Great American Guns and Frontier Fighters

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CREAT AMERICAN GUNS and FRONTIER FIGHTERS

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GREAT

AMERIC GUNS a«d FRONTIER FIGHTERS LIBRARY ^ North Elementary

Written and

by

Illustrated

WILL BRYANT

GROSSET & DUNLAP NEW YORK

PUBLISHERS

•

3

4563

Littleton,

CO 80120

To my grandfather,

M.

©

E. Bryant

1961 by Will Bryant

Printed in the United States of America

Page

The Kentucky

H

Rifle

The Shut-eye Hunter

The

21

1778

33

Plains Rifle

Mojave Massacre

The Cap and

Buffalo

—

42

1827

59

Ball Colt

John Cremony

The

—

s

Ride

—

o4

18bQ

Gun

77

The Freeze-out Bunch

The Repeating

— 1862

87

99

Rifle

Smoke Wagon Medicine

—

The Broken Medicine of Roman Nose The Buffalo Wallow

—

1874.

Gun

— 1868

120 124

136

The Peacemaker Colt The Fastest

108

1868

—

1900

151

\

THE

Vikings called

time in

it

Vinland.

summer

the

of

Some

1007 or

1008, Thorvald Ericson, brother of Leif the

of Eric the Red,

Lucky and son

was

exploring along the rocky, forested shore

—

of this Vinland

it

would have been

per-

haps the coast of Maine, as we know it now when he and his Vikings came

—

GUNPOWDER

&

SURVIVAL in the

NEW WORLD

upon nine strange men asleep under canoes on a tiny beach. The Vikings fell upon the sleeping men. There was a quick, messy little scuffle and eight of the sleeping men lay dead on the white sand. One escaped. He came back later that day with others in war canoes and there was a fight, a real fight this time. The Vikings were driven off in their dragon ship with Thor-

vald

down and

dying, an arrow in his

lung.

This was the first recorded meeting between Europeans and American Indians. It set the unhappy pattern which was

dominate most further relations between the two peoples for the next ten

to

centuries.

There

is

no way of knowing

how many times the Norsemen and others, before and after them, tried to set up colonies in the

other bitter corded. tle

New World,

little

Once

the

or

how many

skirmishes went unre-

Norsemen brought

cat-

with them and their bull bellowed and

flight. That bull was the white man brought to the weapon best he came at last with until World the New

put the Indians to

the magic thundersticks.

The

steel battle

double-edged thrusting

ax and the short,

and cutting sword

of the

Norsemen, made for boarding ships and hacking through chain

mail and leather armor, were never proof against fleet arrows. "We had camp beside two skerries [rocks or rocky islets], one

from

day's journey north

this stone," reads the inscription

sington rune stone of Minnesota, dated 1362.

we came home, found It

was a message

ten

men

"We

fished

on the Ken-

one day. After

red with blood and dead.

." .

.

as poignant with terror, with the sense of arrows

rushing, as any ever written.

It is

part of the demonstrable fact that the

white man, outnumbered always in those early times, could not stay on this continent until

val required

THIS BOOK it is

he came with gunpowder. The mathematics of survi-

it.

is

concerned with gunpowder and guns.

More than

concerned with people and the way that survival

ness depended, one

way

or another, upon guns. So this

cal study of firearms, although

is

not a techni-

one might come away from

conversational knowledge of the old weapons.

that,

in the wilder-

it

with a

We are not interested here

and breech pressures, except perhaps incidentally. was churning the flow of history along the old frontier for centuries. We do not aim to see it glorified for its own sake, but it was there and it ought to be underin muzzle velocities

There

is

violence inherent in this theme; indeed violence

it was so much a part of the lives of plain people. The guns were there, too, household items in a matter-of-fact way. And when the guns were very good, as a few of them were, so that

stood because

prodigious things were done with them, they began to acquire almost

human

the eyes of the

traits, at least in

men who

carried them.

Men

said

gun was "noble," or that it was "vicious," or "sweet," or gave it a name like Betsy. There is nothing very accurate or scientific in thinking of a gun that way a gun by itself is. at best, still a piece of hardware that a

— but

—

it is

something we cannot help doing.

It is

a part of our emotional

machinery with greatness, spelled out in human terms. It may not be far wrong at that. These things do in truth take on an aura that sets them apart, that makes them involvement with

perhaps a

little

So, while a

life,

to invest a piece of

larger than

gun by

life.

itself is just

a piece of hardware, a

man and

—

a

the gun together are apt to be a story. The story is in the relationship man, the gun and the moment when life hangs by a fraying thread.

Wc have here, then, studies of each of a number of American weafwns which were thought, in their own times, to be the finest instruments in the world for helping a man to stay alive in the wilderness. Then, with each gun, wc have a story of survival in which the gun plays a part. These stories are fragments of history lifted out of time and held close so that we can move into them and share the moment of experience and think to ourselves, this is what it must have been like. So the stories are not exact history; wherever it seemed suitable to do so, I have tampered with names, ages, time, or other details. If the original historical source has made any adventure seem a bit far-fetched, I have not tamed it down. They were there. One alone of the stories, the most Great

Americau

recent in time, has a witness

very

much Most

Cuyi f

as he told

it

now

living

and the story

is set

down

here

to me.

of those old-timers took

it

all

pretty

much

in stride,

but a few

and the ones who could write like Zenas Leonard, James Clyman, James Ohio Pattie and John Cremony. It would be very hard to reconstruct the past and keep it intimate and personal without them. had a hunch they were involved sometimes kept journals, men

Again,

it

is

in history

scarcely possible to understand or write about the

Plains Indians, Cheyennes especially, without

knowing

own

their

stories

of the frontier wars, as recorded and interpreted from their oral tradition

by George Bird Grinnell and others

between the thinking of red men

like

as devoted.

A

vast gulf lay

Black Kettle and Chief Joseph

and the white men Uke General Miles and Custer, who shaped the Indian's destruction in the Thirty Years' War on the plains. It was a gulf that was never bridged in their own time and that was both a part and a cause of the tragedy. But to carp about the enormous injustices

now

is

pointless.

We

are concerned here to see them, white

individuals in the frame of their the universe.

We

see each of

them

and sympathy,

own

man

or Indian, simply as

time and existence and idea of

are trying to reach back into those faraway times, to in that heart-stopping

to be able to think, this

is

moment what

it

with understanding

was

like.

.

.

.

TH

KENTUCKY RIFLE The Shut-eye Hunter

It took

half a mi?iute

to

and jire

load

with sparks from a piece of rock^ hut the

world had ever known

.

a round lead ball it

was

the best

.

Kentu<"ky Rifle the New World was a FIRST century THAT darkness and endless interminable time in

of

unknown

wilderness.

or whatever,

For Cavalier, Pilgrim, Puritan,

was a time of famine, of

it

sickness, of

witch-hunt, of whirring arrows, of tiny clearings in the dark forest of

maple and birch and oak.

was

It

a time of longing for sunlight.

By

the century's end, survivors

and

their children

were creeping gratefully out of the long darkness into a

narrow

strip of sunlight

—

of civilization

—

along the eastern seaboard where the forests had

been cut back and the red colonials, they

men

held at bay.

were for the most part,

still

As

stub-

bornly clinging to their European identities, so that in Williamsburg or Philadelphia the

new

architec-

11

would be Georgian and the new chairs would be Queen Anne and writers would be Alexander Pope and Dean Swift. In later times, antique authorities would look at a fine chair from Boston or a heavy Jaeger rifle from a Pennsylvania attic and be hard put to say whether they were of European or American make. ture the

new

But there were some who stayed on the fringes of darkness and stayed there by choice. In the passage from colonist settler to comfortable colonist citizen, there had

men,

any

grown up

this errant race of frontiers-

Europe. These folk were American and nothing else. In a way, they were the first Americans, as we think of ourselves now. They accepted the land on its own terms, starvation and whirring arrows included. They had the scent of the wilderness in their nostrils, mysterious, and urgent and demanding. In the next century and a half, it would lure them across the sweep of a a breed without

real counterpart in

surely

Great

American

Guns

continent.

For this frontier breed, now shouldering through the Alleghenies, was more than ever a need for sharpening survival tools. They

there

scorned to farm tamed land. They pitied their cousins moving

under the Georgian eaves of the town houses. Survival

was more than

in close

in the wilderness

just a stroke of luck for frontier people. It

was

their

chosen existence on earth, an existence creatively shaped from the harshness of privation. In the lock guns.

first

Men

brutal years, they

had carried

of wealth or position

match-

their thick-bodied

may have owned

wheellocks.

The

wheellock, though, was a complicated and delicate piece of machinery,

comparable

in

many

of

its

parts to a clock.

A

moment's

neglect, a

drops of sea water or a splash of rain into the mechanism, would ruinous corrosion. Competent locksmiths were hard to

find.

few

set

On

up the

other hand, matchlock guns were cheap and scarcely anything about

them could go wrong. For ease of shooting, they couldn't touch a bow, in accuracy. But the lead balls they threw, weighing an ounce and a half or two ounces, struck with stunning force nor were they really superior

when they

struck at

of chain or nails. their firing

12

—

When

were formidable

missed his target lock

all.

Beyond

the lead ran out, they fired rocks or bits

that, the noise in themselves.

— and more than

likely

and smoke and stench from For the shooter who had just he had missed with a match-

there could be considerable comfort in the noise and' smoke.

IVheelLock

Another development

in

ignition

&' winding

key

mechanisms was making

its

—

the simple type of lock appearance in these early years, a new and account to theones of number a are snaphance or snaphaunce. There the pecuUar name for it. One of the for the exact origin of the lock and from the German schnapp Hahn, derives the name

more colorful is that does function precise y meaning pecking chicken. And, in fact, the lock it was called in the old as cock or hammer, like a pecking chicken. The the flint which was and frizzen, steel days, pecked downward at the showered sparks and frizzen the raked in the jaws of the cock gripped into

an open pan

full of

priming powder next to the flash hole

barrel.

m

the ,

complicated than The snaphaunce mechanism was hardly more make and easy to to easy was It a decent door lock of the same period. drop of ram to one took only It drawbacks. fix Of course there were the primmg out blow to wind of dampen the priming powder, or a breath rainy day, wmdy, a of end the at of the pan altogether. It was probably up a clean to down sat hunter in Europe, that a disgusted

somewhere snaphaunce lock that had been

misfiring for

him

all

day, and was sud-

he must have thought, have the denly struck with an idea. Why not, cover that would keep the powder dry frizzen attached to a kind of pan

— then when

the cock struck

down

with the

flint,

the frizzen

would

flip

back and the sparks drop into the pan.

became the flmtWith this simple modification, the snaphaunce principal finng the remain would lock It was reliable and effective and still in service is flintlock a and many mechanism for over a century

-

13

Snaphauuce

lock,

with sliding pan cover

A^ Hammer, or cock B

C D E F

— — — — —

Jaws, holding

Priming pan Flash-hole Frizzen spring

G — Lock in

flinf

Frizzen

plafe

Kentucky Jiintlock

remote comers of the world today. Such locks, snaphaunce or

lock

—

it

makes no

difference

—

flint-

affixed to a bell-muzzled blunderbuss

or to the lately developing long-barreled musket, sustained the settlers

and held for them their perilous foothold on the continent. We were speaking, though, of the frontier breed and of the time when a bell-muzzled blunderbuss was not enough. Gunsmithing had ffourished in Germany for centuries. German and Swiss colonists, with their skills in gunmaking, gravitated to the frontier villages, especially in the

vania.

They brought with them,

neighborhood of Lancaster, Pennsyl-

intact, their

German hunting

rifle

as

it

had evolved in their native forests and they continued now to make them for the American hunters. The Jaeger rifle from Jdger, German for "hunter" or "rifleman," pronounced YAH-ger was short and very bulky in form, with a large and ornate brass trigger-guard that embraced the whole hand. The deeprifled bore ran as large as .75 cahber. Only eleven bullets of this size I could be molded from a pound of lead. Rifling itself was nothing new, an old idea that dated back to at least 1500. But it was an idea that had never worked as well as it should have. In order for the rifling to take effect, the lead ball had to squeeze into the grooves far enough to stop the gases from escaping around it,

1

— —

and far enough for the rifling to impart its twist to the ball in flight. There was no way to accompHsh this in a muzzle-loader except to pound the ball down the length of the barrel with an iron ramrod and a mallet.

The 14

ball,

pounded thus

into a shapeless blob, flew skittishly.

Then some German or Swiss rifleman, forever anonymous, seized the simple answer. Very probably he had driven a greased patch through the bore of his rifle and had seen, upon taking it out, how the upon

lands and grooves of the rifled barrel were deeply impressed into the

greased cloth. size,

He would

then have tried a ball slightly smaller than bore-

a ball seated on a greased patch and easily run

And

of the ramrod.

he would have then

accurately placed rifleshots.

patch

He was

fired

home with

a thrust

one of the world's

first

able to do so because the greased

the rifling grooves, efficiently trapped the expanding gases as

filled

the charge ignited, and sent the

undamaged

ball spinning out of the

barrel.

There were

problems.

still

the famihar

game

things about

it

trails

If the

Jaeger had seemed a fine

rifle

along

of the Swiss and Bavarian forests, there were

on the Pennsylvania frontier. For one thing, lead was precious, devilishly expensive. It had to come in over the mountains in wagons or pack trains. Furthermore, it was heavy to carry in

And

to get only eleven or twelve bullets to the

pound

struck hard at a thrifty settler. Paying for a few pounds of lead could

or days of hard going along a winter trap

line.

A

frugal

hunter would collect his bullet from the deer or bear carcass and save it to melt down again. After a fight, if it was handy to do so and if he could find it, he would dig what lead he could out of the trees with his knife point.

The Jaeger gun hours of fire

itself

was heavy, monstrously

through thick

fast trotting

forest.

quickly, might have reason to curse

was so

far

proved

back that

delicate,

it

its

A

so after

two or three

winded" man, stopping to

atrocious balance. Its weight

caused the muzzle to waver. The big trigger-guard

quick to hang up in the brush, quick to be mashed out

of shape with a chance blow.

These were

lost

irritating

matters were serious business on the

blunderbusses and matchlocks to itself,

The Kentucky Its

design

respect tion.

A

trail

and

lives

because of them. The Jaeger was far enough away from the old

good enough

—

Kentucky

that riled a hunter

the shooter's bag.

mean hours

^ ^^

but rifle

it

set the

make

a hunter want more. It was not

imagination

stirring.

appeared sometime between 1725 and 1728.

is

a direct contradiction to the Jaeger

it

seems to have been a weapon

man named

Stengel

is

bom

rifle in

almost every

out of sheer exaspera-

thought to have designed the

first

one.

15

Rifle

PcuNsylvdnia Jaeger

However

it

happened,

it

rifle

of 1725

seems clear that the design was a deliberate

innovation rather than the slow trial-and-error product of evolution.

There would be changes over the years, to be sure, but they would be minor, a great many of them matters of decoration rather than function. Now we had better examine one. First, though, it should be pointed out that no two Kentucky rifles were alike. Each was the expression of maker's fancy at the time, or the

its it.

Not

until

Samuel Colt's time

whim

in the

1

of the customer

840's

of one design be offered to the individual citizen shooter.

This particular surprise, because

long, but

56 If

to

it is

it

rifle

in

our hands

looks big.

very light

is

a

slender to the point of delicacy.

little less

Most

60 inches long and weighed seven-and-a-half

the dimensions seem vague,

Our It is

now

It is, in fact,

rifle is

remember

to

ordered

—

than

the

first

five feet

of these guns were

to nine or ten pounds.

that there were

no two

alike.

stocked in tiger maple, also called fiddleback maple.

nut brown in color, almost black

common

who

would mass-produced guns

aged maple.

A

little

in places,

with the reddish lights

soot from the fireplace mixed with a

few drops of linseed oil and reddish dye from the alkanet root, rubbed by hand into the dense wood gave it that first color. Only time could give

it

the rich night-deep patina.

Gunmakers claimed

that

no more

than one maple in fifteen yielded the striped fiddleback grain so prized for

rifle

stocks.

These

trees

seemed to be found more often than not on

was no way of knowing what was cut down. The stock runs the full length of the barrel and is pinned to it at three points with small steel wedges set through brass inlays. The barrel has been ground octagonal in section, measures a Uttle less than an inch across the flats and is brown in color, not blue like modern guns. This barrel is not quite four feet long. The rifling was designed to make one turn in four feet, so here it is just shy of a full turn. the slope of hilly ground; otherwise, there the grain

16

would be

like until the tree

LIBRARY Centennial School Littleton,

Many

of these barrels were

made under

Colorado

unbelievably primitive

conditions, with astonishingly accurate results. Generally, the gunsmith started with a flat bar of

tough iron, not

which he heated

steel,

to

welding temperature and shaped around a long rod, heating and weld-

was done. Then the barrel was and polished. Straightness could be reamed out to its determined by stringing a thread-weight bowstring through it and sighting along the string. If a crooked place showed up it was straightened ing successively until the full length

proper caliber

by tapping the outside of the barrel lightly with a hammer. Old-time gunmakers claimed they could tie a gun barrel in knots by tapping the malleable iron long enough.

was straightened, the barrel was clamped down and ground octagonal. Power tools were sometimes operated by treadle, like an old spinning jenny, sometimes driven by mule-power connected through a big flywheel. Boy-power was often used, though it was thought undependable because of a tendency of the power supply to steal away and After

go

it

fishing.

