull in terms of the development of weapons. The opposite proved the case. Three amateurs led the way in the making and refining guns. Historians often question the reality behind the myth of Eli Whitney. As much as his claims have been debunked, he

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THE REPEATING RIFLE

Fought in 1815, the Battle of Waterloo was typical of the major conflicts in which straight lines of infantrymen fired upon each other in single-shot volleys. As the infantrymen shot their rifles, cavalrymen charged enemy lines with swords. Napoleon lost the battle and was exiled to the island of St. Helena.

remains a key part of the American standardization process, especially where guns are concerned. Born in Massachusetts in 1765, Eli Whitney was entranced by things mechanical from an early age. In 1792, he went to Georgia to serve as a tutor on the plantation of Catherine

Inventors and Inventions

Greene, widow of Nathanael Greene, a Revolutionary general. While there, Whitney devised a simple machine that could separate pure cotton from cottonseeds 50 times faster than slaves could do by hand. In one bold stroke, Whitney solved a major problem for cotton farmers in the American South, and perpetuated a problem for the nation as a whole.11 Many people still believe that slavery might have died of its own weight had not the new cotton gin provided a way to make an unprofitable institution profitable. Whitney faced his own problem with his new invention. When he attempted to patent his machine, it was already too late. Others had copied his prototype before he could make a formal claim to it. Returning to the North, Whitney turned his inventive mind to the making of guns. He set up shop in Whitneyville, Connecticut, and he won contracts from the U.S. government to produce rifles. Whether they were truly rifles, with ridges, or whether they were just up-to-date smoothbore muskets remains the subject of some controversy. In either case, Whitney led the way in standardizing parts for small arms. Prior to 1800, virtually every musket or rifle made in the United States (and for that matter almost anywhere else) was handmade by an individual craftsman. This process led to a beautiful, even magnificent, product, but it was a slow process. Whitney foresaw that making standard parts, which could be rapidly replaced even by someone who was not an expert, was the way of the future. Though not specifically addressing the subject of guns, Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton had predicted this trend in his “Report on Manufactures” to the U.S. Congress in 1791. Whitney went to Washington, D.C. He presented his new equipment to President John Adams and a handful of cabinet officers who were deeply impressed by the speed with which Whitney could re-assemble guns from their constituent parts.12 Whitney continued to win government contracts, even though he was nearly always late in production.

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Eli Whitney, whose famous cotton gin removed seeds from cotton bolls 50 times faster than human hands, was also a skilled gunsmith. He was one of the first gunsmiths to envision rifles with replaceable standard parts. His ideas impressed President John Adams, and the U.S. government offered Whitney contracts to supply American fighting men. Unfortunately, his orders were seldom delivered on time.

At the time, there were only two federal armories in the United States: one at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, and the other in Springfield, Massachusetts. Because the latter was so close to the newly established factories of New England, and because innovation as a whole was faster in the North than in the South, the armory at Springfield was the leader in gun production. Soon after the end of the War of 1812, Yankee inventors began to puzzle over new ways to make guns, and they had notable successes. Meanwhile, a Scottish vicar led the way in making weapons much more dependable, and therefore more deadly. He was Reverend Alexander Forsythe of the parish of Belhelvie. Forsythe was an avid sportsman, who particularly enjoyed duck hunting. In the many hours he spent hunting, Forsythe found that the intended prey often escaped because

Inventors and Inventions

of the noise produced when the powder ignited in the pan. The second, or perhaps second-and-a-half between the ignition in the pan and the actual shot leaving the barrel allowed many ducks and other would-be victims to flee. Forsythe experimented for some time before he came up with an answer, which he found in fulminates. Forsythe found that some of these substances exploded more readily if they were struck by a sharp blow rather than through the traditional use of fire. He therefore designed something called the percussion lock, which later gave way to the percussion cap. Between them, these two innovations opened the way for guns that were truly weatherproof.13 The percussion lock was a round plug that was set onto the side of the gun barrel. The hammer descended, as in previous times, but it hit a small cap, which the rifleman placed on top of the percussion “bottle.” The result was an internal spark that led to the explosion of the bullet from the gun barrel, without the previous giveaway noise. Suddenly Forsythe could hunt his ducks more successfully. Had this device been patented and available for general use during the Napoleonic Wars, which were then coming to an end, those wars would have been infinitely more deadly. Even though we shudder to learn that 40,000 Frenchmen were killed or wounded at the Battle of Waterloo, that number could easily have been doubled had the percussion lock and cap been available. As it was, Forsythe’s invention came too late to influence the Napoleonic era. It came into its own over the next 40 years. Forsythe patented his percussion system in 1807, and set up in business in London, England, in partnership with James Watt, the man who had perfected the steam engine some 20 years earlier. But Forsythe, like Eli Whitney, never profited very much from his invention; the percussion system was too logical and was immediately copied by numerous other inventors. The use of the percussion lock and the

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This 1940 photograph of Springfield Armory in Massachusetts shows a visitor examining rows of rifles standing in their racks. Nearly 100 years earlier, poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow visited the armory with his wife, who thought the rifles resembled organ barrels. Longfellow later used this image in a poem dedicated to peace.

percussion cap spread rapidly to other countries, including Prussia, France, Austria, and the United States. The third amateur to break onto the scene was Samuel Colt of Hartford, Connecticut. His name would become nearly synonymous with pistols, rapid fire, and the conquest of the American West. Time has not dimmed Colt’s reputation. His legendary

Inventors and Inventions

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six-shooter is still considered one of the primary reasons why whites took the West from American Indians. As usual, though, there is both more and less to the story. Born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1814, Colt was a gifted but troubled child. In 1830, young Samuel set fire to a school building while conducting one of his explosion experiments, and his father sent him to sea. While at sea, Colt whittled a wooden model of a revolving, multi-barreled pistol. Returning home, Colt continued to work on his experiments. He took out the patent for his first pistol in 1836; the cylinder rotated automatically, soon giving it the nickname of “six-shooter.” In 1847, he contracted with Eli Whitney, Jr., to make 1,000 revolvers in Whitneyville, Connecticut. Some of the first Colt

The Federal Armories Springfield, Massachusetts, on the Connecticut River, was the site of the first federal armory in the United States. Harpers Ferry, located at the confluence of the Shenandoah and Potomac Rivers (in what is now West Virginia) was the second. The two locations have remained household words for nearly 200 years, as they have furnished so many of the weapons used by Americans from the War of 1812 to the Vietnam War. Springfield was in the center of a burgeoning industrial area. Between 1800 and 1880, the lower Connecticut River Valley was the birthplace of numerous innovations and inventions. The industrial lathe was pioneered there; the sewing machine received its start there; and the guns turned out at Springfield Armory were first-rate. Whether this was because of the quality of the tools or the dedication of the machinists is difficult to say. Harpers Ferry, which served as the armory for the Southern states, was attacked by the abolitionist John Brown in 1859. He intended to seize weapons and distribute them to slaves. Brown was cornered and captured at Harpers Ferry. He was executed in December 1859, but his noble and calm demeanor prior to execution won for him the hearts of millions of Northerners. His exploits were memorialized in the words of an abolitionist song: “John Brown’s body lies a-moldering in the grave . . . but his soul goes marching on.”

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THE REPEATING RIFLE

revolvers produced were used by the Texas Rangers in their fights with Mexicans.14 Colt later filled orders for European governments, including the Ottoman Empire. His revolvers won first prize at the London Exhibition of 1851, sponsored by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. Colt was also invited to Russia where he met Czar Alexander II. Traditionalists consider Colt, who died in 1862, to be a “tinker” rather than a true inventor. There is, however, no doubt that his invention and his skill in marketing that invention made the United States one of the leading arms-manufacturing nations of the world. In 1843, the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow visited Springfield Armory. His wife likened the guns in their stacks to the branches of a church organ and asked Longfellow to write a poem to peace. He did so, in “The Arsenal at Springfield”: This is the Arsenal. From floor to ceiling, Like a huge organ, rise the burnished arms; But from their silent pipes no anthem pealing Startles the villages with strange alarms. Ah! what a sound will rise, how wild and dreary, When the death-angel touches those swift keys! What loud lament and dismal Miserere Will mingle with their awful symphonies! . . . Is it, O man, with such discordant noises, With such accursed instruments as these, Thou drownest Nature’s sweet and kindly voices, And jarrest the celestial harmonies? . . . Down the dark future, through long generations, The echoing sounds grow fainter and then cease; And like a bell, with solemn, sweet vibrations, I hear once more the voice of Christ say, “Peace!”

Inventors and Inventions

Peace! and no longer from its brazen portals The blast of War’s great organ shakes the skies! But beautiful as songs of the immortals, The holy melodies of love arise. 15

Longfellow’s words spoke for many Americans in the antebellum (before Civil War) era. This was the period of the temperance movement and of utopian communities, such as those created by the Shakers. But at the same time, the northern and southern parts of the United States were in increasing conflict over the issue of slavery.

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The American Civil War Give us anything but that damned Yankee rifle that can be loaded on Sunday and fired all the week.

AT ISSUE

— Confederate expression regarding the Henry rifle

The Civil War was one of the most remarkable and terrible events of American history. Over 600,000 Americans were killed in the four years of war. How might things have been different? What if the South had obtained the first repeating rifles? What if the North had been more receptive to the Henry rifle when it first appeared in 1863?

During the 1850s, developments took place that contributed to making the Civil War one of the deadliest conflicts in the history of warfare. New weapons were created, and new ways of firing those weapons led to greater “kill” rations than ever before. The British led the way with the Enfield rifle, patented in 1852. Though not a repeating weapon, the Enfield had a greater distance of fire than anything that had come before. When equipped with a Minie bullet (a self-contained cartridge, containing powder and ball), the Enfield was deadly at up to 800 yards. Europeans first experienced the new killing style in a short war between France and Austria in 1859. At the battles of Magenta and Solferino, Emperor Napoleon III, nephew to the great Napoleon, was shocked by the volume of fire and the terrific casualty rates. Though France won the war, Napoleon became something of a pacifist from this experience. In the United States, the Springfield rifle, patented in 1855, became the model for most of the weapons that would

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The American Civil War

be used in the Civil War. Much like the Enfield, but sturdier and distinctly “American,” the Springfield rifle was turned out in increasing numbers when it became obvious that a war between the states was inevitable. John Brown and the numerous legends that grew up around him were also connected to the history of firearms. Brown had carried a Sharps rifle throughout the 1850s, and his murder of six slaveholders at Pottawattamie, Kansas, made both him and his rifle notorious. Later, when Brown decided to seize the Federal Arsenal at Harpers Ferry, he had the covert support of many abolitionists in the North, some who sent him 200 Sharps rifles and a number of Colt revolvers. Brown attacked the Harpers Ferry arsenal in October 1859; he intended to seize the weapons held there, distribute them to slaves, and spark a major slave uprising. Southerners well knew the danger; they remembered Nat Turner’s Rebellion of 1831. Colonel Robert E. Lee and his Marines surrounded and captured Brown at Harpers Ferry. Brown was tried and executed on December 2, 1859. His death made him an instant martyr to millions in the North, and his exploits and execution helped to bring on the Civil War a year and a half later. The first shots of the Civil War were fired on April 12, 1861. Confederate cannon opened fire on Union Fort Sumter in the center of the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina. The War Between the States had begun. A letter from Colonel of Ordnance H.K. Craig to Secretary of War J. Holt reveals the relative scarcity of arms and ammunition on both sides: Sir: In answer to the letter of the Honorable B. Stanton of the 18th instant I have to state that it appears by the last returns that there were remaining in the U.S. arsenals and armories as follows: Percussion muskets and muskets altered to percussion (caliber .69), 499,554, and percussion

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By 1861, bitter debates about slavery and states’ rights had divided the United States. The South believed the North was trying to meddle in its affairs, and the presence of a U.S. Army garrison at Fort Sumter, South Carolina, angered many southerners. On April 12, 1861, Confederate troops fired upon the fort, and the Civil War began. rifles (caliber .54), 42,011; total 541,565. If from this number we deducted the numbers of the same description that were in the arsenals in South Carolina, Alabama, and Louisiana. . . . it leaves this number, 480,687 . . . H.K. Craig, Colonel of Ordnance16

These were large numbers for peacetime, but small ones with which to commence a great war. From the start, there were concerns among both the Union and Confederate forces

The American Civil War

that their supplies of rifles, muskets, and “rifled muskets” would not hold out for the duration of the war. Craig was replaced as colonel of ordnance by James Wolfe Ripley a few weeks after the war began. Like his predecessor, Colonel Ripley had been in the U.S. Army a very long time. A staunch conservative, he was dead-set against both the new generation of breech-loading rifles and the new repeating rifles, such as the Spencer. In the first 14 months of the war, Colonel Craig had ordered 700,000 rifles for the Union army, only 8,271 of which were breech-loading weapons. Despite his concern about the scarcity of firearms, Ripley saw no reason to order more of the latter.17 The concerns of Colonel Craig and Colonel Ripley were not shared by the eager volunteers who came forward in the first year of the war. Known on both sides as the “Boys of ’61,” these were young men who were stirred to fight either for the Stars and Stripes (the Union flag) or the Stars and Bars (the flag of the Confederacy). The young men were inspired by the patriotic songs they had sung in school and the patriotic lessons they had absorbed from William H. McGuffey’s Readers, which were textbooks that instilled moral and religious values in children. They came eagerly to fight in the war that General Sherman later described as “all hell.” Men, both old and young, died in far greater numbers than either side expected. The Battle of Bull Run in July 1861 was but a taste of what was to come. The Battle of Shiloh, fought in April 1862, showed this was a war with a ferocious appetite for killing. The marksmanship of many soldiers had improved, and the new Enfield and Springfield rifles resulted in devastating casualties. Some of the worst were suffered at Fredericksburg in December 1862 and at Gettysburg in July 1863. Fredericksburg lies along the south bank of the Rapahannock River, midway between Washington, D.C., and Richmond, Virginia. Knowing that Union General Ambrose Burnside