When

the barrel

and lined up with the

was ready

for rifling,

rifling cutter.

A

it

was clamped

to the

bench

ramrod-like affair with the twist

its length was set to run through a match those in the long rod. Thus, when the rod was pulled back and forth, it turned at the same rate as

of the rifling reproduced in part of guide, the guide having grooves to

the

rifling.

Fixed to the end of

one for each groove. The

this

rod were the

bits -were set to

through the barrel. For the next

cut,

a

make

slip of

rifling cutters,

or

bits,

a light cut and were run

paper was put under the

splints holding the httle rifling cutters so that the

depth of the cut would

be increased by perhaps a thousandth of an inch.

And

cutting depth increased by paper thicknesses, until the

so

it

went, the

gunmaker was

satisfied.

Upwards of 600 gunsmiths made Kentucky rifles at one time or Some enjoyed well equipped shops for that day, but a great many made their rifles with equipment no less crude than we have just another.

described.

A

great

many

of the guns were of poor quality; a large

number were very good and a few were superb. The poorest were scarcely good enough to survive and come down to us. The best of them were too good to mistreat over the generations, so that a large percentage are

still

sound,

still

capable of being

fired.

17

-'

"^

Kentucky

„ .^ -^

The

we

rifle

arc holding

in the

wood. Of

all

one of

Examining

these.

further,

it

most often.

had a patch box with a has a long brass box

the right side of the butt, the Jaeger

wood. Our American

sliding cover of carved

rifle

with scrolled edges, and here and there along the stock are a other small inlays of silver and brass. Southern

gone

to have

in for

we

butt, the eight-pointed silver star inlaid

the decorative motifs found on these pieces, this

eight-point silver star occurs

On

is

on the

sec the raised chcckpiccc

is

as spare

number

of

makers seem never

The unadorned

elaborate trimmings.

Kentuckian, Simon Kenton,

rifle

of the

rifle

and severe and beautifully pro-

portioned as a Shaker chair.

Great

American >>

Our

rifle

.40 caliber, about average or a

is

little

smaller, but a

pound of lead now yields sexenty balls! Some of these old Kentuckies come down to us with outsized bores. This is often an indication that the gun has seen much use over the years and that the rifling in the iron barrel has been worn down several times, to be rebored and rerifled each time.

The

trigger-guard on this

but this one

is

thick

and

rifle is

stout,

of brass, as

it

was on

though gracefully formed.

the Jaeger,

amply

It is

and no more.

large

Now we

ask the big question.

really shoot? Sadly, that

answer.

It is

too

much

is

like

How

does

it

shoot?

How

does

it

a question which cannot be given a straight

looking at a violin and asking

depends upon who plays the

how

it

plays.

upon who shoots the Kentucky rifle. The rifle, like a fine musical instrument, would play beautifully in the hands of a virtuoso who had practiced with it for years, who knows its every response to temperature, change of powder charge or wind, or It

violin, or

any of the multitude of other variables that are sensed, often unconby the shooter.

sciously,

A rifle

great

not exist as chester or is

no

many

of these variables are eliminated from the

through engineering it

did.

—

To make

Remington and

real basis for

the relationship between

a

comparative

Kentucky

tests

rifle is

18

modem

rifle

need

between a modern Win-

a pointless absurdity. There

comparison that would do

was made straight by sighting along hammer. Nor is there a way to measure the and gun that no longer exists. barrel

man and

weapon whose and tapping it with a relationship between man

justice to a it

The arm. ing

old gun was no casual toy. It was an extension of a man's right was meat in the pot. It was a full, unscalped head of hair. Shootmeant hitting a squirrel running along an oak branch twenty paces

It

it

away,

or, at ten

times that distance, putting a ball where the white straps

crossed on a British soldier's red coat.

It meant being able to cut the powder charge down for frontier economy, knowing then what that would do to the useful range of the bullet. It meant knowing what range, wind and gravity did to the shot. In short, it meant knowing, to a hair, where to hold. American rifleman Tim Murphy knew at the battle of

He knew that he had to hold at least six feet high to make a 300 yards. He knew how the wind would carry his shot. Knowing these things, he gently touched the trigger and scarlet-coated British General Simon Fraser tumbled from the saddle. Back in England, the word was going around that the American barbarians were using a secret device that picked out and killed officers. One Tory observer wrote back to England to advise officers there to Saratoga.

hit at

settle their affairs

before crossing to America, so certain was their fate.

The deadly American rifle was called "the most fatal widow and orphan maker in the world." Most American soldiers in our early wars were armed with smoothbore muskets, like the French Charleville or British Brown Bess. Most

—

Americans were not capable of shooting the Kentucky rifle not the way it was shot by the men who had grown up with it. American riflemen swept the field at King's Mountain, Saratoga, New Orleans, but these riflemen were frontier hunters, each with his own rifle. It was the relathat was the tionship, man and gun together for years and years

—

deadly combination.

The Kentucky

The Kentucky Rifle

Knowing then

wc

that

arc not going to set any records here,

load up. Pulling the fiddle-peg stopper from the horn, us horn measure — and no other — and pour gives

it

a charge that

brass patch box in the the old days

Now

rifle

butt,

we

little

is

into the barrel.

riflle

From

the

take a tallow-greased cloth patch (in

might have been buckskin or heavy homespun linen).

it

and drive

carefully center the ball on the patch

smooth thrust of the

Our rod

we can

the

fill

exactly right for this

powder

the black

wc

down with

a

rod.

hickory, with a red candy-stripe.

is

it

Rods

like

it,

back

in

known to do service until the last ball was enemy looming through the sulfurous smoke, a candy-striped arrow, and a life was saved or

those faraway times, were

and

fired

(jfCilt

(Imencau

then, with the

the rod itself

was

fired,

death put off a minute longer.

Now

p

the priming.

The weapon

at half cock.

is

Push the

frizzen

up

and back against its strong spring, uncovering the pan and flash hole. Pour in the fine priming powder from our small horn and snap the frizzen closed. See that the flint is not too chipped and worn and that it is

firmly gripped in the leather between the steel jaws of the cock.

Now

raise the piece to shoot.

That long

down

in the

V

barrel steadies

of the rear sight.

and holds. The brass front sight squats A fine bead. Steady, did you say? Where

have you known a gun that made you

The set

trigger

is set

now and

feel

It will

it

was bedded

in

sandbags?

take the weight of a whisker to

it off.

Touch

You

it.

.

.

.

hear the

flint strike,

charge and the long, black powder smell.

Did

it

hit?

You

And will

crack sound of there

you hear the hissing suck of the priming

whiplash crack and you smell

flat,

But while the smell of

20

ready.

the

smoke

know how your it

still

now

the rank

drifts.

hangs

smoke clears. and the whipknow that for an instant

shot flew after the

in the

clouded

air

it is still in your ears, you will you were peering along that brown barrel into another time.

The

Shut-eye Hunter

On a snowy day

February^ 1778, twenty -eight

in

Kentuckians were captu?'ed by Shawnees while they were

camped at Blue Licks

A ndy's arms were tied back to a jfVThe Shawnees had tied a pack

salt springs,

stick that ran

boiling out salt.

between

his elbows.

and the pack kept a heave now and then

to his shoulders

he had to bow his neck and give it He marched through the snow with the awkward, hobbled gait of a man whose arms were not free to swing. shifting so that to settle

it.

There was a scalding fury working up choke down, but he knew that

if

he did not,

half-

was hard to would get him

in him. It it

surely

tomahawked. Andy was a boy who had never got his growth. Joe Jackson and the Callaway boys and the others had all grown tall, but Nature

had

quit

on Andy when he was

still

a full head shy of man-size.

could barely see over the muzzle of his

rifle.

But

if

He

he was short on

all he could do to hold it in. He down. He stayed doggedly silent. Keeping quiet helped somehow. At first it was hke a kind of game, a testing of himself, to keep quiet even when he was thumped and

bone, he was long on fight and

gnawed

his

tongue and kept

it

was

his eyes

knocked sprawling into the snow and the fury was right there in his throat where he could taste it. Later, he clung to his silence instinctively, as if it were something he could store up and use later; he was not sure how. Escape, the idea of escape, was mixed up with

—

—

it

— he sensed

that

as long as there was would have to be later snow on the ground, it was plain foolish to think of running. When it came time to run, a man was going to need hard ground under him.

much. But

later

it

21

Misery loving company, the others wanted to though the Shawnees grunted then for

at

them

Andy would have none

it.

and Aaron Foreman both

"Dad drab

it!

tried to

of

talk

to hush, prodding it.

—

did talk,

them now and

Looking worried, Joe Jackson He set his jaw hard.

speak to him.

Leave a man be!" Andy snarled suddenly and tears They were his last and only words the

splashed hot on his cheeks.

whole time.

At night the Shawnees tied them to trees so that they had to sleep up in the snow. The Indians strung them out through the woods so that no two of the twenty-eight prisoners were close enough together to help one another. Andy had never been so cold. Thinking about it, j^g could almost feel the warmth from the fires under the salt kettles back there at the licks. The cold and the snow had got them into this. They had never fought Indians in February snow before, or even seen Indian sign that anyone could remember. So they had gone to the sitting

Kjteat

Amcriciut

^

licks to

make

salt.

trees at night. Andy heard. Some were blaming Boone for dragging them into this, saying that he had made them all surrender to save his own skin because he had been with captured first. Well that was swill for the hogs, Andy thought them scattered and careless the way they had been, and better than a hundred Shawnees on them. They would have made a sorry fight of it. Boone had known that. And he had talked the Shawnees out of going

There was mumbling there under the

—

on

to raid

Boonesborough.

The Shawnees were getting the biggest bag of prisoners ever taken in Kentucky, but the womenfolk and younguns were still alive in Boonesborough. And Boone had bargained for their own lives and got away with it, though the renegade Girty brothers and plenty of the braves had argued to slaughter them end,

Boone had run the Andy remembered

gauntlet

all

right there at the licks. In the

— no one

else.

the long double line of

Shawnees and Boone

laughing and joking with Blackfish, the Shawnee chief, right up to the

minute he made the run. That took cold nerve a-plenty. Many a man, once off and running down the bloody lane, never lived to see the far end.

Boone came out

all

telling Blackfish that the fleas off a dog.

22

up and whipped raw and staggering, then Shawnees couldn't lick hard enough to stir

cut

Beyond The weather

the

Ohio

was

it

stayed cold.

all

new country

Andy was wearing

to them, even to

Boone.

his winter-hunting

buck-

and long drawers and his hair was long over his ears, his wolfskin cap snugged down. The bare-skulled Shawnees were worse off. Andy watched frostbite whiten the ears of the warrior skins with a thick linsey shirt

who marched ahead of him on the trail. The whole left side of the Shawnee's face was speckled with a blueblack tattoo, a mark Andy had seen once before on the face of a hunter from Harrodsburg and took to mean powder-bum. It sometimes happened that a powder charge poured into the bore right after a shot could ignite on a spark of burning lint left in the barrel could ignite

—

and erupt

in a

man's face that way and forever brand

A round, white ring of frostbite crept out under the powder-burn. Another brave saw the ear and touched it and warned the Shawnee with a grunt and the warrior warmed the ear back to life with a cupped hand. The Shavmee's ear bothered him for a while; then, turning, he casually reached out and snatched away Andy's wolfskin cap. He plucked the feathers out of his scalp-lock and stuck them into the furry crown of the cap, then put the cap on over his bare and polished skull. He patted the cap and grinned wolfishly at Andy. "Powdah ketch his

little feller's

scalp."

fury was in his throat again. He gave pack a heave and stalked on. Joe Jackson laughed. Andy set his

Andy

jaw.

did not look up.

The Shawnee

again.

strutted

The and

rolled his eyes

A few minutes later the Shawnee gave

They

struck another and smaller river

would learn

later

— and followed

count, but reckoned

it

it

north.

and Jackson laughed

Joe a chew of tobacco.

—

the Little Miami,

Andy was

at the tenth or eleventh

Andy

not sure of his

day when Shawnee

hunters out ahead of the party killed a bear and a couple of deer.

They

skinned and butchered the animals and cut up the meat and piled

onto the Kentuckians' packs. In a

little

while, they stopped again.

it

Andy

smelled smoke and figured they must be near the Shawnee village at

He was sure of it when the Shawnees pulled the packs off them and made them all strip. To march us all in bare, Andy thought. The men were all whitefaced and shaking, their breath making short sharp spurts of white in last.

the cold

air.

They were

shuffling their feet in the

rp,

it.

snow

in

quick

little

23

Kentucky Rifle

if by moving that way they would be keeping their feet out of snow ahogethcr. That Joe Jackson was a sure enough sight, Andy thought. His bare skin was blue-white and bumpy like a plucked chicken's. Powdah had piled an enormous load of meat on him and the juices ran down his back and legs into the snow. Andy was thinking, Let him laiifjh now. and in that same instant Jackson did laugh. He whooped suddenly and capered and footed a little jig there in the snow, laughing, with a spatter of meat juices spraying out around him. Andy heard Hendricks whisper, "Never see Jackson's like for funnin'. A naked man in a snowbank is the miserablest critter God ever

steps, as

the

throwed together, only Jackson don't know

^"^^"

American

^

it."

"Aye," that was Aaron's voice coming through a chattering of teeth, I

"Aye, though he be takin'

it

better that

never thought to see a boy with Andy's

He

way than yon poor Andy. come apart so quick.

gristle

spoke for days, now."

ain't

"Brain fever, most at that, for he'll not

like."

Hendricks

know what

said.

grief we're

"And maybe

headed

a blessing

for."

Andy's cheeks flushed hotly and he thought, dad-blame fools! But he knew

in

moment how he was going to how he looked to the of making it all the way alone.

that

moment he had testing himself,

not thought

escape. Until that others, but only of

Now, there was Joe Jackson, still capering naked in the snow. Only a moment had passed and Andy knew what he was going to do. He let himself laugh, let it come out a foolish cackle. Again. Then tentatively he jigged a clumsy-footed step in the snow, aping Joe Jackson.

eyes

let his lips and jaw go slack and cackled again. Now he sensed upon him, but he made himself stare blankly and at the same time

He

grinned his hang-jaw grin. Joe Jackson, seeing him, sobered and quit He looked at Andy for a long moment, then turned away,

jigging.

embarrassed jigging,

— he and Andy had grown up

Andy

stopped too.

He

together.

When

Joe stopped

stood there with one foot up as

could not remember what he was doing.

if

he

Then he just looked at the ground. The Kentuckians whispered among themselves. The long column moved out. The Shawnees sent runners on ahead; the whole village, women, children, old folk and dogs turned out to cheer them in. Andy, shuffling naked through the snow under his pack, smelled camp smoke, saw bark-covered lodges through the trees, cop24

per-skinned younguns darting between them, saw the boys cutting switches and the warriors and villagers, laughing, gabbling, forming

up

a long double line.

ribs.

Up

He

gauntlet! Andy's heart thudded against his

ahead, Boone's voice rang out defiantly. But

nothing could stop

and

The

heard a tense growl of whispering from the other Kentuckians.

it

once they

set

out to do

Andy reckoned

that

it.

There was no waiting. The Shawnees prodded them to the mark them off with a grunt and a whack. A full-throated roar rolled

set

along the line. Anse Goodman dashed into the throat of the gauntlet and was swallowed up. Andy watched the flailing of clubs and switches that swept down the column. For a moment the writhing and whipping hung over one spot so that they knew Anse was down and taking a whaling there. But then the flailing went on and Andy saw him break out at the other end. He was dazed, tottering. Warriors ran up to him, elbowing one another to shake his hand. They liked a good run.

The Kentuckians went through fast. It seemed better to do it that way than to wait and let the Shawnees get set. Joe Jackson started with a great roar and a bound and he whooped all the way through so that scared Indian boys dropped their switches and scattered back. Joe ran the

way Boone had

run, leaping

in licks with his elbows, too.

hard in the snow blood

fly

from a

A

from

side to side, but Joe

was

getting

warrior staggered back and sat

— he was shaking

his

down

head and Andy could see the

and mashed nose. Then Joe was through, too, little on his bare feet. Powdah was hand, having an instant before dealt him a tremendous

split lip

laughing and whooping, weaving a there to shake his

whack with Andy's

had

just

a stave the size of a canoe paddle. size

was against him. To dart from

side to side the

done would have slowed him too much.

He went

behind Hendricks, crouched, bandy legs milling

—

way Joe

through close

he ran close

in

Shawnees on the left side of the line, crowding, smelling smoked meat and buckskin, so close he was stomping toes all the way down. Startled, they swayed back from him to get arm room to swing. On the right side of the line, the others leaned in and swung and missed, most of them, or hit another Shawnee. Andy heard the howls and Shawnee oaths behind him, dimly, in the rush of coppery faces, against the belUes of the

thump of sticks on his own body. end and scampering q^t into the open and

the muskiness of buckskin, the

Then he was

at the

25

*

^^

Kentucky Rifle

thinking he was clear until he saw the blue-black, powder-spotted face.