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intended to attack, Confederate General Robert E. Lee set up defensive positions on heights overlooking the town. The Union Army of the Potomac crossed the river in December and attacked the heights. As one of Lee’s aides assured him before the battle began, “General, a chicken couldn’t live in that field once we open on it.” More than 12,000 Union soldiers were killed and wounded in fruitless charges across the open field, as they tried to reach the rail fence and dug-in positions of the Confederates. This was a true killing field, and to all who witnessed it, this should have been the day or event that showed the power of the rifle when used as a defensive weapon. General Lee, observing from the heights, commented, “It is well that war is so terrible; otherwise we should grow too fond of it.” The Confederates soon got a dose of their own medicine. In June 1863, Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia invaded Maryland and then southern Pennsylvania. There they met the Union army, led by General George Meade, at the little town of Gettysburg on July 1, 1863. The first and second days of fighting were a standoff. Lee and his Confederates pushed hard, but the North held stoutly to its defensive position on Cemetery Ridge, south of the town. On the morning of the third day, Lee selected General George Pickett to lead a major attack on the very center of the Union position. Pickett was eager for the assignment, but General James Longstreet voiced strong objections to the plan. Longstreet argued for a move around the Federals, suggesting that it would be better to take up a position between them and their capital at Washington, D.C. Lee refused, saying, “They are here, and I will whip them, or they will whip me.” Pickett’s Charge, carried out in the afternoon of July 3, was a complete disaster. Seven thousand men, over half of those who participated, were killed or wounded. Union artillery

The American Civil War

39

Fredericksburg lay midway between the northern capital of Washington, D.C., and the southern capital at Richmond, Virginia. In December 1862, Union forces crossed the Potomac River and attacked Confederate forces, which had set up defensive positions overlooking Fredericksburg. Charging across an open field, the Union soldiers were mowed down by Confederate rifles.

and rifles made mincemeat of the gallant Johnny Rebs who attacked that day. When the survivors made their way back, Lee rode out and cried, “It’s my fault boys. It’s all my fault.” And so it was. Lee, who had so often lured Federal commanders into suicidal charges against his forces, had, for once, allowed himself to be lured into one instead. The South could not afford those 7,000 casualties, and from that day onward, Confederate forces fought an uphill battle. Meanwhile, the arsenals of both North and South were turning out millions of weapons. As they did, some repeating rifles crept into the mix, and by the middle of 1864, some “damned new Yankee” rifles were wreaking havoc on Southern soldiers.

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At the Battle of Gettysburg, Confederate troops under General George Pickett attempted to assault on Union troops defending a position on Cemetery Ridge. More than half of the Confederate soldiers involved in “Pickett’s Charge” were killed or wounded by Union artillery and rifles. Many historians believe the battle was the beginning of the end for the Confederacy.

The conservative Colonel Ripley retired in September 1863 and was replaced by Colonel George Ramsay, who saw the potential of the new breech-loading weapons. In his first year as chief of U.S. ordnance, Colonel Ramsay doubled the orders for breechloaders. He introduced 33,652 repeating rifles and carbines into the Union armies. Most spectacular was the Henr y rifle, produced by the Winchester Repeating Arms Company in New Haven, Connecticut. The rim-fire, 15-round rifle was created by Benjamin Tyler Henry, and the very idea of being able to release

The American Civil War

15 shots before having to reload was revolutionary. But, once again, the U.S. Ordnance Department balked. The new Henry rifles were considered too fragile for use, and the government purchased only 1,731 of them. Numerous state regiments, however, went ahead and bought the Henry. Like so many important inventions, Ferguson’s breechloader among them, Henry’s invention depended on a simple idea that was expanded into technical sophistication. In the Henry rifle, the used cartridge was expelled by a fresh cartridge, allowing an infantryman to shoot once more before reloading. The Henry rifle first appeared during the siege of Petersburg and Richmond. General Ulysses S. Grant pressed his advantage and boxed Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia within these two cities and their extended perimeters. The Confederates were upset by the Yankee sharpshooting that came from the new Henry rifles. William Tecumseh Sherman also employed the new Henry rifles. As he marched southeast from Tennessee into the heart of the Confederacy in Atlanta, Sherman fought a number of battles with Confederate General Hood. Hood was audacious to the point of recklessness, and Sherman lured him into attacking on open ground. Union men, equipped with their new Henrys, decimated the lines of oncoming Confederates. The North now had the advantage, both in better rifles and in sounder tactics. One of the most eloquent testimonies to the qualities of the Henry rifle came from a Union cavalry officer, Major Claudman, who was held in Libby Prison by the Confederates. Claudman wrote to Oliver Winchester that he had overheard Confederate officers discussing Union weapons. One of them, Claudman reported, had said, “Give us anything but that damned Yankee rifle than can be loaded on Sunday and fired all the week.” 18 Sherman continued his March to the Sea. Grant continued

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As the South grew steadily weaker, a Union army commanded by William Tecumseh Sherman marched east from Tennessee to the Georgia coast. Sherman’s soldiers were armed with the Henry rifle, which could be fired twice before reloading. Though Confederate troops tried to resist, the March to the Sea could not be stopped. The illustration shows Sherman’s troops in Savannah, which lies on Georgia’s coastline.

his siege of Richmond and Petersburg. In the spring of 1865, General Lee and his remaining soldiers escaped Richmond, but were run to the earth at Appamatox Court House, where Lee yielded his sword and his army to Grant. Just three weeks later, the last Confederate troops in North Carolina surrendered to General Sherman at Durham Station. Though some Confederates in Texas and Arkansas had not yielded, the Civil War was over. More than 600,000 men had lost their lives. This was the greatest loss of life in war the United States had suffered to that

The American Civil War

date. As of the early twenty-first century, that number has not been surpassed. Issues of slavery and abolition, union and secession had brought the war about, but it took the resolution of millions of men and the new firepower of millions of rifles to bring the conflict to an end. When the Civil War ended, a new American nation had been born—one that would not again stand divided against itself.

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5

The Wild West

Americans have long believed that the Winchester rifle and the Colt six-shooter “won the West.”Since about 1970, when Native Americans began to demonstrate and demand better conditions on their reservations, many people have begun to question whether the West was won or whether it was “lost.” This chapter takes the reader into the Great Plains conflicts between soldiers like Custer and Miles and warriors like Crazy Horse and Geronimo.

Americans began to move west almost as soon as the Civil War ended in 1865. There had already been a small number of Americans who were brave enough to go to Oregon, Texas or the Rocky Mountains, but their numbers greatly increased after the war, and by the 1870s, westward movement had practically become an exodus. Itemized lists from wagon trains show that westward bound settlers traveled with sugar, salt, leather, rope, and firearms. Guns of all types were deemed vital for anyone who crossed the Mississippi River and headed onto the Great Plains of what are now Nebraska, Kansas, and the Dakotas. Fortunately, a new set of firearms had appeared by this time. Among them were the new Colts and Winchesters. Oliver Winchester had so far experienced only limited success in the gun business. His Henry rifles had appeared too late to have a major impact on the Civil War, and the U.S. Army had not wanted to acquire any more official rifles. But the movement of Americans westward came as a godsend to

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The Wild West

A legendary figure of the American West, Buffalo Bill Cody earned his nickname by killing nearly 4,000 buffalo in about four months. Riding close to the herd, he often risked his life as he shot the animals with the Winchester rifle that he prized. His exploits drew other buffalo hunters to the western plains and the buffalo herds were almost wiped out.

Winchester and in 1867 he introduced the Winchester Model One, which became a standard on the western frontier. The 1866 Winchester was not only handsome — it was

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beautifully engraved—it was the first truly popular repeating weapon. Bullets were lowered into a chamber at the bottom of the barrel, and the action of bringing back the trigger mechanism—“cocking” the rifle—moved yet another cartridge into position. Never before had an American, or anyone else around the world, had access to such a gun and the volume of fire it could create. There were only two major problems: the barrel became very hot from the volume of fire, and the cartridge barrel sometimes became fouled with dirt. Otherwise, the Winchester ruled supreme. The 1873 Winchester was even more impressive. At the same time, Samuel Colt came out with a new single-action six-shooter that nearly equaled the Winchester in efficiency. The 1873 Colt was handsome, and it fit nicely into the hand. Most importantly, Colt had designed his pistol so that it would take exactly the same cartridges as the 1873 Winchester. Even serious rifle enthusiasts began to experiment with the pistol, and die-hard pistolmen began to experiment with the rifle. The 1873 Colt and Winchester became a deadly combination. It was said that when “Judge Colt and his jury of six” tried a case, the verdict was always the same: “Guilty.” Who, though, were the enemies? And what did they use for weapons? The Native Americans of the Great Plains had not always been a horse-riding and hunting people. Until about 1600 or even 1650, most of the Plains Indians had been agricultural peoples, who supplemented their diet with buffalo meat. But when Spanish runaway horses appeared on the Great Plains and were captured and trained, the life of the Plains Indians changed dramatically. Whether they were Blackfeet in the north, Sioux in the central, or Comanche on the southern plains, the Indians came to love their horses. The horse changed the way of life for tribe after tribe. Indians who had previously raised maize and potatoes now became fearless riders who hunted the buffalo far and wide. The Plains Indians became more nomadic, more warlike, and more fearless.

The Wild West

The Indians of the Great Plains were fearless people who believed the buffalo was a sacred animal that gave life to the tribes.They hunted the buffalo to provide food and hides for their villages.

But even at the height of their power on the plains, the Indians never slaughtered buffalo in a reckless manner. To most of the tribes, the buffalo was a sacred animal with a mystical power: the ability to give life to the tribal peoples. Therefore, the animal was hunted and killed with a reverent spirit, and no part of the buffalo was wasted. All the skin, flesh, and bones were used.19 The wars between Indians and Americans on the plains began in earnest in the 1860s. There were Red Cloud’s War, the Blackfeet War, and numerous others. As the decade passed, a handful of American military leaders became famous for their skills at “Indian-fighting.” These men knew more about the

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Indians than did the average American, and three men in particular were determined to eliminate Indian resistance to the westward movement of white Americans. Even before the end of the Civil War, Americans and Indians were at war on the Great Plains. Chiefs like Red Cloud and Mangas Coloradas fought the first battles against United States Army units. The Indians did not often triumph over army detachments, but they could fight short battles and escape quickly; their rifles and horsemanship made them equal to the best army units of the time. There were times, however, when even the bravest Indians were completely undone by the appearance of the repeating rifle. One incident occurred when two former Union soldiers were mining borax in the country of the Blackfoot Indians of Montana. One of the two white men involved in the occurrence told this story many years after the event. The men had kept their Henry rifles from their Civil War service days. One day they saw 40 Indians approach within close range and lie down in the grass. The two whites knew what the Indians would do: one of the Indians showed himself deliberately to draw their fire. Both men fired, and then the entire force of Indians rose and came forward on the run, expecting that the white men’s gun barrels were empty. A man who heard the story from the former soldier recalled: But those two guns kept right on firing! Shot after shot kept pouring from the guns over the low log breast work, and to the indescribable horror of the warriors who considered themselves already victorious, man after man of their number fell shrieking or silent in the prairie grass as the deadly and unheard-of continuous firing blazed steadily at them. . . . From that day no other attack was ever made upon that pair. Not only were they thereafter immune but the one of them I later knew told me that passing Indian bands would make wide detours to avoid even the neighborhood of their cabin; or, on meeting one of them, would rush off to a distance

The Wild West

for fear of coming into proximity with the awful magic of death that had been so terribly exhibited. Once, he told me, meeting an Indian whom he had reason to believe to have been one of the survivors of the fight, the brave, with a face of horror exclaimed, “Spirit guns! Spirit guns!” and was off as fast as his pony could gallop.20

Once the Civil War was over, the powerful United States had great reserves of manpower on which to draw. One could even argue that the Wars on the Plains were useful to the U.S. government, since they provided employment for thousands of soldiers who might otherwise have proved troublesome. Although there were many chiefs who fought with skill, many army commanders quickly learned the ways of fighting in the West. The four who stand out are Custer, Crazy Horse, Crook, and Geronimo. Born in Ohio, Custer graduated from West Point in 1861. He became the “boy general,” the youngest in the Union army in 1863, and acquired a reputation for audacity that was unrivaled during the war. Once the war was won, Custer went west and fought against Black Kettle and the Cheyenne Indians. Custer developed a reputation for ruthlessness and skill; his Indian opponents called him “Yellow Hair.” Born in Sioux country, Crazy Horse was about the same age as Custer, and like Custer, Crazy Horse was a warrior to the bone. Nothing thrilled him as much as the horse, saddle, and rifle. The two men clashed at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in June 1876. Crazy Horse led Sioux and Cheyenne warriors who destroyed Custer’s Seventh Cavalry at the Little Bighorn. When the battle was over, “Yellow Hair” and 270 of his fellows lay dead in the area that the Sioux called the “Greasy Grass.” The Sioux victory was complete, but short-lived. Other regiments of the U.S. Army came swiftly west. Some of the Sioux escaped to Canada, while others, led by Crazy Horse, turned themselves in to the Americans. Crazy Horse was killed a year later while in captivity by an Indian scout in the pay of the Americans.

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General George A. Custer leads a column of cavalry and artillery deep into Indian Territory in 1874. Two years later, Custer and his Seventh Cavalry were defeated at the Battle of Little Bighorn by warriors who were led by Chief Crazy Horse.

Not long ago, a new, massive memorial to Crazy Horse and his people was built about 25 miles from Mount Rushmore. Begun by the sculptor Ziolkowski and continued by his children, the memorial shows Crazy Horse on horseback, holding his rifle. This is a fitting testimony to the Sioux leader. His rifle was part of what made him a great warrior, just as the rifles of the U.S. cavalry were part of what brought him down.

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General George Crook (second from right) respected the Apache Indians and their leader Chief Geronimo (third from left). Crook tried to persuade the Apache to stop fighting and to live peacefully in reservations established by the U.S. government.

Nearly 1,000 miles to the south of the Little Bighorn, another Indian leader kept up a different type of resistance. The Chiruchua Apache, led by Geronimo (a name given him by the Mexicans) fought a series of off-again, on-again wars against white Americans. Geronimo was opposed by General George Crook, a great Indian fighter who had a deep sympathy for the Indians he pursued. When Geronimo and Crook sat down together and conversed, the two men came to an understanding. Geronimo and his Apache warriors accepted reservation life as their only option. But within a year or two, Geronimo and his band escaped

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Annie Oakley Annie Oakley was one of the most admired American women of her time. She was a spectacular markswoman who could shoot cigars out of the mouths of astonished men.

She was born in Ohio in 1860. Her birth name was Phoebe Ann Moses. Her father died when she was six, and her mother remarried three years later. Hers was a painful childhood,full of dislocation and abandonment.Things improved when she married Francis Butler in 1875. He was a specialty shot for circuses, but it soon turned out that her talent surpassed his. Annie Oakley joined Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show in 1885. Frank Butler was her manager, and she soon became an integral part of the show. Annie Oakley was one of the most natural markswoman ever seen. She used mirrors, she rode on horseback, and she performed tricks such as shooting cigars out of the mouths of astonished men, Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II among them. Chief Sitting Bull, also a show member, called her “Little Sure Shot,” and adopted her into the Sioux Nation. She continued to perform until 1901, retiring after a back injury suffered on a railroad car. She returned briefly to the stage a decade later and gave shooting exhibitions for American troops during the First World War. She died in 1923. Her husband died a few days later, and the two are buried side-by-side in Brock, Ohio. Annie Oakley was perhaps the most admired American woman of her time. In private she was demure, even shy, but on the stage she demonstrated a magnetism that made her one of the most sought-after performers of her time. Though she always wore long Victorian skirts and emphasized her femininity, her performance with a gun clearly demonstrated that guns had an equalizing effect in the West.

The Wild West

from the reservation and played hide-and-seek with the American soldiers. Photos of the elusive Apaches, always clutching their rifles, were displayed in most American newspapers, and a good deal of sympathy went to the Indians. Fearing a growth of such sympathy, the U.S. government sent General Nelson Miles to replace Crook. Miles hunted down and captured Geronimo, who was taken to a prison in Florida. Later released, Geronimo spent the rest of his life on a reservation, admired as a potent symbol of Indian resistance. The Indian Wars ended by 1890. There was no more native resistance to the Americans on the Great Plains. But the repeating rifle continued to be important to sportsmen and hunters. The famous hunter Buffalo Bill Cody once wrote an advertisement for the 1873 Winchester Rifle: “I have been using and have thoroughly tested your latest improved rifle. Allow me to say that I have tried and used nearly every kind of gun made in the United States, and for general hunting, or Indian fighting, I pronounce your improved Winchester the boss.” 21 What Cody did not say was what he had done with that Winchester. Cody earned the nickname “Buffalo Bill” by killing about 4,000 buffalo over a four-month period. He did so by riding close to the buffalo herd, taking chances with his life, and shooting down scores of buffalo with his repeating rifle. As heinous as this may sound, things became even worse. By about 1875, large numbers of buffalo hunters, few of them with Cody’s individualism of spirit, rode safely in railroad cars and fired on herds of buffalo. In 1870, there were about eight million buffalo on the plains; by 1885, the number had been reduced to less than 50,000. This represents one of the most vicious killing sprees ever perpetrated by Western humankind against animal life.22

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Arms for Empire Whatever happens we have got the Maxim Gun and they have not.

AT ISSUE

— Hillaire Belloc, The Modern Traveler, published in 1898

Between 1820 and 1914, Great Britain dominated the oceans of the world. Her navy was supreme. At the same time, some 200,000 soldiers managed to conquer and control native populations from Australia to Canada. This chapter examines some of the inventions and guns that allowed the British, and then the Americans, to become successful imperialists.

The biblical saying that a “prophet is not without honor except in his own country” has some merit as concerns the inventors of the first machine guns. A Southerner made the first; he tried to sell it to the Union, but was rebuffed. A Northerner made the second; he obtained his success in Great Britain, rather than the United States. Richard Jordan Gatling was the first of these men. Born in North Carolina in 1818, Gatling was the son of a prosperous farmer. He became an inventor in his early twenties when he experimented with a screw propeller and patented a device for planting rice. Gatling moved north to St. Louis, Missouri, in 1844. There he patented a hemp-breaking machine and a steel plow before the Civil War began. When the great conflict came, Gatling turned his attention to guns. In November 1862, he patented a rapid-fire gun, which was the world’s first true machine gun. The weapon

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was cranked by hand; it had six barrels, which revolved around a central axis, and it fired cartridges that were dropped from a drum on top of the gun. The Gatling gun fired 350 rounds per minute, at a time when most expert riflemen were shooting no more than six rounds per minute. One wonders what might have happened had Gatling offered his gun to the Confederacy. But living in St. Louis, he was now a Northerner and he took his invention to the U.S. Army. The chief of ordnance, General James Ripley, was already being besieged by promoters of new gun types and new caliber types. Ripley declined to test the Gatling gun, believing it would further confuse the state of the Union’s ordnance supply. The U.S. Navy purchased a few Gatling guns in 1862, and the Union force occupying New Orleans ordered a number that saw action in the spring of 1864. But by and large, the Gatling gun’s tremendous potential went unused by either North or South during the Civil War. Not until the war was over did the gun receive any true recognition. The U.S. Army tested the weapon in 1865, and ordered 100 guns in 1866. Fifty of these were to be with a one-inch caliber and the other 50 with a .50 caliber. These 100 guns were seldom used during the next 30 years. The Gatling gun did not see real service until the beginning of the Spanish-American War in 1898. Its performance was described by Colonel Theodore Roosevelt (later president of the United States) in his book about the Spanish-American War, Rough Riders. Roosevelt commanded three regiments that were assigned to capturing San Juan Hill in the mountains above Santiago, Cuba, on July 1, 1898. A handful of Gatling guns had been issued to Roosevelt’s men; not knowing much about the weapons, the officer in charge, Lieutenant Parker, placed them near the front of the American lines. Roosevelt wrote:

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The Gatling gun was a rapid-fire machine gun that fired 350 rounds per minute. It had six barrels that revolved around a central axis and fired cartridges that were dropped from a drum into the firing chamber. It was used by Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders during the Spanish-American War. Suddenly, above the crackling of the carbines, rose a peculiar drumming sound, and some of the men cried, “The Spanish machine-guns!” Listening, I made out that it came from the flat ground to the left, and jumped to my feet, smiting my hand on my thigh, and shouting aloud with exultation, “It’s the Gatlings, men, our Gatlings!” Lieutenant Parker was bringing his four Gatlings into action, and shoving them nearer and nearer the front. Now and then the drumming ceased for a moment; then it would resound again, always closer to San Juan Hill, which Parker, like ourselves, was hammering to assist the

Arms for Empire

infantry attack. Our men cheered lustily. We saw much of Parker after that, and there was never a more welcome sound than his Galtings as they opened. It was the only sound which I ever heard my men cheer in battle.23

Roosevelt and his men won the central part of the mountains over Santiago that day. The U.S. forces closed in rapidly after that, and Santiago soon surrendered, bringing to a close what many called the “splendid little war.” The fame Roosevelt engendered by leading his Rough Riders helped him win the vice-presidential nomination in 1900, and on the death of President William McKinley, he became president of the United States. The stellar performance at the Battle for San Juan Hill inspired the U.S. Army to take a closer look at the weapon that it had possessed for slightly more than 30 years. But the Gatling was now obsolete; it had been outpaced by two other weapons, the Hotchkiss and the Maxim. Richard Gatling died in New York City in 1903. His numerous other inventions had produced successes and a modest income for the prolific inventor, but the Gatling gun had been shelved during the Civil War, only to re-emerge in 1898, when it was no longer state-of-the-art. Hiram Maxim was born in Sangerville, Maine, in 1840. After an adventurous youth, which included travel in eastern Canada, Maxim went to work making guns for an uncle in Fitchburg, Massachusetts. This employment did not alter Maxim’s need for novelty in his life; he was a prolific inventor whose first patent was for a hair-curling iron. After the Civil War, Maxim experimented in the up-andcoming electric light industry. He competed with Thomas Edison in designs and for patents, and later served as chief engineer of the U.S. Electric Light Company. He and Edison knew each other well and were perennial rivals, with Edison making the best of the situation and receiving the highest

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Hiram Maxim poses with the machine gun he invented in 1884. This weapon was smaller and lighter than most guns of its time. By 1890, it became standard issue for soldiers serving in Britain’s vast colonial empire.

prizes. In 1881, Maxim went to London to exhibit his electrical works, and he decided to remain in England. Gun manufacture soon called to Maxim. Although Europe was at peace in 1881 and would remain so for several decades to come, Maxim foresaw that Europeans would demand a new and more vigorous gun for future wars. Whether he knew anything of the Gatling gun or not, Maxim put his attention to making a new type of machine gun. As he

Arms for Empire

he began to develop his new design, Maxim visited the Henry Rifled Barrel Company in London. The old superintendent tried to discourage Maxim from his new work, saying, “Thousands of men for many years have been working on guns; and there are hundreds of failures every year; many engineers and clever men imagine that they can make a gun, but they never succeed; they are all failures, so you had better drop it, and not spend a single penny on it. You don’t stand a ghost of a chance in competition with regular gun makers — stick to electricity.” 24 Maxim replied, “I am a totally different mechanic from any you have ever seen before — a different breed.” 25 Maxim spent about two years developing his new gun. In the spring of 1884, he displayed the gun and its spectacular rate of fire to a number of admiring observers, one of whom was Albert, the Prince of Wales. But one of the finest compliments came from an American, Mr. Francis Pratt of Pratt and Whitney in Hartford, Connecticut. Upon arriving in London and seeing the gun, Pratt declared: If anyone had told me that it would be possible to make a gun that would pull a cartridge belt into position, pull a loaded cartridge out of it, move it in front of the barrel, thrust it into the barrel, close the breech in a proper manner, cock the hammer, pull the trigger, fire off the cartridge, extract the empty shell and throw it out of the mechanism, feed a new cartridge into position, and do all these things in the tenth part of a second, I would not have believed it. I would not have believed it if Mr. Whitney had told me — no, I would not have believed it if my wife had told me. But now I have seen it done with my own eyes.26

Maxim’s gun was soon refined; it became smaller and lighter than most guns of its type. By about 1890 it had

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become standard equipment for the British army. In 1898, the same year that Gatling’s guns won their first true approval in the Spanish-American War, Maxim’s guns had a major trial by fire in the Anglo-Egyptian campaign in the Sudan. About 12 years earlier, a religious leader in the Sudan had named himself the Mahdi (“Messiah”). The Mahdi had organized Sudanese tribesmen into a new fighting force that included cavalry, artillery, and infantry. The Mahdi had defeated the British at Khartoum, but had died two years later. Now his successor and a large Sudanese army faced a British and Egyptian force led by General Horatio Kitchener. One of the British lieutenants on the force was the young Winston Spencer Churchill, later to become one of the most famous of all British political leaders. Churchill, who was a journalist as well as an officer, described the climactic Battle of Omdurman on September 2, 1898, which occurred just two months and one day after the Battle of San Juan Hill. Churchill estimated the enemy’s strength at about 60,000 men, most of them on horseback. Accurately assessing the difference between the two forces, he wrote, “If there was one arm in which the Arabs were beyond all comparison inferior to their adversaries, it was in guns. Yet it was with this arm that they opened their attack.” Churchill watched with fascination and horror as the Mahdi’s forces began a traditional cavalry attack straight across the open desert plain. He later recalled: The ranges were known. It was a matter of machinery. The more distant slaughter passed unnoticed, as the mind was fascinated by the impending horror. I could see it coming. In a few seconds swift destruction would rush on these brave men. They topped the crest and drew out into full view of the whole army. Their white banners made them conspicuous above all. As they saw the camp of their

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This photograph, taken in 1885, shows British troops boarding a military transport ship bound for the Sudan in Africa to fight against rebellious Sudanese tribesmen. Winston Churchill, working as a journalist during the campaign, reported on one of the battles where lines of tribesmen, armed with spears and primitive rifles, faced British troops armed with Maxim guns.

enemies, they discharged their rifles with a great roar of musketry and quickened their pace, and I was alarmed to see a solitary British officer, Lieutenant Conolly, attached to the 21st, galloping across their front fifty feet below them, but at only a hundred yards’ distance. He had been sent out to take a final look behind the hill. Fortunately he returned in safety, and with the necessary information.