Pimdah swung and gave him a glancing blow on the top He saw a whirling of tree tops and white sky and

head. his

back and skidding

Andy came running

in the .snow. It

staggering to his feet.

him and he

at

was

set himself,

of his bent-over

then he was on

like failing into a fire.

He saw Powdah and

but they

the others

swarmed over him, shaking

hands, pointing at the cuts on him and the plum-colored blood-beaded brui.ses,

grunting approval.

cap; he put

it

"Little feller

Andy Great

American

Guns

Powdah on impulse took

back on Andy's head with the feathers

let

his

in

it.

good run," Powdah said. "Ketch scalp." jaw go loose. He reached up to touch the cap and

grinned timidly; then he

pushed him toward the

let

the grin break out into a cackle.

pile of clothes.

with a long, sad face and

mouth open and

off the wolfskin

still

Andy

Powdah

Joe Jackson was looking at him

looked right through and past him, his

moist. Joe turned

away looking

sick.

Andy

pulled the

long linsey shirt on over his head, grateful for the delicious roughness of the cloth against his icy skin.

The durned fool, he thought, he

finally quit

laughing.

Some to be

of the Kentuckians, including Boone, were sent

shown

off to the British, the

Shawnees'

allies.

on

The

to Detroit

others were

kept at the village, to be adopted into the tribe.

Adoption was a serious matter. Later, there would be a lengthy ceremony and purification rites to wash away their tainted white blood, but for now it was enough to take them into the lodges. Nearly every hunter was put into a lodge where a son had been lost. The Shawnees opened their hearts. They thought of themselves as The People others were barbarians, outsiders and they could not tolerate the whites as

—

—

whites, but as their

Shawnees they could love them honestly and equally with

own kind. At the same

time, they

were

realistic

a constant watch, over the Kentuckians.

enough

A

man

to

keep a gentle hold,

could have

it

any way

he wanted; he could be a prisoner or a son or a little of both, for the Shawnees were quite capable of mixing affection and captivity. Joe

Jackson went Shawnee from the beginning. seventy years or

but

it

did not take.

Andy went 26

so.

He

lived

on another

In that time, he tried once to go back to the whites,

He was Shawnee.

to live in the lodge of

Limping Bear, whose own sons

were dead. Limping Bear, though having danced turn around the torture stake, took

Indians seemed to hold for the

Joe Jackson.

He

bitter,

in

afflicted.

day many a

Andy

could not understand

—

Limping Bear

shiftless grin, the staring eyes,

untameable white

The Shawnees

in his

with the pecuHar gentleness

did not try to understand

behind the slack jaw and the

an angry,

Andy

man

inside,

Andy was

to the bone.

Powdah were good-natured with him. Where was oddly mixed with Limping Bear's kind of gentleness. Andy hovered close to the old man. He cut wood and fetched water for the women or stretched deerskins all of it women's work. He showed them that he was afraid to go into the woods. If the warriors teased him, he scuttled to Limping Bear. Andy took to playing in the snow with the youngsters around the lodges. He could see how the even when he other Kentuckians were watched. He was suspicious was blowing bone whistles with the five-year-olds, he was not sure the Shawnees had quit watching him. He had to be sure. was contempt,

there

like it

—

—

The weather warmed and there was a three-day thaw that ate away nearly all of the snow. Andy saw Powdah and Joe Jackson and most of the other Kentuckians and warriors carrying

He

woods near

the village.

trotted out

and cut a small blaze

with his hatchet and stuck a for a

mark

powder

rifles off

A

tagged along with the younguns.

little

in a

beech

tree,

then he

into the

Shawnee

made

a cut

piece of black bark in the white blaze

to shoot at. Indians loved shooting

—

when

there

was

bum

any excuse was good enough to touch off a shooting match. There was powder to bum now, Andy knew. The British had to

given the Shawnees an enormous store of

it

to raid the Kentuckians.

Shooters took their turns. Shawnees were surly losers, so the Kentuckians contrived to shoot as well they could without shooting better It was a touchy point. Then Powdah took Andy's arm and pulled him up

than the Shawnees.

to the shooter's

—

Andy took it Kentucky rifle awkwardly, grinning foolishly. The rifle was longer than his own, the muzzle inches above his eye level. Powdah handed him a shooting bag and powder hom and Andy hung them in a tangle around his neck. line.

He grinned and handed Andy

a long

"Little feller shoot." Powdah pointed to the blaze-marked beech. Andy shook his head fearfully, jaw and lip slack. "Shoot!" Powdah was grinning, insistent. He rapped the hom

27

-*

^^

Kentucky Rifle

against the brciwn, (Ktagon barrel

the

(if

but fair

took the horn and

powder measure,

the

drop; then he poured powder into the palm of his hand

let it

charge —

around him.

it

He dumped

looked.

f'orgetfully, he

it

and stared blankly

into the bore

poured another charge into

The

Andy

a

little,

too.

his

Andy

then, to see a wide grin split Joe Jackson's face. All right, .

.

.

who quits first. He poured another full

we'll just see

pretended once again to forget.

charge into the gun. Shawnees laughed openly, so that

Amcriciin x>

it

long fringes on their hunting shirts to swaying. Probably at

hand, then

rifle

Joe, he thought, mulishly. Fun's fun

Great

—a

had at least a double charge in probably more. The Shawnees were nudging one another. It annoyed

poured that into the bore, it,

Andy

rifle.

He touched

pulled the stopper with clumsy lingers.

one time or another, had

charge.

It

could be spectacular.

Andy grinned back one

—

fired,

at

they could

A

or seen

Andy made

in

another charge.

A big

see that.

himself grin inanely at the Shawnee.

sweat coming out on his upper

Powdah was He could feel

lip.

"What's he aimin' to do?" he heard Jackson

powder

of them,

charge ought to be magnificent.

triple

Joe Jackson's face was the color of wet ashes. Even uneasy.

all

with a double

fired, a rifle

them happily and poured

all

set the foot-

gun to blow up a blockhouse." "He's fixin' to blow his fool head off, Hendricks said, shaky-voiced.

say.

"They's enough

in that

"Boys,

don't

I

of panic rising in

want

it.

to

watch

this.

.

.

."

what

that's

he's a-doin,"

Jackson's voice had a kind

"I'd liefer take the tail hold

on

a b'ar as touch that

thing off now."

Powdah took ing bag

the horn away from Andy. He fumbled in the shootand pulled out a round lead ball and a cloth patch. Andy took

them.

// /

patch

flutter

patch that

ball,

away. The

thump. Powdah rolled

he thought, the gun will blow sure.

ball

dropped

in loosely

his eyes in disgust

and

He

let

the

bottom with a

and put away the hickory

He snapped the frizzen open and primed he turned Andy toward the beech tree.

ramrod.

hit

the

pan himself, then

"Shoot," he said.

Andy swung

the long barrel up. There was carving on the wrist of saw it in the moment of shouldering the rifle. It read, Gun. Andy turned his face away and squeezed his eyes

the stock; he

D 28

Boon

his

The

shut. hard.

rifle

swung

barrel

like a

weathcrvane

— Shawnees and

scattering, then crouching

Kcntuckians jumped back, ducking low and down, waiting. A long-dead leaf detached itself and drifted down and ticked on a patch of snow. Andy pressed the trigger. There was a snap of frizzen and priming flashed in the pan

—

yellow-white smoke plumed out thick and ropy as curded milk with

Andy was blown back

snow and mud. He lay half-sen.seless, sure the gun had blown. Blood seeped from a long cut on his cheek where the comb of the stock had laid it open. His smashed lips were already thickening and his right eye was swelling a long. deep-booming(-roar.

shut.

Great AmericiUi y^

The

rifle

had dropped butt-down and stuck

in

into

the

snow

that way,

hank of smoke twisting from the muzzle. It had not blown. Andy got to his hands and knees; he shook his head and saw bright drops of blood bead the snow. cocked

off at the sky, a thick-curling

Powdah's

slitted

mark stood blackly plenty gun."

A

Shawnee eyes were rounded and

against his face.

trace of his wicked grin

again, darkly glittering. "Little

Somehow, he hunter

.

.

.

"////.'"

Kentuck liked the

He

feller

he

said.

the

powder

"Plenty gun

came back and

.

.

.

his eyes slitted

looked around at the others. Plenty shut-eye

plenty hunter.

sound of

it.

He

said

it

hunter."

over and over. "Shut-eye

plenty shut-eye hunter."

Limping Bear was furious at them, furious especially at Powdah. He doctored Andy himself and fussed over him until the battered face looked man-like again. Whenever Andy saw Powdah, he scuttled away to Limping Bear. But the Shawnee name Powdah gave him stuck. Pequolly. It meant Little Shut-Eyes. Pequolly went back to playing with the younguns. The Shawnees no longer watched him no one could doubt his simple-mindedness

—

after the shooting match.

The next day was

A

wet snow

clear, bright

fell,

thawed and disappeared.

and cold again. The ground froze hard.

That night there was a feast and ceremonial dance. Andy followed Limping Bear around, pup-like, until the dancing started, then he drifted back to the lodge. He took Limping Bear's rifle, powder horn, hatchet and skinning knife and a sack of parched com and dried venison. For a

minute he stood outside

and the dancers,

in the dark, looking at the leaping firelight

listening to the singing, to the gabble of voices.

he trotted into the darkness on the frozen ground. 30

Then

PLAINS RIFLE Mojave Massacre

.T'^E

TYTI*

~7t.~

tMP

-.^iv-

as

->»\-

^»

i

M

-.-ix-

.

Measured against

the grizzly

and

buffalo bull^ against the Indian in his unspoiled greatness^ agaifist

himself^

man

mountain

the old-time

was a gun that had

it

to

stand tall and shoot big..

WESTbegan

woods Beyond the big bend of the Missouri, the woods stopped altogether and yellow prairie rolled away of the Mississippi, the to thin out.

over the horizon.

Old Daniel Boone, stripped of

his

Ken-

tucky lands and of his old dreams, moved out there to the Missouri country, near

When

the edge of the great woods. settled there in

Louisiana,

still

he

was

still

in fact Spanish, for

Na-

about 1800,

poleon had not yet claimed

it

it.

Boone was

glad enough to be quit of the United States, free of land sharks, free of lawyers.

All he wanted was elbow room.

Under

amiably decadent Spanish, the old

found long.

his

elbow room.

Boone would

again by his

It

was not

the

rr^l I

\\^

Plains

man

to last

Rifle

be neglected

live to

own people and

his

own

gov-

ernment. Louisiana passed to the French and, in 1803, to the United States.

Boone

lived on almost another score of years,

trapping almost to the

room was fast

last,

but his elbow

disappearing.

33

Going and coming. Lewis and Clark passed the Boone farm on the banks of the Missouri. And after them the air was filled with tales of the Shining Mountains, the Stony Mountains, of game, of beaver.

The

first

of the fur traders started up the river in kcclboats, heading out for the

mountains. Boone was

still there to see them go. There now, that was He was past seventy. There is no proof for it, but it has been thought by many that Daniel Boone urged his ancient bones on out to the Rocky Mountains some time during those last years, that he even

dhow

rDoni.

wintered there.

So old Daniel Boone, having come

to the

end of the great forested

heartland east of the river, was seeing the inception of a continental

Great

American

^

Vnhcd

States.

During

this time, a Scottish clergyman named Alexander Forsyth was experimenting with the explosive characteristics of metallic fulminates. The word fulminate derived from a word meaning thunderbolt, meant to strike with lightning, to detonate or explode violently, and the word was applied to certain metallic powders having these properties.

In

1

807, Forsyth patented a working design for an ignition system to

replace the flintlock. Flint, steel and priming

powder were replaced with which exploded on impact. All subsequent gun design and firepower date from this beginning of

tiny pills of fulminate

improvements

in

the percussion system.

—

Daniel Boone had been a middling good working gunsmith back days he had even learned how to make his own gunpowder.

in the old

He had known the vacant snap of flint hammer striking over damp powder and he had known, beyond doubt, the hollow fear that could go with it. So of course he would have understood what Forsyth was doing with explosive fulminates, and what Joshua made the fulminate into little copper caps.

Shaw was doing when

he

There had been fulminates. Forsyth

shape

difficulty at first in figuring

first

tried a lock using loose

how

to

make

use of the

powders. Because of

its

was called the "scent-bottle" lock. No matter, it was not a particular improvement over the old method of priming the flintlock. But the idea was sound. After that, in the course of the next half century, the it

fulminates were tried in

caps shaped like

Of 34

all

little

many

forms:

pills,

tubes, paper tapes, discs

and

plug hats.

these designs for percussion ignition, Shaw's

was perhaps

Percussion caplock with copper caps

^ simplest

He

first

and most foolproof.

made

pewter and

was

It

on copper.

finally settled

most popular and

to be

his caps of iron, rejected

it

He had

nipple in place of the old priming pan,

fit

A

snugly over the nipple.

released

hammer, falhng on

tube to the charge.

from the shooter's

tinfoil

shaped

devised a hollow, tubelike

made Hke

and

a

a

little

hat,

shaped

mercury inside the

pellet of fulminate of

cap was sealed with a wafer of

long-lived.

easily

drop of

shellac.

The

the cap, exploded the fulminate through the

The hammer was cupped to direct blowback away The whole system was much closer to being

eyes.

waterproof than ever before.

The percussion cap in this form was perfected in 1817. Old Daniel Boone had three years left to live in a life that had carried him from the beginning to the end of the old frontier, from the beginning to the end of the flintlock

—

Kentucky

An America

rifle.

stretching

from ocean

for conquest, for survival, for

his old flintlock, "Ticklicker,"

yet the old

Kentucky

rifle

to ocean,

meat on the

having come

would

live on,

^ ^^

Plains

opening leading to the main

its

charge inside the barrel. His copper cap was to

more

in favor of

new weapons for it Daniel Boone and

table.

this far,

though

inbred way. East of the Mississippi River, the big

in a

were

finished.

And

backward-looking,

game was thinned

out,

or gone altogether (and hadn't Daniel been complaining of that for

— —

years?). Squirrel, turkey, rabbit they made table fare now. Newly made Kentucky guns showed the change. Calibers went smaller and smaller, down to .33, or even .30 152 baUs to the pound! Squirrel size, that. As squirrel rifles, Kentucky rifles had another century of honest use ahead of them. Men like Sergeant Alvin York of Tennessee went off to World War I, having cut their shooting teeth on squirrel rifles.

35

Rifle

Gunmakcrs

in their

shops

Louis

in St.

in

the 1820's,

and the Santa le men, were having

for the fur trade

making guns

to revise their

designs, willing or not. Trappers, hunters, men who had seen the prairies and mountains, scratched out ideas with the points of their skinning knives on workbenches or drew with sticks in dirt floors. Men were in the

saddle more on the prairies, they were saying.

handier for a

How

man on

A

shorter

rifle

seemed

a horse.

about game? Why, a prairie buffalo could toss a horse and And out in the Rockies and beyond, giant bears were

rider into the air.

Great

American

Guns

as thick as fleas on an old dog. White bears, yellow bears, gray bears, they were being called. Grizzly bear was the name that would stick

—

whatever the name,

were seven, eight feet tall and they took a lot of shooting. "It was a most tremendous looking anamal and extreemly hard to kill," wrote Captain Meriwether Lewis after seeing a giant grizzlies

swim halfway across the Missouri with ten Gunmakers, taking note, began to produce

grizzly

To

bullets in his body.

.50 caliber barrels

cut back

on weight, they were doing away with the full-length stock. The wiping stick was run through brass thimbles under the brown octagon barrel. But even with the half stock and shorter barrel this rifle was going to run ten or eleven pounds. again.

The new weapon was beginning box was

still

there

if

the shooter

wanted

to take shape. his rifle to

The

brass patch-

have the old

flintlock.

he chose the new-fangled percussion system of ignition, the patch box was generally replaced with a small oval box of brass or silver to hold caps or grease and the patching material was carried in the shooting bag. If

Whether along the

to take caplock or flint

was a question that plagued hunters was a question that would be argued by beaver trappers mountain trails aU the way to the Pacific. In the beginning,

ordering guns.

It

most of the trappers preferred flintlock. They were ranging out a thousand and more miles beyond the last sprinkling of settlements along the

Members of a trapping party, or brigade as they were called, might not see another white man from one year's end to the next. They could buy supplies like traps and powder and lead only once a year at the great trappers' rendezvous in the mountains. Thought of losing his caps could put a haunted look into a hard-bitten trapper's eyes. "Well, then," he might have been asked, "s'pose you lose your powder, too, or Missouri.

even your gun, what then?" 36

Mountain men

in Blackfoot coui

r:>?*®

"Then I'm

me a made

I

won't never run out of

Like

this

Army

in fossilized

could lose

hard-core of flintlock

men among

the trappers

is

and hun-

held out against percussion. Here the reason seemed to

lie

army army gave way and abandoned

thinking rather than in any great fear that an entire

its

caps. Finally, in 1841, the

Career dissenters

in the

Army, having

sion ignition for a generation, turned

forestalled the use of percus-

now

to a

For the next two or three decades, they were \trtcii

want

I still

so long as the earth

flints

of rocks."

ters, the

flint.

skun wolf," he might have answered, "but

a

—

llinlgun

new cause

to obstruct.

to dedicate themselves with

equal frenzy to the suppression of breech-loading metallic-cartridge

weapons.