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For a moment the White Flags advanced in regular order, and the whole division crossed the crest and were exposed. Forthwith the gunboats, the 32nd British Field Battery, and other guns from the zeriba opened on them. I was but 400 yards away, and with excellent glasses could almost see the faces of the Dervishes who met the fearful fire. About twenty shells struck them in the first minute. Some burst high in the air, others exactly in their faces. Others, again, plunged into the sand and, exploding, dashed clouds of red dust, splinters, and bullets amid their ranks. The white banners toppled over in all directions. Yet they rose again immediately, as other men pressed forward to die for the Mahdi’s sacred cause and in the defense of the successor of the True Prophet of the Only God. It was a terrible sight, for as yet they had not hurt us at all, and it seemed an unfair advantage to strike thus cruelly when they could not reply. Nevertheless, I watched the effect of the fire most carefully from a close and convenient position. About five men on the average fell to every shell: and there were many shells. Under their influence the mass of the “White Flags” dissolved into thin lines of spear men and skirmishers, and came on in altered formation and diminished numbers, but with unabated enthusiasm. And now, the whole attack being thoroughly exposed, it became the duty of the cavalry to clear the front as quickly as possible, and leave the further conduct of the debate to the infantry and the Maxim guns. All the patrols trotted or cantered back to their squadrons, and the regiment retired swiftly into the zeriba, while the shells from the gunboats screamed overhead and the whole length of the position began to burst into flame and smoke. Nor was it long before the tremendous banging of the artillery was swelled by the roar of musketry.27

The Battle of Omdurman was a slaughter rather than a real conflict. British technology, whether it was in the hands of British regulars or Egyptian soldiers, devastated the native

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peoples at Omdurman. This was one of the last battles of the British Empire during Queen Victoria’s reign, and it showed yet again how powerful and decisive the repeating rifle had become. Valor and courage counted for little against the killing bullets of the repeating rifle. Europeans knew this well, and yet they would somehow believe that they could fight each other in the future with impunity. Time would display how wrong they were.

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The Great War Waves of infantry going down like corn before the scythe of the machine gun.

AT ISSUE

—John Keegan, quoted in A Walk through the Twentieth Century with Bill Moyers

No one — British, French, German, or American — expected the First World War to be so deadly. New types of weapons and new types of tactics meant that hundreds of thousands, indeed millions, of young men would perish in the four years of war. This chapter looks at the new weapons and tactics that caused the carnage.

On June 28, 1914, the Austrian Archduke and his wife toured the city of Sarajevo in an open car. Franz Ferdinand was the heir to the Austrian throne, but his uncle, Emperor Franz Josef, who had ruled since 1848, was still alive and healthy. Thus, Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie probably anticipated having to wait a few years more before they ascended the throne as emperor and empress of Austria-Hungary and the many provinces controlled by those two nations. Among these was Serbia. In the midst of the crowd that lined the streets to see the archduke and the archduchess stood a man named Gavrilo Princip. With no warning, Princip, a Serbian nationalist, stepped forward and fired several shots from a Browning revolver, mortally wounding the archduke and archduchess. The death of these two individuals would soon lead to countless other deaths.28 War was not inevitable. The Great Powers might have arranged a peace conference where wrongs, as perceived by Serbian nationalists, might have been addressed. But there was

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no peace conference, and the European nations drifted into war at the end of July 1914. In the beginning, the First World War pitted Germany and Austria-Hungary (the Central Powers) against Russia, France, Belgium, and Britain (the Allied Powers). Each side believed that it would defeat the other with an enormous concentration of men and matériel. This was especially true in Russia, which had by far the largest army, and which could call up reserves from as far away as Siberia. But other nations, including France, Britain, and Germany, were guilty of the same self-deception. Everyone, it seemed, believed that the war would be over in six months, and every country expected that its troops would be victorious. One of the few realists was Lord Grey, the British Foreign Minister. When war was declared in August 1914, he is said to have remarked, “The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.” 29 These were the lights of peace, of scientific advance for peaceful purposes, and of brotherhood among Europeans. The Great Peace now gave way to the Great War. For the first month of the war, the Germans had some legitimate expectation of success. They marched swiftly through Belgium and angled down into France, headed for Paris. Meanwhile, a major French offensive against central Germany failed dismally, thwarted by German machine guns and barbed wire. But the Germans were also overconfident. At the First Battle of the Marne in September 1914, the French used the new rapidfire guns to halt the German offensive, and at one point, when it seemed the Germans might break through, 5,000 taxicabs brought reinforcements from Paris. Thus, the Von Schlieffen Plan, Germany’s seemingly foolproof design for a quick victory in the West, was defeated by the unlikely combination of machine guns and taxicabs. Very soon after the Battle of the Marne, military action on the western front turned into a stalemate between two opposing

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French soldiers shoot at German soldiers during the Battle of the Marne in 1914, one of the first major battles of World War I. Ironically, the rapid-fire machine guns pictured here were captured from the German troops that are being fired upon.

forces, which used all the techniques, machines, men, and armaments available to them. The Germans on one side, and the British and French on the other, dug deep trenches, set up machine guns near the tops of those trenches, and rigged the area between their lines and the enemy lines with barbed wire and explosives. The 600-yard area between the enemy lines was called “No-Man’s Land” and very few men who ventured into that area lived to tell the tale. The British weapon of choice was the Vickers machine gun, while the Germans and French favored the Hotchkiss. Maxim guns were also dispersed throughout the lines of both sides. The results were terrible. In 1915, both sides believed that a major push through enemy trenches was possible. The Germans struck first at the city of Verdun. Defending Verdun became an article of faith for the French

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nation. General Henri Petain declared, “Il ne passeront pas” (“They shall not pass”), and France committed hundreds of thousands of men to the effort of stopping the Germans. Both sides used machine guns and repeating rifles at close range. When the fighting petered out toward the end of 1915, the combined losses were one million men who were either killed, wounded, or missing—about 20 times the number of those reported killed, wounded, and missing during the SpanishAmerican War. No Frenchman or German who was at Verdun was ever the same again. Indeed, the French were too battleshocked to participate in a major offensive against the Central Powers in 1916 and it was left to the British. British General Douglas Haig believed that his men could break through along the line of the Somme River in northern France. Haig had close to a million men, hundreds of thousands of repeating weapons, and a few of the new tanks that were making their presence felt in warfare. He planned his offensive for the first of July 1916. British, Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand troops went into action that day. They made minimal progress, but nearly 56,000 men were reported killed, wounded, or missing in just one day’s action. The British army lost more men in the Battle of Somme than it had in all of the wars it had fought between 1860 and 1914.30 No British soldier or officer who was present at the Battle of the Somme ever forgot the carnage of that day. No British commander and no British soldier who was at the Somme ever felt the same about war, glory, British pride, or the British Empire. It made an indelible impression on the minds and the psyches of the British people for the next two decades. Unlike the Americans who had been horrified by the casualties suffered in the Civil War, the British, French, and Germans had no overriding purpose, such as freeing slaves, to make their war seem worthwhile or meaningful. Without such motivation, the war was seen for what it was: civilization gone insane.

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One of the deadliest battles of World War I, the Battle of the Somme, took place in 1916. British general Douglas Haig commanded close to 1,000,000 men armed with repeating rifles and one of the newest military inventions to appear on the world’s battlefields — the tank.

As horrible as things were on the western front, they were even worse on the eastern front where Germany and AustriaHungary fought Czarist Russia. The distances were greater on the eastern front, and without trenches and barbed wire to prevent movement, both sides engaged in cumbersome maneuvers that cost millions of lives. When Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated, the Russian psychic Rasputin sent a series of urgent letters to Czar Nicholas II, warning that war would be a disaster for Russia. Rasputin had been wrong many times before, but perhaps the czar should have listened on this occasion, for the war proved to be his undoing. Nicholas lost his throne and Imperial Russia, which had existed for several centuries, collapsed. The Russian steamroller, as it was portrayed in newspaper cartoons, faltered against the Germans at the twin battles of Tannenberg and Masurian Lakes, both fought in 1914. From

The Great War

that time on, the fighting on the eastern front was almost one-sided, with the Russians perpetually on the defensive. The Germans, with their rapid-fire rifles and machine guns, slaughtered the Russians who were often equipped with matériel of 1870s vintage. Some Russian soldiers did not have proper shoes or winter clothing, and Russia suffered about four million casualties in the first three years of war. By March 1917, the Russian people had had enough. The czar was overthrown in a quick revolution in St. Petersburg, and a new provisional government was created. That provisional government, led by Alexander Kerensky, was then overthrown by Vladimir Illyich Ulyanov, better known as Lenin, in October of the same year. Both the popular revolution against the czar and the Bolshevik revolution against Kerensky’s government were carried out by relatively small numbers of men, armed with repeating weapons. While it is true that the czarist government had lost all popular support by March 1917, the ease with which the revolution was carried out shows how a small band of wellarmed men could take over a capital city and then subdue an entire country. Kerensky’s defeat and the takeover by Lenin and the Bolsheviks demonstrated that speed and accuracy, both in movement and use of guns, were critical factors in the success of the two Russian revolutions of 1917. Lenin and the Bolsheviks made peace with Germany in January 1918. Peace came at a great price; the Germans claimed one-third of European Russia (Russia east of the Ural Mountains). Germany was then able to transfer many of her troops to the western front, where she intended to make a last effort against the remaining Allied Powers. There was need for the Germans to hurry. The United States had entered the war on the side of the Britain, France, and Italy in April 1917. It had taken some time for the Americans to gear up for the war, but by the spring of 1918, a million American soldiers were either in France or on their way. They carried with them the 1903 Springfield rifle, manufactured at Springfield Armory.

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The 1903 Springfield was a single-shot, bolt-action rifle. Designed by the armory experts, the Springfield was a cliploading magazine rifle (magazine refers to the gun’s cartridge holder). It was known for its sturdiness and durability. Carrying their new Springfields, the Americans joined the conflict along the western front in 1917 and 1918.31 Of course it was not only their weapons that made the Americans so formidable. They were fresh, better fed, and better equipped than their European counterparts. The word “doughboy” came into circulation because of the well-fed appearance of so many of the Americans. But their use of the Springfield rifle was part of the equation that allowed them to perform so well. The Americans triumphed in the Meuse-Argonne Offensive of September and October 1918, and helped to bring about the end of the war on November 11, 1918.

Alvin York The best-known American hero of the First World War was a pacifist. Born in Tennessee in 1887, Alvin York was a hunter, marksman, farmer, and blacksmith before the war began. He did not support war and tried to register as a conscientious objector. But his request was denied, and he was assigned to the 82nd U.S. Infantry. The United States mounted the Battle of the Argonne Forest in eastern France in September 1918. On October 8,York and his patrol of 16 men were isolated and under enemy fire. Half of his men were dead or wounded, but York outshot a German machine gun group, silenced 35 guns, killed about 20 Germans, and brought another 132 in as prisoners. This was, beyond doubt, the single most successful heroic action by an individual American soldier in the war. York became a national hero when the Saturday Evening Post profiled him in 1919. Americans were thrilled to find a hero who reminded them of the legendary figures of earlier times. Like Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett and others, York was a man of the Appalachian Mountains, a simple man in a complex world. York initially resisted publicity, but on the eve of the Second World War, he agreed to allow a film about his wartime exploits to be made. Sergeant York, starring Gary Cooper, was one of a number of patriotic films created in the pre-World War II era.

The Great War

A Browning pistol had sparked the First World War with the assassination of the Austrian archduke. It was the invention of John Moses Browning. Browning was born in Ogden, Utah, in 1855. The son of Mormon parents, he made his first gun at the age of 13 and later founded his own company. He patented his first breech-loading rifle in 1879, and the Browning automatic pistol in 1911. Under the pressure of the war, he produced the Browning machine gun in 1917 and the Browning automatic rifle in 1918. The Browning rifle and machine gun came too late to influence the First World War, but they heralded the lead that U.S. armsmakers now had over their European competitors. The United States had replaced Great Britain as the world’s foremost industrial and financial power by 1920; the same was true in terms of military weaponry.