Imerican

Guns

Flint or percussion, there to be called the Plains Rifle.

change of clothes

is

was a new

To

say that

rifle it

on the

was

came

frontier. It

just the

not enough. Mechanically, perhaps

it

Kentucky

was very

in a

close

to the Kentucky, and indeed it was made the same way, each individual gun hand-manufactured in the shop to the shooter's order. But it represented a distinct change in the psychology of the frontier hunter. It was

a foot shorter,

pounds heavier, bigger bored, plainer trimmed than the

old long gun. Yes, and uglier. ship, at least artistically. It

were truly defects

—

It

was generally not

made up

so fine in

for these defects

by being right for the job

Flint

it

had

—

if

workman-

indeed they

to do.

and percussion Plains

rifles

Along with the Plains of

men who went

They were got

something must be said about the kind

Rifle,

out to trap beaver and

the ones

who needed

a Plains

came back with a continent. rifle, who demanded it and

it.

The

old frontier stopped at the edge of the timber.

The people

came, following Boone, as they had been coming on since Jamestown

and Plymouth and Boonesborough; having got that far, it was as if they looked out over the empty prairies and sniffed the air and drew back uneasily. The old frontiersmen may have been hunters and trappers like Boone, but they, Boone included, were also farmers, family men, settlers. For them the frontier meant a place to settle. Major Stephen Long returned from his western expedition across the great plains in 1 820 and gave his opinion of the prairies. In regard to this extensive section of country, I do not hesitate in

giving the opinion, that

and

it is

almost wholly unfit for cultivation,

of course uninhabitable by a people depending

ture for their subsistence

.

.

.

the scarcity of

prove an insuperable obstacle

way

in the

Both Long and Zebulon Pike

felt

upon

agricul-

wood and water

will

of settling the country.

that the prairies effectively

stopped any further westward movement of the populace. This would,

Pike said, "leave the prairies incapable of cultivation to the wandering

and uncivilized aborigines of the country."

The frontier did, in fact, stop cold for decades. When the westward movement started again in the great wagon-train migrations of the 1 840's and after, people had only one notion and that was to leap over the great plains

and the Rockies and the desert basins

valleys of

Oregon,

And yet, when John tion,"

—

to get to the lush coastal

or, a little later, to the gold-filled

and when the

ones of California.

Charles Fremont began his expeditions of "exploraprairie schooners

there were guides to be had.

pushed

off into the sea of grass,

They were men Uke Kit Carson,

Tom

Fitz-

who had been traveling the country for fifteen twenty years and knew every foot of the trails. Most of these men were nearing middle age by this time. They

patrick and Jim Bridger,

or

had spent their entire adult lives in the wilderness beyond the frontier. They were the mountain men. Neither Pike nor Long had reckoned with the mountain men. Just as the American frontiersman was a new breed, 39

The Plains Rifle

now there was the mountain man who bore his own peculiar stamp. He was hard and sharp as Green River steel, given to monosyllabic

si>

speech, to grunts and hand-talk; there was the wolfish restlessness, the

darting eyes; long hair, grease-black buckskin trimmed with dyed quills

and scalp tufts. He could be profane, eccentric waking hungry in the middle of the night, hacking roast a

hump

ribs of buffalo, then

—

like

Jim Bridger,

a strip of

meat from

hunkering down wailing and chanting

war song, thumping a little Indian skin drum between his knees, rockand forth with his eyes closed and the juice from the meat

ing back

dripping off his stubbly chin. Mountain men.

For some years

Great

American

Guns

demand

past, the fashion in

for this richest of

all felting

from Carolina

for seventy years,

to

beaver hats had swelled the

materials. Daniel

Kentucky

Boone trapped

to Missouri,

thought two dollars per skin was a good price. At that price, or the beaver had been trapped out east of the Mississippi.

and he less, all

Where

to get

more? West to the mountains a thousand miles away, where Lewis and Clark had gone. That was beaver country. John Colter, first of the real mountain men, on the way home with Lewis and Clark, had turned back to trap beaver.

water. Hearing

Out

He found him

boiling springs

talk, folks

of the forest, white

and gushing fountains of sulfur

laughed and called

men

it

Colter's Hell.

did not seem to take naturally to the

Lewis and Clark and the early fur traders

prairie.

all went by river. goods up the Missouri to the fringes of the mountain fur country. There he built a trading post. That was the old

Manuel Lisa took

way

in

his trade

Indian country, to

for the furs. It

let

was a system

do the trapping, then to trade had worked well enough in the past,

the Indians that

but Lisa and others found that these western Indians did not take trapping seriously. Trapping was work. They were horsemen and they much preferred to skirmish and steal one another's ponies or to shoot fur traders

when they

could.

When

it

came

up the

to furs, they liked to steal

them from the whites and trade them back again. In 1822, General William Ashley, militiaman and trader, set out to

make an

River to

He

its

He Young Men,"

idea work.

"Enterprising

advertised in the Missouri Republican for a

hundred of them, "to ascend the Missouri employed for one, two, or three years."

source, there to be

intended to abandon the old way. His hundred young

men were

trap the beaver in the mountains wherever they were to be found,

40

to

and

to

pack them out of the mountains by horse or mule or bullboat or what-

ever.

Furs that had brought Daniel Boone two dollars apiece a few years earlier

would, in the 1820's, bring a free trapper

For Ashley, or anyone would fetch twice that figure.

the mountains. pelts

six to eight dollars in

else delivering

them

to St. Louis,

Beaver, the several varieties of them, lived in virtually every stream in the great west, even including the desert rivers, such as the Colorado, Salt,

Gila and Humboldt. Starting in 1822, the

mountam men,

as the

came to be known, trapped them out. In twenty years there not that it mattered comweren't enough beaver left to bother with mercially, for the market had broken under the newer fashion for silk

i h^

in hats.

Plains

trappers

—

But

in

pursuing beaver, the mountain

men had

followed every

and canyon from the Missouri to the Pacific. They had seen the mountains, prairies, deserts and rivers, the elk, antelope, bear and myriad buffalo. They had seen paradise and there would never be watercourse,

trail

anything quite like to survive.

No

it

again.

For the mountain men, it was only necessary were no families, unless

settling in the old sense, for there

Indian ones counted.

knew the country in a more exacting knew it. Probably three-quarters of all the way wilderness. Those who were left knew in violently the mountain men died that most of it has not been known in way the country, really knew it, a

The few who

did survive

than even the Indians

since,

though

it

may have been

by miners. They knew supporting

because

To

it

life off

was

it

because they were there working their traps and

the country

hostile

surveyed by instruments or prospected

—

and

at least

it

at the

was

same time

finding cover in

it,

best figured to be hostile.

sustain himself over a year in the mountains, each

man

took his

personal string of traps, a couple of blankets, a kettle, knife, a hatchet, a

few oddments to trade, some powder, lead, and caps or

flints,

and of

enough he was taking, he came to be a weapon so very specific about it. The Plains rifle was one result effective that it survived on through the days of the wagon trains, and course, his

rifle.

Since

it

was

little

—

Indian wars and early buffalo hunting until the Civil War. metallic cartridge

end to

and mass-produced breech-loading

Then

rifle finally

the

put an

it.

41

Rifle

^''

Among

sickness

our parties in the mountains^

and natural

deaths are

almost unknown ..."

Jedediah Smith

Mojave Massacre JEDEDIAH Smith

survived the three most violent disasters of the furHe went out to the mountains for the first time in 1822 with General Ashley's company and lived through the slaughter when the Arickara, or Ree, warriors attacked the Ashley keelboats. The following year, he was almost torn to pieces by a trade years in the west.

grizzly bear.

Further catastrophes he managed to sum up succinctly in a .

.

.

and we are under the

letter

home:

necessity of keeping a constant wach;

notwithstanding our vigilenc

Men, who were

Amuchabas fifteen

in

we sometimes suffer; in Augt. 1827 ten company with me, lost their lives, by the

Indians, on the Colorado River;

men, who were

Umpquah

in

Company

Indians, on the River of the

Jedediah, in 1826, was the

and

in July

with me, lost their

lives,

1828 by the

Same name

first American to go overland across the deserts to California, a passage through absolutely unknown country.

42

He

left

most of

his

men

and returned

in California

to the mountains, to

a rendezvous with his partners at Bear Lake, north of the Great Salt Lake. In the summer of 1827, with fresh supplies and trade goods, he set

out to rejoin his

men

in California.

Thirty days' travel south from the

Lake by way of the Sevier and Virgin Rivers found his party resting Mojave villages on the Colorado. They seemed to be well received, the at as they had been a year earlier. With Jedediah were eighteen men eleven American trappers, six French Canadians, one Spaniard, so-called, and two Indian women, squaws of the Canadians. They had no way of knowing that, since Jedediah's first visit a year earlier, the Mojaves had fought with a party of Americans trapping out of Taos. They had lost, and now their hearts were bad. They wanted to Salt

—

spill

Pl^iins

blood.

They the river

stemmed

rested three days.

smiling,

was

time, then, for the trappers to ford

set his

men

to cutting

cane-grass, a kind of arrow weed, rafts.

The Mojaves,

tall,

and

clumps of hollow-

to binding these into

well-formed, naked, hovered

and hundreds of them, chattering, curious, utterly innocent, and yet utterly deadly.

scores

close,

It

and push on. Jedediah

thick-bundled

pilfering,

Jedediah urged the men along smartly, anxious to move the goods under as close control as possible, anxious, too, over the clumsy rafts

and the necessity of swimming so many horses. The Colorado there ran more yellow than red, though lower and less tempestuous than at any other time of the year. An exposed sand bar lay like a bleached bone out in the channel. It was unbelievably hot in the sun. The fiat valley and distant blue mountains shimmered through heat waves. Downstream, tall pinnacles of stone seemed to have wriggled off the

'^'^

horizon to stand detached, dancing free above mirage-lakes

glis-

"The Needles," Jedediah's men were calling the pinnacles, a name that would stick. Back from the river, the green of the Mojave farmland, plots of beans, corn and squash, lay gray under dust. Jedediah had the rafts roped together and loaded. He named the eight men who would go with him on the first crossing. He could not transport everything at once, and he dared not leave goods unattended among the solicitous Mojaves. So ten men, and the two squaws, would tening on the plain.

await the next trip across.

Jedediah mounted and urged his horse out into the ochre waters. 43

/p//^^.

He had

stripped \o leggings, moccasins

was tied around eyebrow had been.

and cotton

shirt in the heat.

A

strip of red cahct)

his

head above the shiny patch of scar

where

A

ropy

his

his left

line of thick scar ran across

forehead to what remained of his right ear. Strangers seeing the

scars for the

time were invariably shaken. "That of grizzle b'ar like

first

to bit the Cap'n's

he thought

head plumb

oflF,"

he had heard one of the

Jedediah took up a position next to

He saw Bosun Brown wade

raft.

Tom

men

say,

and

accurate enough.

it

Virgin's

rifle,

to leave

Daws and Turner on

the lead

out from the shore party and take old

him both hands free for the rafts. Three weapons to Brown, who turned

others saw this and also passed over their

Great

and splashed back on shore with the four Jedediah did not

American

Guns

like

it

—

after the fashion of beaver trappers, it

aside, ever.

He

started to call out.

own

rifles.

was slung, muzzle down, and he was not in the habit of setting At that moment, a half dozen young

his

rifle

Mojaves, apparently

in mischief, put their shoulders to the rafts and drove them out into the stream. The current caught and quickly swung

them and Jedediah had

his hands full. Giant Isaac Galbraith was on the downstream side near the bank, the rope there belayed to him. Water, swirling brown, heaved against the

sides of the rafts side.

and drove them against the men on the downstream

A horse rolled and Jedediah saw Tom Virgin's gray head go under,

mouth gasping turned his

own

wide.

He

and thigh as the

fingers

yelled to Galbraith to stand firm

horse into the current and rafts trailed

felt

out over

below and he

the rawhide rope bite into

Tom

Virgin's floundering

horse.

The middle segment lurched suddenly

—

driven up by the crazed pack toppled and splashed into the water. The horse went down again, caught in a tangle of rope and loosened cane and the raft began to come apart. Jedediah's knife flashed. He slid into horse,

it

reared high.

A

the water, caught hold of the disintegrating raft and hacked furiously at the lashing which bound it to the others. Turner and Swift, out in the

stream, held firm

Jedediah cut

The

it

and began

to

draw the

single free raft across as

loose.

sinking raft

swung away downstream

unsteadily to Galbraith's horse. Jedediah saw

in a long arc,

Tom

few yards downstream and begin to thrash toward shore. 44

moored

Virgin surface a

/; A'/

'

,

.'

:/::: ::i\'

'.15 .

,

'^

i'-'K^^'

'

•/,"

//7<

.;»•''

-'

moment, he heard a scream, a sharp, rasping cry of despairing agony. Jedediah turned in amazement, staring. He saw Bosun Brown being hacked to pieces with flint-bladed war clubs. A tangle of swarming brown bodies swept over the others. Jedediah shouted and his own voice was smothered in a riding torrent of screams. His people had already At

that

disappeared under swinging clubs.

Water spouted around him. Cane arrows bobbed and sank. rifle overhead, sank to his knees and allowed the current to take him. He saw Isaac Galbraith slide off a horse that was bristling with arrows; and the horse and sinking rafts tied to it slowly spun away downstream. Mojaves lining the sandy bank jumped into the water screeching, swinging clubs, spears and black flint hatchets. Galbraith fired once and bellowed, then flaiUng his eleven pound rifle like a switch, he clubbed at brown arms and brown faces and darting spears. Jedediah, going with the current, saw Tom Virgin overtaken in chest-deep water. A Mojave chopped and redstained the gray hair. Virgin pitched forward and his blood marbled the yellow water. Jedediah found footing and fired his rifle into the Mojave's face, then he lunged close to Virgin and caught his collar. The trapper paddled feebly and Jedediah pushed off into the current. "Back off, Isaac! Back off, now!" he called. Galbraith was in a cluster of Mojaves, swinging rifle sendmg up sheets of spray. Then, like a whale, he went under. His knife flashed sunhght once. The Mojaves poised their clubs and chattered shakily, pointJedediah held his

Great

American

^

ing at the water, edging back. Suddenly one screamed and slipped down,

thrashing in a swirl of red.

The others turned in panic, clawing at the came up snorting. He stood there for a

water. Behind them, Galbraith

long defiant moment, then he turned slowly and pushed off into the current after Jedediah. In that way, shortly, they crept from the water

up onto the sand bar and there lay gasping. Soon, then, Jedediah took stock of his disaster. He had eight men on the bar with him, ten dead ashore, the two squaws doubtless captives. All the horses were gone. The surviving packs contained trade goods and a few pounds of dried meat. There were five rifles among them, a little

powder and

lead.

And now some

hundreds of Indians gathered on

the far shore, swarming in clusters like hornets,

come 46

at

them.

making cane

rafts to

Jedediah began to break open the packs. "Take what you feel said. "We'll scatter the rest on the sand

you can carry, no more," he

and pray they stop to fight over it." He and Isaac lifted Tom Virgin between them and they all waded on into the channel and pushed on toward the west bank. Jedediah stopped there and looked back. There were rafts already in midriver. He would have liked to prepare better before going on into the desert. They had no way to carry water. He remembered from a year earUer that there

was no spring within a day's march. In

August, he doubted that his

men

the furnace heat of

could survive that march.

He was

determined, nevertheless, to go ahead.

Ahnost immediately, he changed

his

hesitated over the plunder scattered as bait

mind. The Mojaves barely

on the sand

many of them; the few who stopped themselves made no difference. "Move on back to the bank," Jedediah said. best we can 'mongst the cottonwoods."

bar.

to

simply too

There were

scrap

leave sheltering hollows

were there

in

"We'll fort up as

them on.

Jedediah, trying also to care for

The wet

rifles,

to bhster a

reluctant to

bluffs along the river, yet they

such numbers that the physical pressure of their bodies

against one another drove

Tom

Virgin, posted his riflemen.

sun heated, were already dry, the barrels hot enough

man's hand.

And

their buckskins

which had been sodden,

shiny wet-black and sagging were already hard-dry so that they rasped

with movement.

Virgin stirred and mumbled.

"You reckon

we'll

make

it,

Cap'n?"

Jedediah could see Mojaves snaking through creosote brush,

more than last

a

hundred yards

hour on "We'll

He

believed that he

was

little

well into his

earth.

make

it,

shores of the Pacific it

distant.

every foot.

Tom," he is

said, "certain sure.

But you know, the to walk

two hundred miles away and we have

Are you ready

Virgin's battered head

to try?"

was muffled

Plains Rifle

The Mojaves were

low sand

in the

^^

among

There they found all young trees, none very substantial, along with some willows, strung along the edge of a shallow cut-bank. They cut brush and threw up breastworks; and then fiinally they lashed their knives to stout poles to use as lances.

-^

in turns of trade calico

and

,^— 47

his voice left leg,

came up

thinly.