On February 17, 1919, Sergeant Alvin York of Tennessee surveys the Argonne Forest, France, where he and 17 other Allied soldiers captured over a 100 Germans on October 8, 1918. Many small skirmishes were fought in the forests of Europe during World War I, ending in death or imprisonment for some men; others, like York, became famous heroes.

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Gangsters and G-Men Gee, but I’d like to be a G-Man And go Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!

AT ISSUE

— Popular song in 1930s

Prohibition went into effect in 1920. A decade of lawbreaking ensued in many American cities. Notorious criminals like Al Capone emerged. A new generation of lawmen, led by J. Edgar Hoover, opposed those criminals. This chapter looks at the gangsters, the government agents, the weaponry they used, and the hold they still have on the popular imagination today.

The gangster era began in earnest in the early 1920s. Several factors contributed to the sudden rise in lawlessness. Among them were Prohibition, growing urbanization, and the availability of new submachine guns. The Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution went into effect on January 17, 1920. Suddenly it was illegal to make or sell alcoholic beverages anywhere in the United States. The amendment had been supported and driven home by forces within American society that decried the new urbanization and wanted to see a return to rural and Protestant values. The results were just the opposite. Bootlegging became the booming business of the 1920s. Gangsters appeared in major American cities, expanding their enterprises from prostitution and gambling to drink and spreading alcohol everywhere. Speakeasies appeared in cities around the nation. Chicago was the center of bootlegging activities and it became the center of gangster culture in the United States.

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Prohibition, which outlawed the sale of alcohol, contributed to an era of lawlessness in the United States in the 1920s. Gangsters and police officers, armed with submachine guns, fought for control of cities. Here, a group of policemen empty barrels of illegally brewed beer confiscated from bootleggers.

Americans first learned about gangster culture from the short and decidedly unromantic lives of Bonny and Clyde, but within a year or two, major gangs and groups of thugs were operating in most American cities. They had a decided advantage in their weaponry; the gangs used the “Tommy gun.” Designed and patented by Brigadier General John Thompson,

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the “Tommy gun” had been invented to break the deadlock of trench warfare in the First World War. But gangsters in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles latched on to the new weapon as their gun of choice. A determined gangster could shoot 800 rounds a minute, and could conceivably stand off an entire police force.32 The increase in gun violence around the nation led Americans to discuss restrictions on guns for the first time. In 1920, the British House of Commons had passed, by a vote of 254 to 6, the first national Firearms Act of that country. The law severely restricted the use of any type of guns in Britain, and gave police departments great discretionary powers to whom they might or might not award permits.33 Some Americans believed the time had come for gun regulation in the United States. Congress had outlawed the use of alcohol; why not do the same for guns? But the most that the federal government was willing to do was to ban the use of the federal mails for the delivery of guns. This obstacle was quickly circumvented by gun suppliers, who simply used private delivery services instead of the U.S. Postal Service. Alphonse Capone, born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1899, was the archenemy of the lawmen. In 1924, Capone became the leader of most of the organized crime elements in Chicago. Capone’s power increased throughout the decade, and on February 14, 1929, he authorized the brutal execution of seven members of a rival gang. The Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre, as it was immediately labeled, was described in The New York Times the following day: Chicago gangland leaders observed Valentine’s Day with machine guns and a stream of bullets and as a result seven members of the George (Bugs) Moran-Dean O’Banion, North Side gang are dead in the most cold-blooded massacre in the history of this city’s underworld.34

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One of the most famous gangsters of the 1920s was Al Capone, the organized crime boss of Chicago. His machine gun-armed henchmen killed rival gangster leaders in the infamous Valentine’s Day Massacre to protect Capone’s “turf.”

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The victims were placed up against a wall of a garage and cut down by machine gun fire. Public outrage was enormous. There was no sympathy for the gang members who had been executed; rather many were appalled that the gangs were now completely out of control. Herbert Hoover, who became president of the United States just three weeks later, vowed to subdue the criminal elements in American society. Fortunately, Hoover and his administration were able to benefit from the efforts of the Bureau of Investigation (it was not called the FBI until 1935), which had been working on gang cases for about five years. J. (John) Edgar Hoover became chief of the Bureau of Investigation in 1924, the same year that Al Capone became master of the Chicago mob. Hoover entered an organization badly shaken by the excesses of his predecessor, Mitchell Palmer. Under Palmer’s leadership, the bureau had rounded up hundreds of aliens and suspected Communist sympathizers in 1920. The “Red Scare” of 1920 had discredited the bureau’s activities; Hoover was determined to bring the agency back to respectability. Hoover was a masterful bureaucrat, both in the best and in the worst senses of the word. He excelled at organization, commanded loyalty, and was determined to make America a safer place. These public virtues made Hoover one of nation’s most admired men, and he continued to lead the bureau (and then the FBI) until his death in 1972. But there was another side of Hoover, a deeply controlling side, that caused concern in those Americans who knew him well. Hoover was so intent on creating a crime-free America that he began to trample on civil liberties. Few average Americans had qualms about Hoover in the 1920s or 1930s. His vigorous efforts, his creation of the fingerprinting system, and his relentless pursuit of criminals made him an outstanding hero. His numerous agents became symbols of what it was to be a good American. A popular song of the

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time attests to this while at the same time drawing attention to the agency’s abuse of power: Gee, but I’d like to be a G-Man And go Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Just like Dick Tracy, what a “he-man” And go Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! I’d do as I please, act high-handed and regal ’Cause when you’re a G-Man, there’s nothing illegal.35

Hoover and his G-Men (“Government Men”) pursued their cases with vigor, but also with painstaking research. When they found they could pin nothing on Al Capone, one of the bright minds in the bureau suggested they look into tax evasion. Capone was arrested in 1931, and in 1932, he was found guilty of tax evasion and sentenced to 11 years in prison. He served nine years in several locations—Alcatraz among them—and was then released for reasons of health. By then his grip on the Chicago underworld had disappeared. Throughout the 1930s, J. Edgar Hoover and his agents fulfilled their image of always getting “their man.” The bureau became the most admired of all government agencies during the decade. Part of the goodwill created toward law enforcement was channeled into the idea of a gun regulation law for the United States. By early 1934, Congress was in the midst of a major debate about how the law should be shaped. Then the National Rifle Association made its weight felt for the first time. The NRA had been formed in 1871 by a handful of retired Civil War officers. Led by Colonel William Church and Captain George Wingate, the NRA began as an organization to promote better marksmanship through shooting contests. New York State provided most of the funding for the NRA in its first decade, but then withdrew funding. The NRA languished and nearly disappeared before it made a return around the turn of the twentieth century.36

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Theodore Roosevelt, a hero of the Spanish-American War, became president in 1901. Roosevelt had always been a strong gun enthusiast, first as a cattle rancher, then as a soldier. He became a member of the NRA and helped develop the first national shooting agency. By about 1910, NRA membership had risen to 3,500. By 1934, there were 10 times as many NRA members.

Theodore Roosevelt Few presidents, or few men for that matter, have contributed as much to the positive image of guns as Theodore Roosevelt. Whether as a rancher, a soldier, or a big-game hunter, Roosevelt showed his enthusiasm for guns in a way that increased Americans’ acceptance of those weapons. Born in New York City in 1858, Roosevelt was a sickly child and suffered from asthma. In his teenage years he rejected the idea of being an invalid and became an advocate of a strenuous lifestyle that included boxing, gymnastics, and rifle shooting. Roosevelt’s enthusiasm for the Winchester 1876 Rifle was well known. As colonel of the regiment of Rough Riders, he helped to popularize the Gatling gun and the need for a new combat rifle to equal the Mauser, used by the Spanish in the Spanish-American War. After the assassination of William McKinley in 1901, Theodore Roosevelt became president. He lent his support to the National Rifle Association and strengthened the relationship between the federal government and the arms industry. Roosevelt played a role in making the 1903 Springfield rifle the weapon of choice for the U.S. Army. Roosevelt’s presidency ended in 1909, but he remained very much in the public eye. He went on safari in Africa, displaying his pistols, carbines, and rifles to newspapermen. Roosevelt’s greatest moment came in 1912, when he ran for president as the nominee of the “Bull Moose” Party. As he was about to give a speech, Roosevelt was shot by a deranged man with a pistol. Roosevelt continued his speech for another hour with the bullet in his chest, telling the crowd that “it takes more than [a bullet] to kill a bull moose.” He finally agreed to be taken to a hospital. Roosevelt recovered from his wound, but did not win the presidency that year. He became an ardent spokesman for those who wanted the United States to enter the First World War. When he died in 1919, American gun enthusiasts mourned the passing of one of their strongest supporters.

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The NRA leadership called out all the support that it could muster to oppose the gun regulation of 1934. As a result, the National Firearms Act of 1934 was much less severe on gun owners and gun companies than it was on criminals. The legislation increased the number of offenses that could be tried as federal offenses, but did little to prevent the manufacture or sale of guns.

Theodore Roosevelt was president of the United States from 1901 to 1909. An avid sportsman and hunter, he went on safari to Africa to shoot “big game” like the rhinoceros in this photograph. Today, worldwide conservation movements have outlawed big game hunting in many African countries to protect endangered species.

9

The Arsenal of Democracy In my opinion, the M-1 Rifle is the greatest battle implement ever devised.

AT ISSUE

— General George Patton, 1945

In the Second World War, Americans and Russians brought down the German war machine. The Americans used the M-1 Rifle, developed at Springfield Armory. The Russians used an assortment of rifles, but when the war ended, they developed the AK-47 rifle. The two weapons — the M-1 and the AK-47 — and the men that carried them confronted each other during the decades of the cold war. This chapter examines the inventors and the conflicts in which the weapons were used.

Throughout the 1930s, Americans were more concerned with domestic than with foreign affairs. The crisis brought on by the Great Depression overrode concerns about what was happening in Europe. But by about 1936, Americans realized that three major totalitarian dictatorships had arisen: Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, and Stalin’s Soviet Union. Each of these dictatorships relied on the strength of its military and police forces. The German Nazis, Italian Fascists, and Russian Communists were quick to see the potential of the new military weaponry that had emerged after the First World War. Using machine guns and tanks, a relatively small military force was able to subdue and rule a large population. Meanwhile, the major democracies had embraced disarmament. The British and French, in particular, considered World War I to be the “war to end all wars.” The British and French were, therefore, no longer effective deterrents to dictatorships on the continent

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of Europe. Fortunately, Americans had a leader who thought differently about the matter. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, like his distant cousin Theodore Roosevelt, had always been interested in foreign affairs. Roosevelt was elected president in 1932. He worked to combat the Great Depression, but he also saw the danger posed by the Fascist and Communist nations. But even a president as popular as Roosevelt was unable to stir Americans to do much about this danger during the mid-1930s. Americans were in a decidedly isolationist mood. Not until the autumn of 1939, when Hitler and Stalin carved up Poland, did the United States really begin to pay attention to the totalitarian regimes in Europe. Fortunately, American gun makers had not been idle. The 1930s were a time of slow but steady growth for American arms manufacturing. Production increased greatly soon after Europe went to war in September 1939, but the United States was still far from doing all that it could. Some military analysts argued that the day of the rifle— whether it was a repeater or not—was now over. Adolf Hitler’s German army had introduced a new type of warfare, known as Blitzkrieg (“Lightning War”), which seemed to bypass the old emphasis on either the rifle or the machine gun. The tank, fighter plane, and jeep were the new technologies of the Second World War. But Franklin Roosevelt and his military planners believed that the rifle would still play a major role once the United States entered the war. The timing was not of President Roosevelt’s choosing. There were formidable political forces arrayed against intervention, and as late as June 1941, at least 50 percent of the American public had doubts about playing any role in the war. But the Japanese bomber attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 ended any such doubts or misgivings, and the United States entered the war with a will and with a vengeance. American soldiers carried a new weapon into World War II: the M-1 rifle. It was designed by John Garand of Springfield,

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John Garand displays one of the M-1 semi-automatic rifles he invented in the years between the world wars. The rifle weighed close to nine pounds and was 43-inches long. The M-1 was loaded with a clip that held seven bullets. Each pull of the trigger released a bullet.

Massachusetts. Born in Quebec, Canada, Garand had moved to the United States with his family at a young age. Fascinated by guns, and given to long periods of research and introspection, Garand turned all his attention to making a rifle better than either the Springfield 1903 or the Mauser, which the Germans had used in the First World War. Success did not come easily. To begin with, Garand was so painstaking in his work that his rifle took longer to develop than was expected. Secondly, the U.S. Army experts were exceptionally picky in the 1920s. They believed that the 1903 Springfield was still better than anything their potential enemies had, and

The Arsenal of Democracy

that there was no need to invest in a new gun unless it showed exceptional prowess. Garand demonstrated his new rifle to army experts in 1931. They turned him down at first, and he had to return to the drawing board. But in 1936 the gun was finally accepted. Springfield Armory went into full-scale production of the M-1 rifle and never looked back. 37 The new rifle weighed 8.94 pounds and was 43 inches long. Military manuals described it as a “gas-operated, clip-fed, ait-colled, semi-automatic shoulder weapon.” Because the rifle was semi-automatic, rather than fully automatic, a separate pull of the trigger was needed for each release of a bullet. The M-1 was fed with a clip of seven bullets at a time, thereby following in the tradition of the successful German Mauser. The single most obvious feature of the M-1 was that the cartridge clip was automatically ejected after the seventh bullet had been fired. This happened from the squeeze of the trigger. The U.S. infantryman then fed in the next clip of seven rounds. The Second World War was much less predictable than the First World War had been. Rather than long periods of trench warfare, soldiers had to accommodate themselves to quick burst of “breakthrough” action. Thus, the Americans soon copied the German system of lightning warfare. The American tank, airplane, and jeep seemed to be the key elements that allowed for American breakthroughs in North Africa, Italy, and northern Europe. But the slogging, hard fighting still had to be performed by American troops on the ground, and they were very happy to have the M-1 rifle. In terms of tanks, the Germans usually had the advantage. The German Tiger tank was faster and more deadly than the American Sherman. The same was true of German bazookas and anti-tank weapons. But in deadly fireshoots between groups of infantry, the Americans held the trump card in the M-1. It was rugged, more durable than the German Mauser 98K, which held five rounds of ammunition, and fired a heavier slug. In most man-to-man shootouts, Americans prevailed.38

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U.S. soldiers armed with the M-1 rifle cautiously make their way through a Dutch town they have recently entered, not knowing if they will encounter resistance from German troops. The M-1 was rugged and more durable than the German Mauser, but street fighting in cities was often dangerously unpredictable.

In the Pacific, things were even less predictable. There Americans faced a foe like none they had ever seen before. The Japanese fought with great, even reckless, courage. The use of the kamikaze plane against U.S. ships was something Americans

The Arsenal of Democracy

simply could not prepare for. But, as in Europe, the American infantryman usually prevailed with his M-1 rifle. The Japanese had been copying and improving upon American and European weaponry for three generations. But nothing they had was equal to the M-1. Fighting in foxholes and burrowing into caves was something at which the Japanese excelled. The Americans caught up with them, however, through sheer grit and through the superior performance of the M-1. The greatest compliments to the gun came from generals Patton and MacArthur. General Patton, whose Seventh Army had copied the German system of lightning war, wrote to the Ordnance Department,“In my opinion, the M-1 Rifle is the greatest battle implement ever devised.” General MacArthur, who defeated the Japanese on one Pacific island after another, wrote, “Under combat conditions it operated with no mechanical defects and when used in foxholes [it] did not develop stoppages from dust and dirt. It has been in almost constant action for as much as a week without cleaning or lubrication.” 39 No higher praise could be given. The M-1 was clearly the ideal infantry weapon for Americans in the Second World War. The war in Europe ended in May 1945, and the war in the Pacific ended in September of that same year. Without any question, the United States had become the greatest economic and military power in the world. The atomic bomb, used against Japan in 1945, ensured that the United States would hold the edge against the Russian Communists in any showdown. But then came the surprises of the fall of 1949. Early in September, Mao Tse-Tung completed the Communist takeover of China. Suddenly there was a third superpower with which to contend. Just three weeks later, President Harry Truman made the grim announcement that the Soviet Union had successfully detonated its first atomic bomb. Now there were two nuclear superpowers and a small club of other nations—including France and China—that aspired to join the nuclear ranks.

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The cold war began in earnest that month. From 1949 until 1989, when the Soviet Union collapsed, the United States was engaged in an endless series of small conflicts that required the use of the American infantryman. Whether those actions were in Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, or elsewhere, the American soldier carried the new M-14 rifle. Springfield Armory began to search for a new rifle as early as 1944. The amazing success of the M-1 rifle convinced U.S. Army experts that they needed to search out and find the new generation of weapons before any of their adversaries. The M-14 was accepted by the army in 1957 and unveiled to small numbers

The Kalashnikov Rifle The “AK-47” (short for Automatic Kalashnikov, year 1947 ) has become as much a part of the American vocabulary as the “M-1.” The Kalashnikov, though, has generally been carried by the foes of the United States around the world. During the long cold war, Russian, North Korean, North Vietnamese, and Cuban Communists often carried the AK-47 into battle against the M-1. Mikhail Kalashnikov was born in the Altai Territory of Russia in 1919. He served in a Russian tank corps in World War II and was seriously wounded. While in the hospital, he developed his idea for a submachine gun. In 1947, his assault rifle was determined to be the best offered to the Russian government. By 1949, the Kalashnikov was adopted by the Soviet army; its inventor received the Stalin Prize First Class. The AK-47 has been used by the Soviet army since 1949 and has been adopted by governments and terrorist organizations around the world. Some ordnance experts say that the AK-47 is not particularly special in and of itself, but is remarkable for the vast numbers that have been produced. The AK-47 is especially popular in developing countries, where spare parts are difficult to obtain. Many people claim that the AK-47 seldom breaks down, making the scarcity of spare parts unimportant. In some countries, the AK-47 has become so popular that newborn boys are often named “Kalash” in its honor.

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The Automatic Kalashnikov assault rifle, better known as the AK-47, was invented soon after the end of World War II by Mikhail Kalashnikov, shown here at his home in the Ural Mountains in Russia. The AK-47 became the symbol of Communist aggression during the cold war.

of American servicemen in 1958. The M-14 was 44.14 inches in length and weighed 8.7 pounds. The detachable magazine, or cartridge holder, held 20 rounds of ammunition. The M-14 was designed to combat the new types of assault rifles developed by the Germans toward the end of World War II and the Russians in the years immediately following the war. In 1947, the Russians came out with the AK-47, which stands for Automatic Kalashnikov, year 1947assault rifle. Lighter than most rifles of its type and easy to use, the AK-47 became the symbol of Russian aggression throughout the cold war.

10

Hunters, Sportsmen, and Regulators From my cold dead hands.

AT ISSUE

— Charlton Heston

Many Americans today have guns in their homes. Should they? Homicidal murders in the United States hit an all-time high in the late 1980s and early 1990s. They declined during the second half of the decade.Those who favored gun control and those who did not clashed repeatedly during the 1990s.At the beginning of the new century, the presidential election was rife with rumors of whether one candidate or the other would take up the cause of gun control. This chapter shows that issues of gun control have been discussed since the 1930s,and that the gun control movement gained strength in the late 1970s and early 1980s, especially in response to the assassination of John Lennon and the attempted assassinations of Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II.

The Second Amendment to the United States Constitution reads,“A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” What controversies have been raised by those 27 words! Twenty-first century Americans have strong and heated opinions on the matter and there is a fairly equal division between those who believe that the Constitution gives sacred protection to the right of gun ownership and those who believe that the Founding Fathers did not know enough about the future—about the power of the repeating rifle and the machine gun—to provide for the twenty-first century. The amendment was passed in 1791, as part of the Bill of Rights. At that time, there was little fear that the United States government

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would oppress its own citizens; the concern was over Indian raids, or dangers posed by invasions from Europe. Now, in the twentyfirst century, numerous Americans believe that their government is so large and so powerful that they must retain their own weapons as a last line of defense against possible tyranny. Other Americans believe that the dangers posed by the existence of so many guns in private hands outweigh any possible advantages; they want the United States to become a nation with fewer weapons. A ready-made example is often provided in twenty-first century Britain; few people have guns, and many police are still able to do their jobs with nightsticks. The argument will continue. There is little likelihood of a resolution, at least any time soon. Americans are among the world’s most passionate people when it comes to their private possessions, whether those possessions are cars, stereos, or automatic weapons. The National Rifle Association (NRA) was founded in 1871 by three Civil War veterans. Deploring the poor quality of marksmanship exhibited by the Union armies during the war, these veterans envisioned the NRA as a club that would promote marksmanship in shooting. 40 The organization nearly foundered several times in the nineteenth century, but was revitalized in the twentieth century. This revitalization was assisted by President Theodore Roosevelt, a former soldier and an avid sportsman, who created the National Board for the promotion of Rifle Practice in 1903. The NRA moved its headquarters to Washington, D.C., in 1907, and strengthened its ties to the government. Though the expression the “militaryindustrial complex” would not be coined until the early 1960s, there were some Americans who already thought that the relationship between the NRA and the federal government was too cozy. NRA membership rose slowly. In 1921, there were about 3,500 members, and by about 1935 there were over 30,000 members. The increase might be traced to social tensions such as the controversy over Prohibition in the 1920s and the onset of the Great Depression in the early 1930s.

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NRA president Charlton Heston expresses his views on the issue of gun control by proudly raising a rifle. The National Rifle Association is an organization that supports the right of private American citizens to own guns.

If there was a decade in which American attraction to guns increased, it might be the 1930s. During those 10 years, colorful outlaws such as Al Capone virtually took over the government of the city of Chicago, and lawmen such as the G-Men became heroes. Rather than discouraging Americans from gun ownership, the battles between lawmen and crooks seemed to increase the American sentiment for weaponry. Rural Americans had long been gun owners. As late as about 1900, it was impractical and downright dangerous for people living on the frontier not to have firearms. But as the United States became an increasingly urban nation (the 1920 census shows that the country was divided about 50-50 between rural and urban areas), city people began to acquire weapons as well. Gun ownership soared during the 1950s. Peaceable, thoughtful Americans purchased guns so that they might feel safer about their families and homes. Gun ownership, which had

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once been a mark of the frontiersman, suddenly became quite normal throughout the country. Even wealthy upper-class Americans adorned their mantelpieces with guns and claimed that no one and no thing would take away from them this one sense of security in such a dangerous world. A series of assassinations in the 1960s made Americans look again at their attitudes toward gun ownership. Lee Harvey Oswald shot President Kennedy dead in 1963; Malcolm X was killed in 1965; and Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot and killed in 1968. The 1960s were a time when gun ownership was held in mixed regard. Young Americans, especially those who protested against the Vietnam War, thought their parents were ridiculous to hoard guns in an era when biological and nuclear weapons held greater perils. The parents believed their sons and daughters were foolhardy to trust to peace, love, and rock music at such a time. The real turning point in American beliefs about gun ownership came about as a result of urban riots that began in the 1960s and continued into the 1990s. There were inner-city race riots throughout the 1960s. The first ones were in Watts, a poor section of Los Angeles. Other riots broke out in Detroit, Michigan, and Newark, New Jersey. These riots demonstrated very clearly the pent-up anger of millions of African-Americans who felt left out of the American system. Great numbers of police and army troops were called in to suppress these riots. The same thing occurred in 1971 to 1973, when a group of Native American protesters held a mock siege at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. These events, on the soil of the American heartland, convinced many middle- and workingclass Americans that they needed guns, or, at least, that they had to have the ability to buy guns. Ronald Reagan was elected president of the United States in November 1980. Few men who have held the office have been so consistently friendly toward the NRA or to the idea of gun ownership. Reagan had been governor of California during the late 1960s; he had become an inveterate opponent of those who

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stood in the way of law and order. He seemed to be the perfect president to back the NRA cause.41 But the mood of the country started to change the year Reagan was elected: Two assassination attempts and one successful assassination contributed to a turn-around in the opinions of many American regarding gun control. First, John Lennon, a former member of the popular band The Beatles, was shot and killed in December 1980. Just three months later, President Reagan was shot and seriously wounded on March 30, 1981. Three other men were also wounded: Press Secretary James Brady, a Secret Service agent, and a Washington, D.C., policeman. Reagan was rushed to the hospital, where he spent the next several weeks. Only his relentless optimism made his convalescence appear easy to the public; in actuality, Reagan had come very close to losing his life. Then, in May 1981, Pope John Paul II, the most popular pope of the century, was shot and wounded. The assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan persuaded many Americans that there were too many guns in the United States, and criminals could get them too easily. Sarah Brady, wife of Reagan’s press secretary James Brady, led the crusade for a new gun control law. James Brady had been wounded in the head; his wounds led to paralysis, and he was confined to a wheelchair. His wife worked, at first behind the scenes, and then more outwardly, to promote the Brady Bill, which would require a waiting period to purchase any gun. The Brady Bill was first introduced in Congress in 1987. It took until November 30, 1993 before it was signed into law, due to the pressure exerted against it by the pro-gun lobby. 42 Surprisingly, former President Reagan, who was known for his conservative political beliefs, came out in favor of the bill in its later stages, helping it to become the law of the land. In 2000, guns were a frequent subject of debate, as the nation geared up for its first presidential election of the new millennium. Republican George W. Bush (son of George H.W. Bush) and Democrat Al Gore both argued they would defend the rights of

Hunters, Sportsmen, and Regulators

In 1981, a man named John Hinckley Jr. attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan. The president and his press secretary, James Brady, were among the men wounded. After the incident, Brady was paralyzed, and he and his wife worked to promote a bill for stricter gun-control laws.

Americans to own and carry weapons. Almost as if it did not believe the two candidates, the NRA, led by actor Charlton Heston, made some dramatic statements about the needs of gun owners. In one speech, Heston loudly proclaimed that only “over [his] dead body” would his gun be taken from him. George W. Bush won the election of 2000, and things appeared secure for gun owners and the NRA until September 11, 2001, when Arab terrorists hijacked airplanes and flew them into the Twin Towers of the Manhattan’s World Trade Center. Americans were horrified, and President Bush announced a new, unrelenting war on the terrorists and on the states that harbored them. One might think that the terrorist attack in New York City might have led Americans to be more sympathetic to gun owners, but the reverse proved true. Charlton Heston had to call short the

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annual NRA conference in Denver, Colorado, when it became apparent that national sentiment against the NRA ran high. Currently, it seems as if the United States and the American people will continue their dialogue concerning weapons. Both points of view—the right to bear arms, and the need to regulate those arms — obviously have some merit, but fashioning a compromise will be difficult indeed. One of the weapons that figures in this debate is the rifle.