"Funny

my

Cap'n ...

thing,

my

they just run along fine as frog fur, but

Don't hurt. She just drags along. So goin' by that,

left

arm and

right side drags.

say I'm about

I'd

half ready."

Jedediah stood up and looked over the brush

were noisy again

— working themselves up

arching high,

close

lay

fell

now. He

and saw two Indians

what appeared

in

it,

tried to estimate

where

how

on

you some

American

Guns

The Mojaves

their leadership rest

and waving

sticks like totems.

their stick floats

now. Daws, you and

Turner lay a bead on that bunch yonder. Touch

Great

fort.

he thought. Arrows,

one group haranguing the

to be stuffed birds set

"All right, we'll see

for

when they show

off

skin."

"That's near forty rod, Cap'n,"

Daws

said, matter-of-factly.

"Hold a trifle high, then. Daws," Jedediah said. "Just don't miss if you do, we cross over Jordan to the promised land." The two heavy Plains rifles fired almost together. Smoke plumed out, hung white and dense, drifting slowly through the cottonwoods.

—

Then before they could

see through

the trappers heard a babble of

it,

pounding sand. Daws and Turner feverishly rammed fresh charges into gun barrels thinking the Indians were upon them. Then the smoke lazed out over the river and voices, sounds of tearing brush, footsteps

they could see at

bank.

last.

The two with

skins dull

now

and Jedediah

Brown

in thick dust.

let

too.

if it

was a

One run,

all

The

lances dipped, at last dipped down,

down next to Tom Virgin. Tom. Never. It was two hundred

out his breath and slipped

"You never saw two paces,

bodies fled scrambUng along the river-

the stuffed birds were dovm, their bright copper

foot,

prettier shots,

and both boys

run, just like quail

hit

dead center.

— and not

next." Jedediah grinned through his scars. to walk, that's ready enough.

walk out."

48

Drink the

a

man

"Old Tom,

It

done the

trick,

stayed to see who's if

you're half ready

river dry, boys.

Tonight we

they across one the on AND walk they reached a Spanish mission a few miles from of

did,

hottest deserts

earth. Until,

at last,

had been Jedediah's intention

It

in California,

then to trap his

to

way north

the coast.

meet with the men he had to the

mouth

left

of the Columbia,

thence east overland, back to the Rockies. This he set out to do that following winter and spring. Jedediah's party had reached the

Umpqua

river country in

Oregon

by the summer of 1828. There, on the banks of a smaller stream, known now as the Smith River, they were ambushed again. It was the bitterest kind of irony because of those who walked away from the Colorado with Jedediah, as well as the men he rejoined in California, all but a few were struck

down

Late

in the

in 1830,

^ ^^

Umpqua ambush. Jedediah

left

the mountains

at last, after eight years

and danger. By the next spring, he was involved in a new trading venture, bound out for Santa Fe. The Santa Fe trail had been well-traveled for almost a dozen years now. Jedediah captained eighty-odd men and twenty-four wagons, one of which mounted a cannon. They unlimbered the cannon once in a brush with Comanches and it was a great discourager. More than half way out, 500 miles from St. Louis, they elected to take the Cimarron cut-off. They crossed the Arkansas not far from where Dodge City would stand forty years later and struck out for the Cimarron, a river that only occasionally ran wet. It meant crossing fifty miles or so of trackless gypsum flats tough, thirsty going, but others had traveled it, so it was passable. It was only May, but already the country was sizzling. Three

Plains

of almost constant hardship

—

waterless days sapped the teams. Jedediah

two had

first

Ashley's

enough

1

822 company

is

ol'

off

is crow bait," on the ground."

at

set to

to the

—

Tom

said.

"Look

I'll

bring the wagons on

these

mountains with

one bone-dry

"He's done," Jedediah agreed. "All right,

The river can't be far. You can

He rode on. Tom

Tom Fitzpatrick

south to hunt a patch of sand

They stopped

horse

a-draggin'

and

when they went out

— rode

to dig for water.

"This

tongue

ridden together

hole. at

him

damp

—

his

go on ahead a ways.

when they come up."

digging half-heartedly in the dry hole.

When

he looked up, Jedediah's figure had dwindled to a speck on the shimmering plain. Tom took a spyglass, newly bought for this trip, from 49

Rifle

his

saddlebag and trained

caught him up close

on

hat, shoulders

saddle bow.

Tom

it

— Tom

on Jedediah. For a moment, the glass could see the white powdering of dust

and horse, the plains

rifle

squarely set across the

lowered the glass and went back to digging.

Jedediah never returned, nor was any trace of him found. His party went on,

finally, to

Santa Fe. There, not long

after, his rifle

and

by Mexican hunters who had traded them away from Comanches. The Comanches had told how they came by the guns, a story simple, direct and harrowing. There were fifteen or twenty of them hidden out in the sandy

pistols appeared, carried in

draws running down

Great

American

Guns

to the

Cimarron, near the one spot

in miles

and

They were waiting for buffalo There was no question what they

miles of dry river where water pooled.

when

the white

man came

aJone.

weapons required that they get up close, so they showed themselves and rode up. He was only one man. He signed peace, and signed again to have a smoke. They were not interested, but with set faces deliberately edged out around him. He backed his horse. A Comanche suddenly flapped a blanket and grunted explosively, "Hu!" Jedediah's horse swung half around and there was a shot, deep and booming, probably from a Mexican smoothwanted

to do, but their

enormous caliber. The ball knocked Jedediah half out of even in his swung back and fired his one shot for judgment, unerring in and was direct moment, Jedediah dying lances buffalo Comanche chief. Comanche was the the man he blasted bore down on Jedediah and he was gone. Afterward, they saw the far-off dust of the wagons. Having no bore

fusil of

—

the saddle, but he

desire to be run

the

body

in reprisal for their bit of enterprise, they

carefully, so that

they erased

rode away.

50

down

all

buried

would ever be found, and then

no trace of it from the surrounding ground and

sign of the incident

The old Plains

and

one shot

enough

it

Rifle carried just

was not always

— for Jedediah

Smith

it

wasn

t

but that one shot^ as Zenas Leonard

might have

testified^

than no shot at all

TT "^ORD V^

.

was a .

lot better

.

'f'i} ^-^'

of what happened to Jedediah got around the mountains

soon enough, for he was top dog in beaver country. Death was

never too far from a mountain man, so the trappers did not but they

may have

flinch,

looked over their shoulders more often. The young

Pennsylvanian, Zenas Leonard, trapping the Black Hills with a party of fourteen men, remembered later

when one they knew

One

of their it,

own men was

how

cautious they were, for a while,

killed.

But time passed and before

weeks had gone by with no sign of an Indian.

a little stream somewhere was open, rolhng country, with pine and juniper darkening the upper slopes. Grass was sparse and there was no timber at all along the creek. A thirty-foot picket rope wasn't enough scope for a horse on that kind of grass. With the beaver packs getting heavier every day, the trappers had to keep the animals' strength up; so that evening they turned all the horses loose for a good graze. Zenas slept that night, as most of them did, with his rifle tucked in under the blanket, out of the damp. When he awoke, the muzzle of the rifle was white with frost and he was stiff with cold, for he had rolled half out of the blanket in his sleep. He stretched hard and sat up, then he wiped away the frost and beads of moisture from the rifle barrel. With his thumb, he wiped a little grease from around the lock and slicked it along the barrel where the damp had been.

afternoon they

made camp on

above the Cheyenne River.

It

51

He snapped refilled the

the

fri//en

up and dumped

pan with fresh powder from

his small

chancy with priming when damp was

to get

his

priming powder,

horn

—

in the air.

it

didn't

pay

He looked

to

was snug in the jaws on the goose-neck hammer, then he laid the weapon against his pack. It was a heavy, unadorned rifle, made by Hawken Brothers of St. Louis. It was half-stocked in the see that the

flint

and the brown octagonal barrel was a foot shorter

plains fashion,

Zenas had known as a boy in Pennsylvania. The bullets shooting bag ran thirty-five to the pound, which meant that the

than the in his

rifies

was about .50 caliber. The fourteen mountain men in this party hundred pounds of lead, none too much. "Come on, Zenas, let's hustle them ponies." ^^ looked up and saw Gillam, the trapper from Illinois, heading up the barren slope toward the horses. The animals were in plain sight on a bald knoll, less than half a mile away. Morning sunlight, slanting, gave the horses enormous shadows that curved along the hill where they browsed. Zenas picked up a halter and lead rope and followed rifle

carried a

Lrreat

American

Guns

Gillam.

And

because

it

was open country, with the morning sun touching because Gillam was striding off Zenas left his Hawken rifle leaning there against

warm through

his cold-stiff buckskins,

empty-handed

too,

his pack.

A

trapper

named

Harris joined them; their moccasins crunched and red-graveled soil. The shoulder of the hiU swelled above them and they lost sight of the bench beyond and the horses. When they topped out on the hill, the horses had gone, drifting on ahead of them and down the far side. in

the frosted grass

"Look air,

"Ah and

there," Gillam grumbled, his breath frosty in the sharp

"they're a-fannin' out

I'll

right,"

go

Zenas

down

said,

there."

"you two go on after that bunch there

after the ones in that

draw yonder. They've moved on

a

right smart already."

He went on down

and kept on trotting until them that he was after. One tossed its head and danced a fewsteps and the others were skittish too, so he walked up to them very slowly, talking along in a soft voice. He got the halter on his roan, the horse he rode most and that knew him the slope at a trot

he drew up to the horses

52

— four

of

—

The horse went white-eyed and

best.

tried to pull

away.

Its

hide was

hot with flecks of lather working up. Zenas laughed.

"You're pretty hot for a horse that

He

been rode," he

ain't

said.

trusting the other three to follow like

started to lead off,

the pack horses they were. Instead, one nickered, poised for an instant

on quivering

legs,

then

it

blew loudly and sprang past Zenas

in a clatter

moment, Zenas had not thought why the horses were so worked up. But he watched this one run, spooked, and something about the way it ran made him think of his rifle. In his mind, he saw it back there, leaning against his pack in camp. of stone,

A

its tail

heavy

his neck.

high. Until that

chill,

He

a solid cold weight of fear, settled at the nape of

thought the word

—

Injun.

He

thought for a

moment

would mount the roan, but in the same instant decided he was safer walking between the horses where he was sheltered. He clicked his tongue and urged the roan on, scanning the low thickets of brush that he

along the draw.

He heard

shadow against the skyline, or both. running down upon him from above.

a sound, or sensed a

Whirhng, he saw the

single figure

Clearly he saw the flicking white feathers, the strung bow, curving darkly against vermilion paint and long swinging fringes.

Zenas took a

tight

The horse jumped

hold on the lead rope and swung up to mount.

sideways, suddenly gone from beneath his knees;

to earth. He leaped again and the horse swung away, and again Zenas jumped with straddled legs. "O'n'ry fool beast!" The words choked in his throat as he slid helplessly, foolishly, off the horse's neck and the animal backed rump-first into thick brush. Zenas crouched behind the brush and faced the Indian; at the same time, he reached back and pulled out his heavy knife.

Zenas dropped crouched, back

.

.

.

.

.

.

Panting, the warrior stopped on the slope above Zenas' intended path.

He was no more

in his left

to

Zenas who was

to

be a Ree

free

if

than

fifteen steps

away.

He

held his short

bow

hand, the arrow was nocked ready to shoot; he gestured sharply

—

still

half hidden

by the horse. The brave

clearly indicated with

hand

— he looked

sign that

Zenas could go

He

punctuated the

he would toss over the horse's lead rope.

hand-talk with chest-deep grunts; a buffalo-hide shield hung from his

bow arm,

its

dry hide rattling as he moved.

Zenas wagged

his knife at arm's length,

crouched now well down 53

The piniijc

^{A^

-i"

^

'I

m"^

^^

-^'

^^^"*^

:^-h1<'-''

/

/i

S.'^^f>^:

ir*^yii\^

M^ >. J"^^^?' ^^'|

S^'^-^^

in the

brush which,

if

Ree

shot.

A

The arrow

He

not soUd, might at least deflect an arrow.

was hke something scaly, writhing dry shower of leaves and bark exploded

waited. His fear

in his belly.

The

in front of Zenas'

saw it had a three-inch iron head. He felt naked and exposed and deathly afraid. Next to the arrow a ragged stone was imbedded in dirt. Oh, God, what made me leave my gun? Zenas bent to pick up the the rock. With only a slight sound, the Ree arrow struck him in the side ... a thin piercing pain like a white-hot needle point. Zenas clawed convulsively at the shaft where it protruded just above his belt. Something tore and the arrow came away in his hand. He threw it from him in horror. face.

Then he The

slipped gently through the twigs to earth. Zenas

le

terrified

horse burst out of the brush with him and Zenas

caught at the halter. Together they swept by the Ree brave, Zenas

drawn along in huge bounds. He saw light flash gold on an arrow shaft and dirt skittered in front of him. The horse followed the draw now, a dry watercourse that would skirt the hill and take him on into the trappers'

camp,

if

he could stay with the horse that long. There were

more arrows, but they All right, let him have let

Ree wanted the horse. arm feeling half torn off,

flew wide. Clearly, the it.

So Zenas, with

his

go the horse.

him on, he had gained ground. And the Zenas stumbled on, his breath scorching his throat. Then he heard the Ree behind hun, sprinting, and he knew that the horse was no longer enough. The Ree wanted

With the horse Ree had stopped to

to pull

shoot. Reeling,

his scalp.

Zenas felt himself going. He was in sight of camp now and he wheezed shuddering gulps of air, but could not cry out. His ears filled with vast roaring, like wind through tall trees, and there was fog before his eyes. Then at last he saw the trappers start up and run for him

—

so far off, he thought.

He

felt

himself floating

.

.

far out

... the gravelly earth pounded rudely into

was

for Zenas.

side,

all

^,

ran.

.

floating out

his face

.

.

.

and that

They were patching him up when Zenas opened his eyes. His left his legging and moccasin, were bathed in blood. The trapper named

Harris lay next to him.

"Where's Gillam?" Zenas gasped. 55

Plains Rifle

"Out yonder," Harris us.

"Must've been two hundred jumped

said.

seen Gillam lose his hair, before

I

didn't but nick

me

throwed down on 'em with they'd

fall

back.

"I'd say

we

I

my

I

got

away from

They

there.

Would've rubbed me out, only

a time or two.

—

gun

like to

shoot

I

— and ever time

never did shoot."

cut

it

awful

fine,"

The trappers had two horses

Zenas said. There was nothing

left.

but fort up and wait for an attack.

It

was bound

to

to

do now,

come. They picked

up what they could carry and pulled back to the thicket of brush at the hill where they started to chop out a fort. Zenas leaned back against his pack, clutching his rifle at last. There was one other man foot of the

Kjreat

American

wounded, most of

in

addition to Harris.

their

baggage, including

They had been forced their

all

beaver

hundreds of miles from any chance of help.

Guns

Zenas thought,

Out

I've got a hole in

there in the open, he

me

And

furs, if

to abandon and they were

that ain't enough,

that hurts a-plenty.

saw the Rees galloping back and

urging one another on. Zenas laid out his powder horn,

forth,

rifle

balls,

patches and wiping stick; then he set the brown, octagon barrel of the

Hawken

across a hackberry branch and waited.

Seventy-nine days later and some three hundred miles or so away,

crow flies, thirteen trappers and two horses walked into Captain Benjamin Bonneville's camp on the upper Green River. They were as the

tattered, stripped of their outfits

some bore healed-over wound

and

scars.

traps, short of

they said they were ready to go back to trapping.

56

ammunition; and

Otherwise, they were

fine,

and

THW£AP

and

BALL COLT

John Cremonys Ride

The Jirst of Colonel //

took

a

man

Colt' s

with an

great Equalizers

arm

like a?i

.

oak stump

.

to

hold

her steady through a full stri7i^ of six shots.

The

Cap and Ball Colt THE OLD STORY

says that

when Samuel Colt went

to

sea as a boy, he got the idea for his revolving pistol

by watching the way the ship's wheel clicked through its turns under the hands of the helmsman. It is a pretty good story at that and if it is not

—

exact history, at least

it

is

now

solidly rooted in folklore.

However, revolving mechanisms for guns were not new in Colt's day. The ship's wheel may indeed have inspired Sam Colt in some way, but he undoubtedly must have studied earlier gun designs, good and bad, as he was perfecting his own.

The dream of a repeating weapon had tormented men's minds for centuries. Countless attempts were made to

work it out, but the most obvious answer seemed to some kind of revolving cluster of barrels. Double-

rest in

59

«p

Double-oarreicd^ over-and-under Kentucky rijie^ has separate friz'Ztn and pan for each barrel

An

Allen &f Thurber 6-barrel pepperbox

barreled guns

was not

became common enough, but

Running, after his

in a rifle the

added weight

man who might one day have to run with was all a man had left when his gun was empty

attractive to a all,

powder damp. Even so, some muskets and even

optimistically

made with

a

few Kentucky

rifles

it.

or

were

two, three or four barrels which had to be

rotated by hand into firing position.

Of course,

the weight

was enormous:

the frontiersman, growling suspicion, caressed his faithful single-barreled

Kentucky and saw the whole thing as a conspiracy from his scalp.

to separate

him

Gunsmiths went on tinkering at their benches, along with soldiers, lawyers and farmers; for in those days guns were everybody's concern. After the Revolutionary War there appeared on the scene the manybarreled "pepperbox" pistol. It was the same old idea of clustered, rotating barrels, but the weight

was not

so

bad

in a pistol.

Clumsy and

inaccurate though they were, pepperboxes were around for years before Colt; but the amazing thing is that they reached their greatest popularity

began production, and they continued War.

ajier Colt

the Civil

60

^

in

use right through

Not long named Elisha

before the Collier

War

made

of 1812, however, a

man from Boston

handsome and

practical flintlock

a very

gun with a revolving cylinder and only one barrel. He said the idea had come from one Artemus Wheeler of Massachusetts, and chances are that Wheeler in turn had gotten it from someone else, and so on. Collier's gun was a good one, all right, but it was expensive to make and somehow the time was just not right for him. The world of guns was cluttered with literally hundreds of new designs most of them impractical, many of them downright weird. It was not always easy to see the good ones among the gimcracks. Out in the tall grass of the prairie or in the dark woods along the frontier, a man simply could not stake his life on a gimcrack never mind if you could run like a deer with it. After all, it had to shoot, too. Trappers along the beaver streams of the Rockies and settlers in Mexico's Texas country carried their marvelous Kentuckies and Plains

—

—

rifles

and

fired

far too often, a third.

them

When war

Texas, the

— come what may—one shot

man

died because he could not

at a time.

fire

with Mexico came like a thundering brush

Alamo was defended

— and

lost

Sometimes,

a second shot, or a

— by men

fire

across

firing single-shot

Kentucky rifles and Plains rifles. Only a few days earlier, on February 25, 1836, Sam Colt had been granted his first American patent. The time should have been right for him. It very nearly wasn't. In the next five years only a few thousand Colts of various models were made, many of these bought by

new Republic of Texas. In 1839, possibly three hundred Colts no more than that went to the Texas Rangers at the insistence the

—

— of

Ranger Captain Samuel Walker. This was probably the most important

i'/ie

Collier self-primi?ig^ revolving Jlintlock

The

Cap and Bali Colt

'r/ic

Pater son Colt of lH36,frst of was a jive-shooter with

the line^

a foldaway trigger

The Walker Colt of 1847 15^2 inches long ajid weighed over 4]/2 pounds^ carried •was

improvements suggested by

Ranker Sam Walker single order of pistols Colt ever delivered.

Without the Rangers, Sam

Colt might well have fallen back into the shadows, along with Collier

and the numberless others. As it was, he did go bankrupt, and for six years no Colts were made. But against the Comanche and Kiowa, the Apache, against the outlaws and border raiders, the Rangers were proving the Colt. In 1847, once more because Captain Sam Walker managed to secure an order for some six-shooters, Colt was back in business this time to stay.

We

— —

might examine one of those early Colts

let us say a .44 cahber Dragoon Model of 1848, because this design embodied all the improvements suggested by Walker and the Rangers and thus became

the

granddaddy of

all

the Colts to follow.

considerable size of the piece:

over four pounds.

some

sight

is

We

are aware

first

of the

fourteen inches long and weighs

on it the rich brown patina of age, perhaps by rust, and scarring of the walnut grips. The are rounded from holster wear. The bright brass see

pitting of the metal

muzzle and 62

We

it

trigger

above

guard all

we

wonder what

worn

is

thin,

are struck by

rubbed away against leather and its

bare, craggy simplicity.

We

But

cloth.

might even

was about. So now we look more closely and butt rides into the curve of the palm like a plow handle, they used to say. The simplicity we saw is there, yes,

perhaps heft but

all

we cannot

the fuss

See

it.

how

—

its

fail to see, too,

how

the simplicity

of perfection, a blending of steel and primitive perhaps, but

somehow

it

wood and

is

is

really a crude

function. Big

it

kind

may

be,

just right.

A

dedicated few still fire the old cap and ball Colts today. The once simple tricks of molding bullets and loading loose powder and ball are a curious ritual to

—

this is the shooter's

watch now. Fire a few shots on the range

moment

The

of truth.

Black powder, slow burning, explodes with a deep boom like a roll of thunder; the gun bucks hard, straight up, and slaps the heel of the hand. There is a thick white cloud of smoke and it reeks of sulphur

and hangs heavy in the solid sound of the lead

air.

ball

Through

it

in that

chunking into the

same target.

a punishing power exceeded only by the latest

instant

The

comes the

old gun has

magnum

handguns.

A

good shooter can fire remarkably high scores with it. Look back through time, then, to a century and more ago. See the Colt for what it was in those rugged days: a supreme tool for survival like a work of art, perfect in spite of its crudeness, in spite of its faults. The rest of it whatever would happen, good or bad would be up Accurate?

—

to the

—

men who

—

carried

it.

1848 Dragoo?i Colt

Cap and Ball Colt

"In the Apache tongue the word tats-an means dead ... in alluding to an animal

destroyed in the chase they exclaim, 'Yah-tats-an!'

but

if it

— 'now

it

is

dead';

should only be wounded,

and

rise again,

'To-tats-an-see-dah' From

—

'it

is

they say,

not dead'."

Capt. John C. Cremony's study of the

Apache language

hn Cremonfs Ride

LIGHT flooded the tent and weakly at the canvas. moths thumped J The young man who sat in a camp chair molding bullets was slim-boned and wiry, with a dark lean face and black hair and a mustache that threw a barred shadow down

LANTERN

hollow cheek. He wore high, soft boots and forest-green trousers of light wool with black braid at the seams. Before him on a his

table lay four oiled

new

.44 caliber Colt revolvers,

and gleaming Outside

whispers

in the

from

in the flickering light.

darkness a breeze stirred

roundleafed

cottonwoods

along the riverbank. Somewhere, away from the cluster of tents

and adobe

huts, a family

of spotted skunks rustled through willow scrub on the

bank of the

stream. Hearing them, a nervous sentry challenged and then gripped

musket till his hands hurt, waiting for something fearful to happen. was July, 1850, and this was Doiia Ana, New Mexico, and New Mexico was Apache country. In the tent the young man heard the sentry bark the challenge and he too sat very still and cocked his head and listened. In this country, his It

he thought, there

is

always the feeling of being out on the far edge of

the world, of waiting to be toppled into the darkness in a flight of arrows.

He

looked at Captain Buford, stretched

lazily relaxed as

full

length on the cot,

always but listening too. Then he looked at Jose

on a saddle blanket by the tent thin shoulders hunched. sat

flap.

The boy

who

Cap and Ball

The young man, whose name was John Cremony, turned back work. Molten lead glistened

his

charcoal.

He

in

dipped a small ladle into the lead and carefully poured

mouth of the mold held in his left hand like wisp of smoke curled up. He held the mold still for

opened

it

and rapped

it

smartly on the table.

among the others. Cremony leaned forward and hooked

and

to

a tiny iron kettle over white-hot

into the

A

A

round

a pair of pliers. a

moment, then

ball

dropped out

rolled

the kettle of lead off the

and Jose put on a pot of coffee in its place. Cremony commenced shave at one of the bullets with a sharp knife. He was slicing away

coals to

the sprue, or rough lead left by the

mouth

of the mold. His hands were

quick and accurate, and occasionally as he worked he tossed an imperfect

back into the lead

ball

pot.

The good ones he did not toss or handle mar their roundness. Buford noted

roughly, wanting no slightest dent to

with approval that

Cremony was

he'd better he particular

.

.

He

and

light glinted

very particular about

it,

and thought

.

Cremony picked up one flask,

of the heavy Colts and a brass

powder

from the eagle design embossed on the

set the revolver at half

cock to allow the cylinder to turn

flask.

freely;

then holding the muzzle up he poured a measured charge of black

powder

into each chamber. Selecting a bullet, he set

it

in a

chamber

opening, sprue up, rotated the cylinder until the ball was directly in line

rammer lever that ran beneath the down smoothly and the ball was seated.

with the

lever

j^,

shivered suddenly, his

barrel.

He

pulled the

65

n^if

Great

American

Guns

When he had finished loading the weapons, he shook copper caps from a small tin into his palm and capped the charges. On each revolver the chamber under the hammer was left uncapped so that no chance jar

might explode

down

holsters

and

it.

He

reached to a peg on the tent pole and took There was a tin of thick grease in a pouch He dipped a finger into it and smeared the stuff

belt.

strapped to the

belt.

thickly over the

mouth

the charges watertight

—

of each chamber a routine precaution to keep and lubricate the barrel with each shot, and, more

important, to prevent the burning gases of an exploding chamber from igniting the

powder in

all

the other chambers at the

that could take the shooter's

hand

Jose poured coffee into tin cups and

Buford.

The

same

time, a chainfire

off.

Cremony passed one

captain sniffed the coffee happily.

He wore

to

the badges and

uniform of the First United States Dragoons, and one hand played with the gold-braided cord on the massive saber that leaned against the cot.

He

could only have been a Dragoon. Magnificent red side-

whiskers and great curving saber

mind

mark enough, never

." .

.

Cremony grinned and the belt

and two

one

Dragoons. But I'm glad

my

bolstered the pistols, so there were two on

in saddle holsters

in theory at least,

66

these were

and studied the four Colts. "Twenty-four shots without reloading," he mused. "John, I claim

that's a miracle

He's

—

the uniform. Buford sipped his coffee

man I

ticket to old age."

so

hanging over the chairback. "Well,

armed

is

equal to a detachment of

bought that big horse from you, anyway.

YEAR EARLIER John Cremony had been settling comfortably into not his work as a reporter on the staff of the Boston Herald without pleasure, for he had seen hard service in the Mexican War of 1846-7, and before that there had been long wanderings in South America as a sort of free-lance journalist. In 1 849, however, the United States Boundary Commission was reorganized under John R. Bartlett in order to survey the Mexican border as it stood after the recent Mexican War. John Cremony was persuaded to join the Commission

A

—

as official interpreter.

By January of 1850, Cremony was with the Commission at its camp at the village of Dona Ana on the Rio Grande.

headquarters

The

and near-by copper mines had been deserted for years because of the Apaches who now gathered in great numbers to harass the new intruders. The Commission itself numbered about fifty men and had a military escort of heavy cavalry, some 250 men of the First and Second United States Dragoons under Colonel Craig. The Apache chief, Mangas Colorados, professed friendship. Since Bartlett and Craig had no desire for a war, they found Mangas Colorados' 400 or so

j^.

village

Mimbres Apaches camped amusing themselves by

Commission found

itself

quantities of food daily

virtually in their laps, with the warriors

stealing anything that wasn't tied

short

on supplies

and the Apaches

There were sheep ranches

Cremony volunteered

to

to

the

down. The

— 300 hungry men

ate vast

pilfered more.

north, around Socorro,

and

go there to bargain with the Mexican ranchers

for sheep.

LATER, Cremony was

remember

to

north to Socorro for in fact, as he

had hoped

it

it

little

of the ride from Dofia

took place without incident

—

Ana

exactly,

might. Elapsed time: thirty-one hours.

His old friend of Mexican

War days,

Lieutenant Reuben Campbell,

had been stationed at Socorro by Colonel Craig with half a company of the Second Dragoons. Together they examined the smelly, bleating sheep, and at night by the

names

— Buena

fire

Vista, Cerro

they talked of old battles with melodious

Gordo, Chapultepec.

Cremony took a day's At three o'clock in the morning of the next day an orderly shook him awake. Campbell arose also, and the friends breakfasted After settling for purchase of the sheep,

lazy rest.

67

(^^^p

^^y^

and Ball

together by candlelight. Crcmony's horse was saddled and led around

He

to the tent. light

strapped two holstcred Colts across the

pommel

hunting saddle and fastened his canteen securely so that

of the

would

it

rattle. Having chided Buford enough times about his clattering and clanking Dragoons, he was satisfied to hear only the faint squeak of leather as he mounted. He leaned down and grasped Campbell's hand and they whispered a few words in the darkness, then he wheeled

not

away and was gone. After

its

friskiness

first

X-,

.

was

deliciously cool

under saddle, the horse

settled

down

away under a fat moon. The desert night and Cremony cantered his horse for stretches. He

smartly and the miles

fell

and walked for ten minutes of each hour. saw the length of the long trail laid out before ^^^- "^^^ ^^'^•' back to Dona Ana from Socorro led due south through unbroken desert. There was a good growth of grama grass near Socorro but for a fiery stretch of ninety-six miles there was neither water nor shade. This was the Jornada del Muerto, the Dead Man's Journey. Still, he thought, it was not all bad. A fine, hard, natural roadway ran the length of the Jornada. The whole plain was bare of cover, so he could not be ambushed. However, for sixty or seventy miles along its east side there towered the jagged peaks of the San Andres range, called the Sierra Blanca in Cremony's time. And here, more or less permanently, lived the Mescalero Apaches who by no means observed Mangas Colorados' truce. If they were not off raiding elsewhere, as they must have been two days earlier, their lookouts on the heights also dismounted

American

Guns

In his mind's eye he

—

could not

To

fail to

see him.

his left at last the

the Sierra Blanca.

heat poured

down

As

—

dawn

rolled

up over the sawtooth ridges of and the

the sun climbed, the sky grew brassy

the white-hot furnace heat of July.

He

felt his

morning wore on, felt them drawing up in a tight squint. His nostrils and lips burned dry and puckered, his teeth were gritty with a taste like hot ashes. He pushed on, now and then grateful to climb down and walk a spell, to dry the seat of his breeches and to ease the horse. Sweat trickled down his ribs; his hair grew sodden under his hat and a hot red ache swelled behind his eyeballs. By midafternoon he thought he had covered close to fifty miles the heat was the most intense he had ever known. He saw then a fair-

eyelids searing as the

—

68

bush

sized creosote

patch of grama grass some hundred yards

in a

the trail toward the Sierra Blanca.

The bush might

give

off

him shade

to

wait out the day's heat, and the horse could graze for a while, he thought, so he jogged over and dismounted. It

was

then, as his foot hit the ground, that he

of dust shimmering through the heat

He

Blanca. set the it

waves

it

— a column

sensed violent motion at the base of the dust cloud and

blood pounding in his temples.

much

saw

at the foot of the Sierra

sooner, but he had

Quickly

now

the four Colts

let

He knew he

it

should have seen

the heat dull his senses.

he checked the copper percussion caps on each of

and now too he plucked caps from

his belt for that last

charge on each gun. Then he shook his saddle good on

—

its

somewhere in the back of his cinched it down tight. He hesitated mind a thought grew, some half-forgotten fragment of a campfire yam. Time was running out, but he unfastened his heavy woolen scrape from behind his saddle and shook it out, then doubled it lengthwise. He punched two holes in it with his knife, ran a leather thong from his saddle through the holes and fastened the serape at his throat like a cloak. Then he swung up into the saddle and bolted headlong. The Apaches were quartering toward the trail to head him off. Through the muffled thunder of hoofbeats in the sand he heard the first Apache screeches ringing flat in the dead heat. With the big horse in a charging run his own dust boiled up after him. The Apaches pounded onto the trail 300 yards behind him. He turned in the saddle and peered back through the dust. As nearly as he could

tell,

there were close to forty warriors behind him.

head and forced himself to think clearly. He had seventy-five miles to go and there was no faintest hope of help before Dona Ana. Jokingly he had said to Buford that he and the Colts were worth a detachment of Dragoons vaguely now it came to him what an inane thing it was to say. He was just one man on a horse and he had a very long way to ride.

Cremony shook

his

—

There was no doubt that his big horse was far superior to the ponies. He was pulling well out ahead, but the pace could not be held for long. How about firepower? Guns among the Apaches in 1850 were a rare luxury aside from a few undependable Mexican

Apache

muskets

— but

the question remained,

what did these

-pi

^

blanket and

devils carry?

69

Cap and Ball (^qI^

Great

American

Guns

John Cremony Cremony slowed he swallowed

his horse to

fiercely against

an easy run. Panic floated in him and

The Apaches

it.

yards and then with a touch of rein he kept still

no

gunfire.

Polished

up

crept it

to within fifty

that way.

There were many lances. There were bows

wood

flashed in the sun

to let fly their arrows. It

was too

—

No

gunfire,

in plenty.

the lead riders had begun

far for accuracy, he thought, but not^

canvas in

and he let his horse out faster. The serape rattled its him and down over the horse's rump, cracking like a gale. There was an instant's sharp tug at the thong around

his throat

and the

for a lucky hit,

folds out behind

flesh of his

back crawled as

had been

if it

stirred with

a spoon. There, flickering in the edge of his vision as he looked back,

were the feathers of an arrow

—

the jagged obsidian head. Relief

He saw

the serape' s thick folds had stopped

washed over him

then a surge of action

among

.

.

.

the Apaches. War-cries

swelled louder in his ears as riders pulled toward him at sprint-speed.

He 70

held a long Colt up where they could see

it,

then aimed back, but

still

held his

fire.

Apaches thought

There was better of

nearly a half-mile long.

Cremony allowed to perhaps it

down

hesitation, then a falling it.

The Colt had them

his horse another

600 yards before easing

again.