The Rifle in the Movies Movies are an important barometer of American public sentiment. Most films that display rifles have done so in a positive manner, but there have been some notable exceptions, such as Annie, Get Your Gun and Bowling for Columbine. During the Great Depression and the Second World War, rifles and the men who carried them were very positively portrayed in films. Gary Cooper starred as Sergeant Alvin York, and John Wayne used rifles in numerous heroic roles. More recently, no one who has ever heard Clint Eastwood’s expression “Go ahead. Make my day,” has ever forgotten it. There were also films that glorified the early days of the American musket and then the Kentucky rifle. Films about Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, the Battle at the Alamo, and Northwest Passage, a film depicting Major Robert Rogers and his Rangers, are but a few examples. But if there was one film that showed both the beauty of the rifle and its stunning power to kill, that film was Gettysburg. In 1993, Martin Sheen delivers a memorable performance as Robert E. Lee, and thousands of period re-enactors make the three days at the real Gettysburg battlefield come to life on the screen. The most telling scene depicts Pickett’s Charge. While watching this hour-long scene, the viewer wants to yell at the Confederates to run up Cemetery Ridge, rather than slowly march to their doom. Cannon fire chews up their ranks as they approach; men are hurled into the air by the power of the guns. Worst of all, when the Confederates do gain the ridge and come close to their enemies, they are met by withering rifle fire from groups of standing Union troops. The scene is one of horrible devastation, and one wonders how anyone, Yankee or Rebel, could have withstood the terrible carnage.

Hunters, Sportsmen, and Regulators

The repeating rifle has changed human history. Until about 1800, the ways in which one person could kill another were fairly limited. There was the pistol, the sword, and the smoothbore musket. To kill someone with any of these weapons required a certain amount of premeditation. After 1800, the appearance of the true rifles, with grooved barrels, the percussion cap, and then the first repeating rifles in the 1860s, made war and violence a very different matter. It was now possible to kill at a faster rate. The appearance of the Gatling and Maxim guns, and the use of the new smokeless powder made the First World War a time of great killing. Individual bravery became less and less relevant; what mattered was having a greater amount of firepower. The twentieth century introduced even more powerful weapons, such as the M-1, AK-47, and M-14. One wonders whether the Americans who fought at the Battle of Kings Mountain—as Patriots or as Loyalists—would even recognize the face of war in the twentieth century. The repeating rifle helped to shape the deadly conflicts of the twentieth century. The appearance of the rifle may even have helped spur on the development of other and greater weapons, such as the atomic bomb. For as one nation or tribe acquires a new and deadly weapon, other nations and tribes will attempt to do the same. The “arms race,” therefore, is influenced by many factors and many weapons—one them being the repeating rifle—but the net result is nearly always the same: an escalation in weapons and their deadly powers. Americans of the twentieth century were often asked what technologies have shaped and altered their lives. Some of the answers that came quickly to the tongue are the computer, the automobile, and the telephone. One answer that did not usually surface—unless the person being questioned was a war veteran— was the repeating rifle. Yet the rifle, in its beauty and its destructive power, is definitely one of the forces that shaped the twentieth century. One can only wonder what role it may play in the twenty-first.

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ca. A.D. 1000 Gunpowder is first used in China. ca. A.D. 1300 Reports of the use of gunpowder reach Europe. 1347 Cannon appear at the Siege of Crecy in the Hundred Years War between England and France. 1450–1480 The matchlock gun first appears in Europe. ca. 1510 The wheel lock gun first appears in Europe. 1519–1522 Spaniards, led by Hernán Cortés, use guns to great effect in their conquest of Aztec Mexico. ca. 1610 The first flintlock musket is invented in Normandy, France. 1609 Samuel de Champlain uses an arquebus on Lake Champlain. 1650 By this date, the flintlock has been adopted by most European armies. 1703 The British Brown Bess musket is introduced. 1725 German-American gunsmiths, working in Pennsylvania, develop the first American rifle, later to be known as the Kentucky rifle. 1775 Daniel Boone and other frontiersmen settle in Kentucky. 1775 Colonel Daniel Morgan of Virginia leads companies of riflemen to Boston, where they participate in the siege of the British-occupied town. 1776 British Major Patrick Ferguson demonstrates his new breech-loading rifle to the British army experts. 1777 Ferguson and his special company of riflemen fight at the Battle of Brandywine Creek. 1780 Ferguson is surrounded and killed at Kings Mountain. 1783 The Revolutionary War ends. The American colonies become independent. 1798 Eli Whitney obtains his first government contract to produce muskets at his factory near New Haven, Connecticut. 1807 Scottish Reverend Alexander Forsythe patents the percussion cap.

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1836 Samuel Colt patents his first pistol. 1861 The Civil War begins. At first, both Union and Confederate troops use muzzle-loading guns almost exclusively. 1863 A new chief of ordnance for the Union army takes a keen interest in the new breech-loading rifles. 1864 The repeating Henry rifles appear on the Union side. 1865 The Civil War ends when the Confederates surrender. 1873 The Winchester Company brings out its Model ’73. It is soon known as “the Gun that Won the West.”

CHRONOLOGY OF EVENTS

1815 American riflemen led by Andrew Jackson win the Battle of New Orleans.

1876 Custer’s troops are wiped out at Battle of Little Bighorn. ca. 1880 The American buffalo is practically extinct. 1884 Hiram Maxim’s new machine gun becomes available. 1890s Smokeless powder appears in American and European arsenals. 1898 The United States becomes an imperial power after its victory in the Spanish-American War. 1898 Theodore Roosevelt becomes a national hero because of his performance at the Battle of San Juan Hill. 1898 The British, led by Lord Kitchener, crush the Sudanese at the Battle of Omdurman. 1903 The new ‘03 Springfield rifle introduced. 1907 Great Britain approves the Pistol Act. 1914 World War I begins with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. 1917 The Browning rifle is adopted by American soldiers in WWI. 1920 The British government approves the first national firearms act. 1921 General Thompson patents the Tommy submachine gun.

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1924 J. Edgar Hoover becomes director of the Bureau of Investigation. 1920s Mobs and organized crime flourish in many American cities. 1927 A law is passed to prohibit the use of U.S. mail to deliver guns. 1929 The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre occurs in Chicago. 1934 The National Firearms Act becomes law in the United States. 1935 The Bureau of Investigation becomes the FBI. 1936 John Garrand’s M-1 Rifle is adopted by the U.S. Army. 1939 World War II begins in Europe. 1941 The United States enters the war. 1945 The war ends in complete victory for the Allies. Generals Patton and MacArthur recognize the value of the M-1. 1947 A Russian tank mechanic invents the AK-47. 1949 The cold war becomes more serious with the explosion of the first Russian atomic bomb. 1957 The M-14 is adopted by the U.S. Army. 1960s Three major assassinations take place against President John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr. U.S. soldiers in Vietnam use the M-14 rifle. 1970s The National Rifle Association grows in numbers and strength. 1980 Former Beatle member John Lennon is shot and killed. 1981 President Ronald Reagan is wounded in an assassination attempt. Three other men are wounded, including Press Secretary James Brady. Pope John Paul II is wounded in assassination attempt. 1987 The Brady Bill is introduced in U.S. Congress. 1988 The U.S. presidential election pits George H.W. Bush, a member of the NRA, against Michael Dukakis, a member of the ACLU. Bush wins.

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1994 Gun control legislation efforts fade in the wake of an overwhelming victory by Republicans in the off-year elections. 1995 The bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City results in a renewed call for gun control. 2000 The NRA takes a strong stand during the presidential election. George W. Bush, a supporter of the NRA, is elected president.

CHRONOLOGY OF EVENTS

1993 President Clinton signs the Brady Bill, which takes effect in March 1994.

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NOTES

Chapter 1: Kentucky Rifles versus British Rifles 1 Robert L. O’Connell, Soul of the Sword: An Illustrated History of Weaponry and Warfare from Prehistory to the Present. The Free Press, 2002, p. 163. 2 Ibid., p. 163 3 National Park Service, Rifle Making in the Great Smoky Mountains. National Parl Service Popular Study Series, #13, p. 2. 4 Franklin and Mary Wickwire, Cornwallis: The American Adventure. Houghton Mifflin, 1970, pp. 212-216. 5 “The Battle of Kings Mountain,” quoted in Benson J. Lossing, The Pictorial Field-Book of the Revolution. Harper& Brothers, 1959, p. 421.

Chapter 2: Anatomy of the Gun 6 Edward Tunis, Weapons: A Pictorial History. The World Publishing Company, 1954, p. 68. 7 Samuel Eliot Morison, Samuel de Champlain: Father of New France. Little, Brown and Company, 1972, p. 110. 8 Claude Blair, general editor, Pollard’s History of Firearms. Macmillan, 1983, pp. 63-66. 9 Ibid., p. 73. 10 Robert L. O’Connell, Soul of the Sword, pp. 160-161.

Chapter 3: Inventors and Inventions 11 Constance McL. Green, Eli Whitney and the Birth of American Technology. Little, Brown and Company, 1956, pp. 45-49. 12 Robert L. O’Connell, Soul of the Sword. The Free Press, 2002, p. 182. 13 Edwin Tunis, Weapons: A Pictorial History . The World Publishing Company, 1954, p. 110. 14 Robert L. O’Connell, Soul of the Sword, p. 185. 15 Buccaneer Books, The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Buccaneer Books, 1993, pp. 56-57.

Chapter 4: The American Civil War 16 Fuller, Claud E., The Rifled Musket. Bonanza Books, p. 39

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17 David S. Heidler and Jeanne T. Heidler, Encyclopedia of the American Civil War . ABC-CLIO, 2000, pp. 1654-1655. 18 Harold F. Williamson, Winchester: The Gun that Won the West. Combat Forces Press, 1952, p. 38.

Chapter 5: The Wild West 19 Albert Marrin, Cowboys, Indians, and Gunfighters: The Story of the Cattle Kingdom. Antheneum, 1993, pp. 127-135. 20 Harold F. Williamson, Winchester: The Gun that Won the West. Combat Forces Press, 1952, p. 43. 21 Ibid., p. 67. 22 Albert Marrin, Cowboys, Indians, and Gunfighters: The Story of the Cattle Kingdom. Antheneum, 1993, pp. 127-135.

Chapter 6: Arms for Empire 23 Theodore Roosevelt, The Rough Riders. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1899, pp. 1135-136. 24 Sir Hiram S. Maxim, My Life. McBride, Nast & Company, 1915, p. 163. 25 Ibid., p. 163. 26 Ibid., p. 179. 27 Winston Churchill, The River War. London, 1899, pp. 273-274.

Chapter 7: The Great War 28 Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August. Macmillan, 1962, p. 71. 29 Ibid., p. 122. 30 John Keegan, The Illustrated Face of Battle. Viking Pengin, 1989, pp. 218-227. 31 Byron Farwell, Over There: The United States in the Great War. W.W. Norton, 1999, pp. 87-98.

Chapter 8: Gangsters and G-Men 32 Alexander DeConde, Gun Violence in America: The Struggle for Control. Northeastern University Press, 2001, p. 126-127. 33 Ibid., p. 119. 34 New York Times, February 15, 1929. 35 Richard Gid Powers, Secrecy and Power: The Life of J. Edgar Hoover. The Free Press, 1987, p. 179. 36 Alexander DeConde, Gun Violence in America, pp. 89-104.

37 David C. Clark, Arms for the Nation: Springfield Longarms. National Park Service, 1994, p. 58 38 Ibid., p. 58 39 Ibid., p. 60

Chapter 10: Hunters, Sportsmen, and Regulators 40 Alexander De Conde, Gun Violence in America: The Struggle for Control. Northeastern University Press, 2001, pp. 89-104. 41 Ibid., 42 New York Times, December 1, 1993.

NOTES

Chapter 9: The Arsenal of Democracy

101

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BOOKS Blair, Claude, ed. Pollard’s History of Firearms. New York: Macmillan, 1983. Buccaneer Books, The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Cutchogue, N.Y.: Buccaneer Books, 1993. Carter, Gregg Lee. The Gun Control Movement. New York: Twayne, 1997. Caruso, John A. The Appalachian Frontier: America’s First Surge Westward. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1959. Churchill, Winston S. The River War. London: 1899. Clark, David C. Arms for the Nation: Springfield Longarms. Albany, N.Y.: National Park Service, 1994. DeConde, Alexander. Gun Violence in America: The Struggle for Control. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2001. Farwell, Byron. Over There: The United States in the Great War. New York: W.W. Norton, 1999. ———. Prisoners of the Mahdi. New York: Harper & Row, 1967. Freedman, Russell. Buffalo Hunt. New York: Holiday House, 1988. Fuller, Claud E. The Rifled Musket. New York: Bonanza Books, 1958. Green, Constance McL. Eli Whitney and the Birth of American Technology. Boston: Little, Brown, 1956. Hanson, Victor Davis. Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power. New York: Doubleday, 2001. Johnson, Melvin Maynard. Rifles and Machine Guns of the World’s Armies. Washington, D.C.: The Infantry Journal, 1944. Keegan, John. The Illustrated Face of Battle: A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme. New York: Viking Penguin, 1989. Marrin, Albert. Cowboys, Indians, and Gunfighters: The Story of the Cattle Kingdom. New York: Atheneum, 1993. Maxim, Hiram S. My Life. New York: McBride Nast, 1915. Morison, Samuel Eliot. Samuel de Champlain: Father of New France. Boston: Little, Brown, 1972. National Park Service. Rifle Making in the Great Smoky Mountains. National Park Service Popular Study Series # 13. ———. Rifles and Riflemen at the Battle of Kings Mountain. National Park Service Popular Study Series # 12. O’Connell, Robert L. Soul of the Sword: An Illustrated History of Weaponry and Warfare from Prehistory to the Present. New York: The Free Press, 2002.