Had

back as the racing

The Indians were now

off.

in straggling line

buffaloed

good run and

They were

—

for

built

now.

up

his lead

a long time cutting

they been only a couple of riders, or even half a

dozen, he might have held to a dead run and worn them

down

to the

But there were forty of them and he knew that such a run would leave his own horse exhausted of their forty, enough warriors would hold back, saving their mounts, to overtake him easily quitting point.

after itself it.

—

he had run himself into the ground.

— and

part of the

Apache genius

—

It

was a

trick as old as hunting

No, he dared not run flat out he must count on his horse's stamina, on their own, and he must control their timed sprints

as they counted

with the threat of his Colts.

The burning afternoon was pounded away Cremony forced himself to be a part of

brain,

underfoot. his horse

Body and

—

sensing,

adjusting, delicately paying out strength.

The

red ball of the sun sank in a bloody sky and the Jornada del

Muerto was stretched out

Cremony allowed

in the fearfully bright

his horse to drift

arm arrow-slashed before he pulled away arm quickly, but worse, the pounding

moonlight.

back too far and he had an again.

The wound

stiffened

was eating his strength and that buried under out. First, an agonizing stitch in his side deeper pain as the muscles in his belly knotted into cramps. Sweat-damp wool galled his thighs. Time and burning tiredness hardened the sunAche behind his eyes. His horse's long flowing stride grew rough, then his

ride

—

choppy.

He wondered

He knew

their ferocity, their black

genius for terror, their incredible toughness.

An Apache warrior was On a raid, which

at the

Apaches.

pure fighting man, probably the best

y,

lay in their faultless timing of

in the world.

might take months and cover 2000 miles, he carried only his weapons and he made his meals as he found them, off roots, a handful of mesquite beans, rabbits, packrats, birds or snakes

— anything

in fact

was remotely edible. He carried water, if any, in the long intestine of a horse, and in the end he would eat his own mount without hesitation and continue on foot, willing, indeed happy, to endure incredible hardthat

71

Cap and Ball r<

i.

ships so long as there

was

the slightest hope of plunder. Clearly, any of

them would gladly run the whole race through again carry his Colts or to claim his horse,

The was

began to bear

trail

near.

And

left in

if it

for a

chance to

lived.

a bold curve.

The end

of the Jornada

then the plain was gone, broken into ragged

hills

and the

shallow ravines that led away westward, down to the Rio Grande. A blown horse could so easily stumble on this rougher ground ... he eased back.

No war cries came

to him.

He

turned in his saddle, waiting. They

should have been gaining, but where were they? Unbelieving, he slowed his horse

p

American

Guns

still

more.

They were through! He wanted to laugh aloud against the darkness. Then he was cursing himself furiously for his stupidity. This east-

.

ward sweep, could only

Ahead

of

the turn toward

mean

him

in

Dona Ana through

the tumbled hills

—

it

had taken some shorter trail known to them. the darkness they would be waiting to spit him on their that they

lances like a bloody steak.

His spurs

bit into the big horse's

steaming flanks and the shocked

beast laid his belly low in the last jerky, rocking run

—

left in

him.

Cremony

he had to be. The seconds crept by. He drew two was merciless now of the Colts and they seemed huge in his deadened hands. An earsplitting screech clawed at his spine and his skin drew tight and cold. Apaches spilled onto the trail only yards behind him. He flattened himself over the horse and fired into the dark and the screams and his black powder smoke whipped away to hang in reeking clouds over the

trail.

He

An arrow scored a long cut along his leg.

amid the dust and smoke if he was gaining, nor had counted from the two guns. It only mattered that his enemy had to ride into the magic of continuous fire. Deliberately he fired the shots from his third gun back through shadowbroken moonlit dust. the few who had It ended that way. The Apaches were finished could he

couldn't tell if

tell

a single shot

—

withstood the

and tasted the sulphurous smoke. The last heavy hand even after he felt safe enough to pull his horse

last sprint

.44 stayed in his

back into a shambling trot. Shortly before midnight the dark shapes of Dona Ana's clustered adobes and tents ghosted up against the sky, and beyond, the Rio Grande flickered back sparks of moonlight. The sentry, nervous as always, called his challenge and was answered. Cremony

72

i

^^ ••>:y:'.^.v,

.'-.. J-' •''l.-A-

could hear the night noises of horses and saw then the twisted cedar corral posts

pulling

up

shimmering

at his

own

Then he was came shockingly

softly white in the moonlight.

tent, calling

Jose in a voice that

to his ears.

Jose ran out, and a

moment

from the darkness. They looked

The

down from

rider slid

later

at the

Captain Buford came barefoot

man and

horse in the moonlight.

hot saddle leather, a Colt

still

serape hanging oddly cloaklike from his shoulders

Apache arrows

—

in his

hand, a

the feathered

They saw the and heard the guttering sound of the horse's breathing. The animal was near death. shafts of a dozen

bloody furrows

in the

rattled

from

man's right arm and

"Hello, Buford," the

man

folds.

its

left

thigh

whispered.

John Cremony had covered one hundred and twenty-five miles in twenty-one hours on one horse the last seventy-five miles at a run.

—

Moving

stiffly,

like a

man

in a daze,

stiffened fingers to Buford, then started to

near-dead horse. straw until

its

First,

he gave the gun from his

work immediately on the

he and Jose rubbed the animal

sweat-drenched hide was completely dry.

bered later that

this

rubdown took two hours and

Buford about the necessity for

it

until

he drove the

down with clean Cremony remem-

that he fussed at

man

off.

Next, they

washed the horse down with a powerful solution of whisky and water. Again they rubbed him dry. After prying off his shoes, they gave him two quarts of brandy and water to drink the animal would have killed

—

himself with water had they

let

him. Jose ran for blankets and they

swathed the horse in them. They rustled a good feed of chopped hay and Cremony cut a couple of pounds of raw steak into small pieces and mixed it into the hay. Finally, after five hours, they packed a deep bed of straw around the mummy-wrapped horse, and Cremony was satisfied. He staggered back to his tent in the soft light of morning to his cot and to the hot, stout toddy Buford had waiting for him. Buford had cleaned the four Colts and they lay again on the table where they had

—

been four days

earlier.

He was already asleep when Buford pulled off his boots and covered him with a

blanket.

THE BUFFAL(aCiUN The Freeze-out

Bunch

Here was a instrufuent^

man

professiofial

s

packaged thunder and

lightning that was almost too

much

gu?i

for any ma?i

.

.

THE YEAR 1712, a Small herd

INbuffalo was

of

seen within thirty miles

of Charleston, South Carolina. People

remembered

the date for

because those were the ever saw.

many

years

last buffalo

Unknown numbers

they

of buffalo

in that century along

were killed early

the Allegheny frontier from Virginia

through Pennsylvania and

New

up

York.

When Boone and his people went into Kentucky during the seventies, there were buffalo to hunt in the valleys where, a few years later, race horses would be grazing. The buffalo were soon gone.

The old-time frontier settler-farmer who clawed a living from broad-axed clearings

was a force more destructive and its creatures than fire,

to the land

flood, blizzard or war. In his defense

it

could be said that just staying alive was a desperate

trial.

just as the

homy

were part of

it.

Brutality calluses

was part of it his palms

on

The

Buffalo Gun

—

who Hvcd But even his town cousin whose kids wore shoes instead of moccasins

in a

house of milled wood,

— even he remained

destruc-

though he began to get dcstructivcness mixed up with sport.

tive,

Men

enormous game drives, beating through entire valleys until they had piled up mounds of animal bodies, the tally running into hundreds. So much for the deer that trampled their com, the fox that slavered after their chickens, the wolf, bear, or mountain lion that ripped the throats of their calves. A kind of Old Testament stomped the woods together

wrath lay

^

in

in

such scenes.

But

all this

The

eastern buffalo and the mountain buffalo roaming the high

doesn't really explain what happened to the buffalo.

valleys west of the real plains country were only strays,

American

Guns

the

enormous

prairie herds.

pushed out of

Real buffalo country was the grass belt

'^^tween the Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains, from the plains of Texas on the south, bordered there by the Staked Plains and the Pecos River, on north into the Canadian plains, ending somewhere about the fiftieth parallel

forest until

of latitude.

gave way to it

Along the

river

and border country where the

prairie, pioneering quickly

was perhaps

a couple of

narrowed the buffalo

belt

hundred miles wide. The vortex of

seasonal migration, the very heart of the buffalo range, was considered to be

between the Platte and the Arkansas Rivers, especially along the

Republican River.

The

first

great depletion in the prairie herds

was

said

by old-time

hunters to have been the result of an extraordinary blizzard during the winter of 1844-5. There was heavy snowfall on the northern plains, especially in the

Laramie country north of the

glazed a thick crust over the deep snow.

Platte. Freezing nights

The animals were

trapped,

fenced in ice where they stood. Tens of thousands perished and the buffalo never returned to the

Laramie plains

in anything like their old

numbers.

The Union

Pacific Railroad,

first

of several to do so, drove

into the heart of the range in 1867. Thereafter, there

its steel

were two great

herds, split by plug-hatted citizens thrill-shooting

from the windows and platforms of moving coaches until the roadbed was bordered with mounds of bones and putrid carcasses. Buffalo robes had been a staple among trade pelts for years a

— —

kind of general service item with a standard, though not a great, price 78

in the

One

way

that deerskins

buck, that

is,

had been on the old

equaled one dollar and we

to

say

it

that way.

Then

had struck the beaver. There had be a buffalo robe for the boys' bedroom, a couple for the family sleigh winter to be thrown across the knees to prevent the ladies taking a

fashion struck the buffalo the

in

way

frontier east of the river. still

— and a

it

it bowed his shoulders, if he would was more comfortable Indian style, something like a toga. The hides went into leathergoods of every kind: harness, trunks, military accouterments; they were cut into drive belts for heavy machinery; bodies of stagecoaches were slung on thick leather thoroughbraces. It was the best leather in the world, it was cheap, and

chill

only admit

it.

coat for Pa, so heavy

The

the railroads put

The

it

buffalo robe

within reach.

buffalo, along with the horse,

was. There on the hoof was his whole

made the Plains Indian what he way of life his diet virtually

—

complete, his shelter, his wardrobe, his sport and a significant part of

For him there was no scratch-plowing to raise a little wormy He hunted the buffalo where he found them, and that could be pretty nearly anywhere on the plains. He hunted them with lance or bow from his buffalo horse or in the winter on snowshoes. Or his religion.

com

or pumpkin.

at a river crossing, he stalked them, slipping into the yellowed waters

the edge of the herd. He would then drift bawled and blew a pink froth, until they finally reached a graveled beach where the squaws could reach the buffalo and to throat-cut a

swimmer from

with the animal while

it

start skinning.

79

The Buffalo

Gun

^^^^f

-i^^

^^^^^^^^^^^

Buffalo-hunting

j^HI^IE'

SiHiBI

plainsman of 1850

American

Guns So the buffalo gave him sport and, for Httle real effort, fed him very play the Thus, it gave him time to do the two things he liked best plains game of war, with its endless pony-stealing skirmishes and warrior

—

well.

and hunt more buffalo. It was a wonderful life. Mountain men and early plainsmen took the buffalo the way the Indian did, some of them, like Jim Bridger, almost as religiously, too. And they ate it the same way, too, meaning that they ate virtually every part of it, including viscera and bone-marrow. The favorite parts were rituals,

—

hump ribs spinal projections of bone, really, hump meat. The meat was lightly broiled on a

the tongue or a cut of the

extending up into the green stick over the

fire

and eaten

saltless,

or "straight," though old-

gunpowder on it for seasoning. Meat cut it crossways and let the juices run out

timers sometimes put a pinch of

was cut with the grain; to was a scandalous, greenhorn trick. The trapper's word for fat was

was always cooked was pemmican, the greatest condensed food the world has known. To make pemmican, the squaws sliced the meat into strips and dried it. At that stage it was called jerky. It was then crumbled, pounded, and finally mixed in with the meat.

When

equal parts with boiling

were thrown 80

in. It

"fleece,"

and

it

buffalo were hard to find, there

fat;

occasionally a few berries or currants

was made up

into bricks

and wrapped.

Men who

had

on pemmican for a time claimed that they could never get enough even with three meals of it a day. Same with buffalo. Men went on plains or mountain expeditions happily, knowing that their sole lived

of

it,

months on end was going to be buffalo meat, six to eight per man per day, or pemmican. They loved it. Pemmican was used in the great polar expeditions early in this century. Admiral Peary wrote that: ration for

pounds of

it

Of one

all

that,

for three last

foods that

I

am

acquainted with, pemmican

under appropriate conditions, a

hundred and sixty-five days taste as good as the first.

in the

is

the only

eat twice a day

year and have the

mouthful

The

ff^^

buffalo offered a full diet without any shortages of vitamins

or minerals. There was no scurvy unless a cut off the fat of any kind to

man can

—

man was

enough to as a regular thing. In fact, there was almost no sickness what there was usually had a flint or iron head attached foolish

one end and feathers to the other. All these early hunters took about as

as the Indians did.

Both wasted a good

— convenience being work. They hunted or — way

a matter of having

oldest

of

all

killed the

many

buffalo they needed,

deal, according to convenience

squaws handy

animal in

older, even, than flint

many

to

do the

real

ways, including the

arrowheads

— stampeding

For sport, buffalo running was the thing. It took a good, trained horse, and weapons ranged from lance or bow to pistol the beasts off a

cliff.

rifle. The dull-witted herd buffalo was so easy to kill that running him was about the only way to make sport out of it. Most of the excitement, apart from the speed and hard riding, came from the laughs, or

or

occasional tragedies, evolving out of hunters' mishaps. Generally,

it

would be a green hunter doing some fool thing that got him into trouble. There always seemed to be stories around about hunters shooting their

own

horses in the midst of running buffalo.

Of

course, the buffalo

weighed 2000 pounds and was capable of red-eyed rages, so anybody could get into trouble. Colonel Richard Dodge, among others, thought that wild

Texas

they were

fast,

cattle

were

infinitely

more

smart and tough; they were

game; and they wore

exciting animals as

bom mean

six-foot horns.

A Texas Comanche got a colorful name after a buffalo hunt in the

Buffalo

^^^

1

840's.

He had

ridden his pony close to a big bull to lance

turned into him, ripped the belly of his horse and

it

Comanche. Then

charged.

it

The man had

Suddenly,

dumped

the

lance and shield, so he

lost

pulled his knife and, as the buffalo lowered

it.

head to gore him, he

its

leaped over the horns onto the hump.

A Comanche

He

and again down through the curly

clung there, driving his knife time

hair

could ride anything.

and half-inch thick hide into the body, trying for the heart. The He slid off behind, then, and grabbing hold of

bull wouldn't go down.

the

Great

American KjUns

tail

he hamstrung the beast so that

it

finally

stopped running. Then

he walked around and cut its throat. After that, he was always called "Janamata," or "Bloody Buffalo." Maybe the buffalo was his own worst enemy. The stupidest traits ^'^^^ beasts were certainly his. He was capable of being stampeded by ^^ a puff of prairie dust. Hunters claimed there were dozens of stampedes every day in a herd. A stampede could wear itself out in a few yards, or

it

could

somehow pick up momentum

until

cresting swells thousands of bawling animals.

it

had gathered into

The

its

pressures of the herd

If there were a river in the way, the leaders plunged and others ran on over them, and so on, until there might be a solid bridge of quivering, massed flesh. Then the stampede might simply stop, the beasts blowing and snorting briefly, then dropping their heads to graze. And where the bridge of meat had been would be called "Stinking Water" for years to come. There were many such places; the names remained long after the stench had gone.

were unstoppable. in

The thing,

ruffed grouse, in the old days

was sometimes

Hunters scorned

for sport.

it

A

bird smartened up.

when

there

called "fool hen," because

new

Then something

it

was plenty of was so easy to

everyshoot.

peculiar happened.

The

generation of hunters found in the ruffed

grouse a bird wilier than anything else in feathers. Something like that

seemed

to

happen

to the

mountain

buffalo.

When

these animals broke

with the herd, they seemed also to leave behind the herd mentality.

The harsher

life

bred survival

instincts.

over the plains like water seeking a least resistance, the

Where level,

the prairie buffalo flowed

always taking the path of

mountain buffalo learned

to forage for himself,

climbing goat-like after the rockbound hillside grass. small, tough, agile

By 82

1868,

it

— and

was

smart.

He was

He was

a loner,

very, very hard to hunt.

clear that the prairie buffalo

was doomed, though

had yet to start. "Verily, the carrion crow is lord of the Plains," wrote Horace Greeley. "Nowhere is the blind, senseless, human appetite for carnage, for destruction, more strikingly, more lamentably the real hunting

evinced than in the rapidly proceeding extermination of the buffalo."