102

Roosevelt, Theodore. The Rough Riders. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1899. Sugarman, Josh. National Rifle Association: Money, Firepower & Fear. Washington, D.C.: National Press Books, 1992. Tuchman, Barbara. The Guns of August. New York: Macmillan, 1962. Tunis, Edward. Weapons: A Pictorial History. New York: The World Publishing Company, 1954.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Powers, Richard Gid. Secrecy and Power: The Life of J. Edgar Hoover. New York: The Free Press, 1987.

Williamson, Harold F. Winchester: The Gun that Won the West. Washington, D.C.: Combat Forces Press, 1952. PERIODICALS Beliveau, Mike. “The Teddy Roosevelt Rig: It’s the Holster and Revolver of This Famous American Frontiersman!” Guns of the Old West (Harris Outdoor Magazines, Spring 2003). “The Curse of Violent Crime.” Time, March 24, 1981. The New York Times, 15 February 1939; 1 December 1993.

103

FURTHER READING

BOOKS Carter, Gregg Lee. The Gun Control Movement. New York: Twayne, 1997. Hanson, Victor Davis. Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power. New York: Doubleday, 2001. Keegan, John. The Illustrated Face of Battle: A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme. New York: Viking Penguin, 1989. O’Connell, Robert L. Soul of the Sword: An Illustrated History of Weaponry and Warfare from Prehistory to the Present. New York: The Free Press, 2002. VIDEOS PBS. Arming the Earth, from Walk Through the Twentieth Century with Bill Moyers. PBS video series, 1984. WEBSITES Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence http://www.bradycenter.com The Civil War http://www.civilwar.com First World War.com http://www.firstworldwar.com How Machine Guns Work http://people.howstuffworks.com/machine-gun.htm The Maxim Machine Gun in World War II http://users.erols.com/hyattg/usmcguns/mgartl1.htm National Rifle Association http://www.nra.org RareWinchesters.com http://www.rarewinchesters.com The Second World War Experience Centre http://www.war-experience.org/ The Spanish-American War http://www.spanamwar.com The Springfield Armory National Historic Site http://www.nps.gov/spar/

104

Battles Argonne Forest, 70 Brandywine Creek, 8 Bull Run, 37 Cowpens, 12 Culloden, 11 Gettysburg, 37-38, 40 Kings Mountain, 13 Little Bighorn, 49-50 Marne, 65-66 Masurian Lakes, 68 Meuse-Argonne, 70 Omdurman, 60, 6263 San Juan Hill, 57, 60 Shiloh, 37 Somme, 67-68 Tannenberg, 68 Waterloo, 25-26, 29 Waxhaws, 7, 10-11 Black Ben, 7 Blackfeet War, 47 Blitzkrieg, 81 Bloody Ben, 7 Bonnie Prince Charlie, 11 Bonny and Clyde, 73 Boone, Daniel, 10 American frontiersman, 21 used Kentucky rifle, 22 Bootlegging, 72-73 Bowling for Columbine, 94 “Boys of 61,” 37 Brady Bill, The, 92-93

Brady, Sarah, 92 Brady, Secretary James, 92-93 Brown Bess Musket, 21, 25 British use of, 6, 1920 issued, 19 Brown, John attacked Harpers Ferry, 35 as notorious, 35 Browning, John Moses manufactured guns, 71 Buffalo Bill Cody, 45 his killing buffalo, 53 Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show, 52 “Bull Moose Party,” 78 Bureau of Investigation, 76 most admired, 77 Burnside, General Ambrose, 37 Bush, George W., 92-93 Cannon, the, 15 Capone, Al, 72, 90 arrested on tax evasion, 77 as leader of organized crime, 74 his machine gun, 77 Carolina Mountain Men, 10-12 Catapults, 15 Champlain, Samuel de, 17 Charles Town surrendered to British, 6, 10 Chicago and bootlegging, 72 as gangster center, 72 Church, Colonel William, 77 Churchill, Winston Spencer, 60, 62 as journalist, 61

Civil War, 48, 57, 67 as deadly, 34 end of, 42-43 first shots, 35-36 Claudman, Major, 41 Clinton, General Henry, 6 intrigued by Ferguson rifle, 9 Coloradas, Chief Mangas, 48 Colt, Samuel, 24, 30-31, 46 Cooper, Gary, 70, 94 Cornwallis, General Charles, 67 his defeats, 12 and invasion of North Carolina, 11 his surrender, 13 Craig, H. K., 35, 37 Crazy Horse, Chief, 49 memorial to, 50 Crimean War, 25 Crocket, Davy, 10, 23 Crompton, Samuel Willard, 112 Crook, General George, 51 Cumberland Gap, 21 Custer, General George A., (“Yellow Hair”) leading cavalry to Indian territory, 50 as ruthless, 49

INDEX

Adams, President John, 27-28 Algonquin Indians, 17 Amherst, Lord Jeffrey, 8 Annie Get your Gun, (film), 94 “Arms Race,” 95 “Arsenal at Springfield, The,” (Longfellow), 32-33 Atomic bomb, 85, 95

Duke of Wellington, 25 Eastwood, Clint, 94 Edison, Thomas, 57 Eighteenth Amendment, 72 Federal Armories, 31 Ferdinand, Archduke Franz, 64 his assassination, 68

105

INDEX

Ferguson, Major Patrick, 7 his death, 11 invented breechloading rifle, 89 Ferguson rifle, 6, 41 and accuracy, 8 trigger guard, 8-9 Five Nations of Iroquois, 17 Forsythe, Reverend Alexander, 24, 28 designed percussion lock, 29 his patent, 29 Fredericksburg, 37, 39 Gangster era, 72 Garand, John demonstrated rifle to Army, 83 designed M-1 rifle, 81 Gatling, Richard Jordan, 55 his inventions, 54 Gentlemen adventurers, 18-19 George II, King, 11 Germans, 68-69 Geronimo, 51, 53 Gettysburg, (film), 94 G-Men, 77 as heroes, 90 Gore, Al, 92-93 Grant, General Ulysses S., 41 Great Depression, 80-81 rifles in films, 94 Grey, Lord, 65 Gunpowder, 15 Haig, General Douglas, 67-68 Hamilton, Alexander, 27 Henry, Benjamin Tyler, 40 Henry Rifle Barrel Company, 59 Heston, Charlton, 88, 94 his dramatic statements, 93 as President of NRA, 90

106

Hinckley, John Jr., 93 Hitler, 81 Holt, J., 35 Hood, General, 41 Hoover, J. Edgar, 72 chief of Bureau of Investigation, 76 Houston, Sam, 23 Howe, General William, 89 Hundred Years’ War, 15 Jackson, Andrew, 10-11, 23 John Paul II, Pope, 92 Josef, Emperor Franz, 64 Kalashnikov, Mikhail, 87 developed AK-47, 86 Kamikaze plane, 84 Kennedy, President John F., 91 Kerensky, Alexander overthrown by Lenin, 69 King, Martin Luther, 91 Kings Mountain, 6, 11, 95 Kitchener, General Horatio, 60 Lee, Robert E., 35, 38, 41, 94 losing a battle, 39 surrendered to grant, 42 Lenin, 69 Lennon, John, 92 “Lock, Stock and Barrel,” 14 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 30 his poem of peace, 32-33 Longstreet, General James, 38 Mac Arthur, General praised the M-1, 85

Mahdi religious leader, 60 Malcolm X, 91 Maxim, Hiram, 57 and machine gun, 58 McGuffey, William H., 37 McKinley, President William, 57, 78 Mead, General George, 38 Miles, General Nelson, 53 Military technology, 14 Morgan, General Daniel, 12-13 Mussolini, 80 Napoleon, 24-25, 34 career ended, 25 Napoleonic Wars, 21, 25, 29 National Firearms Act of 1937, 79 National Park Service, 10 National Rifle Association, (NRA), 77 oppose gun regulation, 79 and revitalized, 89 Naval technology, 14 New York Times, 74 Nicholas II, Czar, 68 and overthrown, 69 Northwest Passage, (film), 94 Oakley, Annie as markswoman, 52 Olympic athlete and the modern rifle, 15 Oswald, Lee Harvey, 91 Palmer, Mitchell, 76 Patton, General, 80 and the M-1, 85 Pearl Harbor, 81

Race riots, 91 Ramsey, Colonel George, 40 Ramsour’s Mill, 11 Rasputin, 68 Readers, (McGuffey), 37 Red Cloud, Chief, 48 Red Cloud’s War, 47 “Red Scare,” 76 Regan, President Ronald, 92 Repeating Rifle, 63, 68 changed history, 95 developed other weapons, 95 Report on Manufacturers, (Hamilton), 27 Revolutionary War, 6, 13, 21, 23 Ripley, General James, 55 Ripley, James Wolfe, 37, 40 Roosevelt, President Franklin D., 81 on communists, 81 Roosevelt, President Theodore, 55-56, 89 and hunter, 79 member NRA, 78 Rough Riders, (Roosevelt, T.), 55, 57, 78 Russians, 69 Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre, The and description of, 74-76 Saturday Evening Post, 70

Scots Highlanders, 11 Second Amendment, 88 September 11, 2001, 93 Sergeant York, (film), 70 Shawnee Indians, 21, 23 Sheen, Martin, 94 Sherman tank, 83 Sherman, William Tecumseh, 41-42 Sitting Bull, Chief, 52 Slavery, 33, 43 debates on, 36 Soviet Union, and atomic bomb, 85 Spanish-American War, 55-56, 67 and use of Maxim gun, 60 Springfield rifle, (1903), 69, 82 single-shot, 70 Stalin, 80-81 Tarleton, Banastre his brutality, 7 his defeat, 12 slaughtered Americans, 10 Tarleton’s quarter, 7 Thompson, Brigadier General John designed Tommy Gun, 73-74 Tiger Tank, 83 Totalitarian dictatorships, 80 Tse-tung, Mao and takeover of China, 85 Turner’s Rebellion of 1831, 35 Union Fort Sumter, 3536 Union Jack, 11 United States of America, 23 Verdun, 66-67 Vietnam War, 31

Walker, Doctor Thomas, 21 War of 1812, 28, 31 Ward, Nancy, 10 Washington, General George, 89 Watt, James, 29 perfected steam engine, 29 Wayne, John, 94 Weapons AK-47, 80, 95 Brown Bess, 6, 19-21, 25 Browning Pistol, 71 Charlevoix musket, 24 Colt six-shooter, 31, 44, 46 Enfield rifle, 34-35, 37 Ferguson rifle, 6, 8-9, 41 Flintlock musket, 8, 14, 17 Gatling gun, 55-58, 78, 95 Henry rifle, 40-41, 44, 48 Hotchkiss, 57 Kentucky rifle, 6, 1013, 22 M-1 rifle, 80-81, 8486, 95 M-14, 86 M-16, 95 Mangonel, 15 Matchlock, 14, 16-17 Maxim, 60, 95 Rim Fire rifle, 40 Springfield rifle, 82 Tommy gun, 73-74 Vickers machine gun, 66 Wheel Lock, 14, 1719 Winchester rifle, 4446, 53, 78 Westward movement, 44-45 Indian resistance, 48

INDEX

Percussion lock, 29-30, 95 Pickett, General George, 38, 40 Plains Indians, 46 and the buffalo, 47 Pratt, Francis, 59 Pratt and Whitney, 59 Prohibition, 72-73

107

INDEX 108

Whitney, Eli, 24-25, 29, 31 birth of, 26 inventing cotton gin, 27-28 produced rifles, 27 and replaceable gun parts, 28

Winchester, Oliver, 41, 44 Winchester Repeating Arms Company, 40 Wingate, Captain George, 77 Woolwich, (England), 8 World War I, 64

World war II, 81, 83, 85 and rifles in films, 94 York, Alvin, 94 and Argonne Forest, 71 as hero of WWI, 70 as pacifist,70 Ziolkowski, 50

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR 110

Samuel Willard Crompton is a historian and biographer living in western Massachusetts. His father found a Revolutionary bayonet in the family garden when Crompton was a child, and the author has been interested in military history ever since. Crompton is the author or editor of more than 20 books on subjects that range from lighthouses to spiritual leaders of the world to military leaders who shaped world history. A significant contributor to American National Biography, published by Oxford University Press, he currently teaches history at Holyoke Community College in Massachusetts.