The Kansas

Pacific Railroad

was aimed

at the center of the great

southern herd. Laborers were fed buffalo meat. hired to keep them fed

was a youngster

Among

the hunters

of twenty-two or three, but

already a plains veteran, named Cody. Like Janamata, the buffalo gave him his name, "Buffalo Bill." He shot 4,280 buffalo in eighteen months. It was an impressive kill at the time, but it was only a beginning. In the east, prices for robes went up until, by 1869, New York dealers offered $16.50 for a first-class skin, $12.50 and $8.50 for second- and third-class skins. They bought in bales of 100. Hunters who got their robes to the big shippers like Bates of Leavenworth or

Durfree of like

St.

an awful

Louis received only a fraction of the lot of

money wandering around out

price. It

there

still

looked

on the plains

ready to be picked. In 1871, the herds

still

seemed almost

intact. Travelers reported

herds so big that they took three and four days passing a given point. In 1872, the hunters were swarming like locusts, eager for the harvest of slaughter and the quick money,

many

of

them

still

wearing button

They

shoes and hard hats as they struck off into prairie country.

shot

animals almost to pieces to bring them down, not knowing where to aim; in skinning they ruined far more hides than they saved time, a single hide brought to

market represented probably

—

at

five

one

dead

buffalo.

The

big year

Where

was 1873. Colonel Dodge wrote: there were myriads of buffalo the year before, there

were now myriads of carcasses. The air was foul with sickening stench, and the vast plain, which only a short twelvemonth before Every teemed with animal life, was a dead, solitary desert. .

drink of water, every mouthful of grass

There were probably close but the Indians were fighting

seemed hillock

all

to

is

.

.

at the expense of

20,000 hunters in the

field

life.

by 1874,

over that year and, anyway, the herds

to have melted away. Still hunters banged away from every and waterhole, riddling anything that moved. A lot of lead was

83

The Buffalo

Gun

returned to the earth that year. as

many

as

were only a

It

has been estimated that there were

50 million buffalo on the plains in 1850. By 1885, there few hundred and those mostly in the mountains.

Buffalo-running, the old way, went out

took over.

It

was

fun, but

it

wasted time and

when it

the professionals

scattered the herds.

sportsman hunter named Theodore Davis, commenting

in

1

A

869, said

method known as "still-hunting" was introduced by troops from famous 10th Cavalry. They were apparently interested only in meat, and found this an efficient way of getting it. From 1870 on, it was nearly all still-hunting taking a stand, they called it. Hunters learned that by walking up on a herd carefully, a man that the

outfits like the

—

Kjreat

American

^

could get as close as 150 yards from the animals without alarming

them, though 300 yards was a safer distance. position. Standing, a

He

used a pair of crossed

and generally shot from a

sticks for a rifle rest

man

took too

much chance

sitting

prone shooters found themselves spooking herds, decided that the sound of the big-bore

When

rifles

was

or kneeling

of being seen. But too.

They

finally

traveling through the

gun was around 30 inches off the firing seemed to bother the herd. Hide-hunting was a tough and brutal business. Most of the real killing was done by hard-case professionals who, by 1873, had developed long range still-hunting into an exact science. The first shot was strategic. A man aimed for the lungs animals so shot usually staggered about and bled freely. The scent of blood and the dying

ground.

the barrel of the

ground, neither the hunter nor the

—

beasts slow staggering could start a herd milling in stupid confusion.

Once

milling, they

were as good as dead. The hunter dropped them

methodically until he had a day's work for his skinning crew lined up.

Then, since hunters disdained to do

back to

his

camp

to care for his

their

own

skinning, the

man went

guns and to load cartridges for the

next day's shoot.

Among few proven

these men, the choice of

weapons had boiled down to a would

favorites. In the beginning, almost anything that

shoot had been

tried.

There were tens of thousands of Minie-ball

muzzle-loaders around those

first

years after the war.

It is

certain that

they killed or at least mutilated a lot of buffalo. Buffalo Bill used a

newer service-type

Springfield, a breech-loading .50 caliber

called "Lucretia Borgia."

84

which he

i^^mmmm

Remington rolling- block

®

huntifig rifle

The

professionals

had seized upon the Sharps and the Reming-

tons with roUing-block actions. Both were really big-bore long range

one shot, often, 600 yards. If the expression "Buffalo Gun" means anything, it means guns like these. Of all the guns used on the buffalo, the Sharps really gives us our image of the Buffalo Gun. The Sharps legend had its roots in the Civil War regiment organized by Colonel Hiram Berdan. It was a deadly outfit, every man a sniper, trained to pick off gunners and snipers at target guns capable of dropping 2,000-pound bulls with

from as

far as

long range, but not scorning to fight as troops of the military

model .52

line.

Firing the

caliber paper-cartridge Sharps, they played a critical

When

Pickett's great charge

was

also launched a flanking

was sent rolling across movement by 30,000 troops of General Longstreet, aimed at Little and Big Round Top and the Union Artillery beyond. Only 300 Union soldiers were deployed across the Round Tops, but 100 of those were Berdan Sharpshooters. role at Gettysburg.

the sunht

field,

there

Their scorching

fire

held back Longstreet's troops for almost three

quarters of an hour. Then, with Pickett's charge shattered, the whole

attack folded up.

85

Berdan developed the center-fire cartridge after the war. When was adapted to the new cartridge, the makings of the uhimate Buffalo Gun were at hand. Beyond that, to understand what the words "Buffalo Gun" really mean, the gun must be shot. There is no experience quite hke it. the sturdy Sharps action

Here

is

one of the Big

2Vi-inch cartridge case

Fifties. It takes a

loaded with 100 grains of black powder and a .50 caliber bullet weighing

473 grains. Later, in the mid-eighties, shooters who liked a real cannon were using 3!4-inch cartridges loaded with 170 grains of powder, although by that time there were no buffalo to use it on. This Sharps

Great

American

and the

is

figure of

stick is carried

a fine sporting

under the barrel

action.

a

in brass thimbles.

walnut with a raised cheekpiece.

Guns

model with

heavy octagon barrel

A

an Indian brave engraved on the receiver.

The chamber

Slip a cartridge into

Now

The

stock

is

wiping

of black

swing the lever and open the

looks big enough for a fat pup to crawl into.

it,

and close the action on it. For one shot, If you were starting in on half a hundred

then,

shooting sticks aren't necessary.

pounds would soon have your

buffalo, though, the eleven

left

arm

limp as spaghetti dangling from a fork.

The

target out there

— impact

is

is

a cardboard box with a sack of flour in

the thing you are interested in here.

has a hair trigger,

The gun

set fine

—

just a touch.

.

.

Take aim,

it

then. It

.

and there is that long, rolling black-powder boom and gush of smoke. The box has disintegrated and flour is falling like fine snow. Off to one side, leaves on a bush dance butt thuds into the shoulder

from the shock wave. Your hand shakes, and you can suddenly hear the pounding of your heart. .

.

.

.50 caliber

Sharps

rifle

Combustible paper cartridge of 1862 and

bl

21^- inch metallic cartridge of 1874^

|<

both actual size

(!S

^]|

-^^

The Freeze-out Bunch WATER ran

fast

and white, too

fast to freeze so early, there in the

high streams that fed the forks of the Salmon and Selway.

Gold-bearing gravel was beginning to freeze soUd as

flint

by November,

but as long as there was water for sluice and rocker, the miners would

not quit.

summer they had not quit, either, even long enough They slept on the ground, under rock ledges or brush lean-to's. When frost bit, they built bigger fires. The youngster. Dune, shivered more and slept less, but went on digging with the rest. And in the nights he rolled closer to the fire, often to wake with a yelp and a hand clapped to scorched flesh, sniffing the burnt hair and hide of Through

the

to build huts.

his elkskin sleeping robe.

Dune and

his partner,

Jim Keel of

digging

Illinois, quit

could no longer find the ground through the snow.

when they

third day had talked of how, come winter, they would cover up all signs of digging to hide the place from claim jumpers. Now the snow had done it for them. Any man who stayed on in hopes greed-haunted of sacking a rich claim was bound to freeze. Some stayed anyway, even knowing that. And sure enough, they froze. Dune and Jim Keel broke camp and pulled out that same day, the third of December. They followed their httle creek to the Lochsa, It

was the

of December. Since July, Jim

—

—

87

thence to the Selway

in a

day and

From

a half.

there on they

part of the stream of miners emptying out of the gold country

"Freeze-Out Bunch," Jim Keel called them.

He was

in

high

were

—

spirits,

the

Dune

thought, with the digging finally ended.

"There won't be a bed between here and Walla Walla," Jim

"and

said,

You game to go on that far?" ground," Dune said, "but I'd like to

going to winter on the ground.

I ain't

"I don't mind to sleep on the warm. Let's see what turns up." Jim was right. The trails were acrawl with miners; no bed or shelter at any price in gold-camps they passed through, like Kamiah and Orofino on the Clearwater. From the beginning, they heard talk of robbers. Then, in Kamiah, they saw the bodies of three miners laid °"^ ^" ^^ snow just as they had been carried in off the trail. After that, Jim refused to camp near any tent settlement. He divided their deerskin pokes of dust and told Dune to carry his own and at night they slept away off in the pines. git

Kjrciit

American

Guns

They rested up at Lewiston, where the Clearwater joins the Snake, and there they threw in with seven other miners. Dune protested at first, but Jim said, "Psha-a, they all look square to me. Dune. I come across the plains with Wes Dean six years ago. We went to Sacramento and then to the Feather River diggin's. Got skunked, too. With all the talk about highwaymen, I'm squamish about goin' it alone, here on in. What do you say?" "I'm 'feard if we do and 'feard if we don't," Dune said. "I left Missouri with a chicken leg and half a loaf of bread and I ain't had a stake since. I don't want to lose this gold, but I ain't sure I'm man enough to keep it without help." So they threw in with the others. They moved their packs into Wes Dean's

tent,

picketed their horses with the rest and went out to look

The Snake River was choked up with ice, cakes of it floating by as big as stagecoaches. Dune was thinking, along with a lot of trash ice. They walked along the bank until they came to a dock where two steamboats were tied up. A man was coiling a thick hemp line around.

on the deck of one. Jim Keel called over hauling passengers.

and glared

The man looked

to

him and asked

out over the

at him.

"Ask again

in

May, Jack," he barked.

ice,

if

they were

then turned

in an icy blast of wind that swept Snake to Columbia country would than the trails. Well, the ferry is running and

Jim shrugged and they walked on off the river.

"A

down

boat ride

have been a heap safer

the

we're going to go, we'd best git. The horses couldn't bust through much more snow than what's on the ground already." The nine miners held council in Dean's tent and voted to lay over if

one more day

to rest the horses.

right off.

"Now

bound

snow

to

think about

Jim was against he

it,"

it;

said. "It ain't

he wanted to push

snowing now

—

it's

later."

Dave English and his bunch has been sniffing around named Parker said. "Wet or dry, the weather going to count when he makes his play." Dune felt suddenly uneasy. "Who's Dave English?" Wes Dean studied the pattern of steam fogging up out of his coffee "That

feller

here again today," a miner ain't

"Highwayman, looks along the Salmon this fall cup.

like.

He was

— looking us

we broke camp he

follered us

been working a nice

little

all

and out of a over, I reckon

was easy enough

ain't

told us!"

camps and when see we had

lot of

—

to

claim there. He's got four or

with him, too. At least there

"You should have

down.

It

in

five

gunmen

any shovels amongst them."

Dune

felt his

voice go

shrill.

"We

wouldn't have throwed in with you."

back out, sonny," Dean said. "We figgered numbers for you as well as us." "He's right, Dune," Jim said. "If it wasn't English, it would be someone else there's always more thieves than miners in gold "It ain't too late to

there's safety in

—

Anyway, it's the weather that frets me." They crossed the Snake by ferry a day and a half later. It was just daybreak, the morning of December 19th. Gray clouds scudded overhead, driven by a raw wind. The old snow was knee-deep on the country.

trail, with a sharp crust on it. On the trail snow was scarcely broken, not packed, and it was exhausting for the horses. They were an hour gone from the ferry, with the halffrozen river glinting off to the right, when a big, soft flake floated down and settled on Dune's sleeve. The snow started lightly; within minutes it was falling briskly. Dune turned in the saddle and looked back at Jim.

horses any place off the

itself,

the

"You've got a sure-enough nose for weather, Jim," he

"That

ain't all,"

Jim said glumly. "Look

there,

said.

back of

us."

89

^ "^ Buffalo

Gun

Dune made

out

limit of visibility

Walla Walla," he

said.

Wes Dean shook

He

They were

six riders.

through the snow.

"Mebbe

his head.

"We

half a mile back, at the far ain't the

"Naw.

I'd

know

that English anywheres.

sets his horse like a trick bear."

"You mean we have a knotty weight

belly,

looked

at

him and

to

make

under

a fight of it?" Fear settled in Dune's

his

said nothing.

belt buckle. Dean and Jim Keel Dune thought of the old caplock

muzzle-loader hanging from the saddle beneath his

camp meat and Kjreat

American

Guns

only ones going to

they're just pilgrims like us."

that

was about

all.

He knew Jim

— good

left leg

for

carried a seven shot

pepperbox; it had always made him laugh to see Jim shoot it. He wondered if the other miners were fixed any better. A little, maybe, ^ut not much. The snow thickened. Dune felt its weight on his back and shoulders and a thick crest of it built up on his horse's neck. He was cold, but not too cold. The sharp edge of his fright had worn off and it left him a little touchy and resentful. He wanted to blame someone, but wasn't sure where to start. From time to time he looked back and saw English and his men, still keeping their distance. The trail led to Pataha, nearly thirty miles from Lewiston and the first station on the way to Walla Walla. The trail swung away from

noon and about twelve miles out, the riders guessed. and at length they came out onto a high, snowswept plain. It was like going into a white-draped room; almost instantly the snow thickened until it was suffocating. Dune knotted his scarf tighter where it passed over his hat and under his chin; he bowed his head against the wind and nursed his resentment. When he looked up the young miner to make out the cloudy shape of the rider ahead

the river around

They began

to climb

called Cincinattus Miller

and face

—

—

the cold bit into the bones of his skull

like a steel blade.

"Them

outlaws are ahead of us now." It was Jim, his beard a ." mask of ice, his voice muffled. "I don't know how come "You reckon they're ready to tackle us?" Dune asked.

ghostly

"It's

.

snowin' on them as hard as

they're lost.

And

if

they're lost, then

the trail they've broke, like a

Dune's resentment 90

it is

we

on

Jim said. We've been

us,"

are too.

bunch of sheep." "Doggone it, Jim ...

spilled out.

I

.

"I'd say

foUerin'

was always

told to respect

my

elders, but

it

gits

harder to do

all

the time, the

way

things are goin'."

thought he heard Jim laughing, but it was too cold to lift his chin out of his collar for a look. After a long minute, Jim said, "Dune,

He

I

b'Ueve you've growed up a

though.

I

You and me

.

.

.

we're just partners,

never promised to be your daddy."

Dune heard him laugh to

little.

again as his horse dropped back.

It

seemed

him then that the cold wrapped around him and crept through him.

away at the httle glowing was gone. Cold held warmth center of warmth in his body until the afraid to move, as was he him so that his breath came short, so that not moving, there by if he had gone brittle and might break. And was a kind of warmth even there in the saddle, a warmth and a drowsiness and no more resentment. For a while he amused himself sleepily In the slow, frozen passage of time,

it

ate

with the sensation of floating, of not feeling his horse under him. The spell snapped when his horse stopped. His resentment came

back when he remembered where he was and realized that it was still cold, still snowing, and that someone was shaking him by the shoulders until his teeth rattled. "Quit it, Jim! Quit it now, Jim!" he flaring

was pleading and his lips felt stiff as saddle leather. The shaking kept up and his head flopped back painfully and his eyes came unstuck. "You ain't Jim!" Dune said accusingly. He was looking into a thick bush of beard and long hair, rimed and frosted with snow; an enormous head it was, and one of the gray eyes cocked wildly off to one side. The voice coming out of the beard was rough and splintery. you keep "That's right, bub, I ain't. I'm the old he-boar, hisself

—

and bone, Savvy?" The horses were milling together, miners and outlaws knee-to-knee. Dune realized suddenly that his fear of the outlaws was gone, that if anything he was relieved to see them. Now that Dave English had shaken

them eyes open or

I'U

chaw you

him awake, he was scared

The

up, meat, hide

all right,

but scared of the snow.

— enough. Dune thought —

big outlaw sunply took over. "It's plain enough to see"

Enghsh's growling voice came bear-like, sure "that we're lost." They couldn't go back-tracking because the covered over the instant they passed on.

—

They would have

and and freeze EngUsh. by thunder, he would, snorted rather than stand there

if

no one

else

to

trail

was

go on, then,

would

lead, then,

91

-^

^^

Buffalo

^

.

—

"Close up, now, nose and tail pass a lead rope back to the next man," he bellowed. With fumbling fingers. Dune took and held a length of rope from Cincinattus Miller.

He

turned to find Joe and

Wes Dean

in the thick-

swirling snow.

They were gone. He called out in quick panic, but they were gone, in the snow somewhere back there. When the miners took count, they found that another man was missing, too. They shouted swallowed up

until they

were wheezing. English pulled a

was heavy-barreled, cased

Great

American

in

rifle

out of a saddle boot;

it

beaded and fringed buckskin. Dune saw.

The outlaw skinned off the cover, shouldered the big gun and fired; smoke squirted up into the falling snow. The blast was concussive, solid, and Dune felt the slap of it through his body. English loaded and fired

Guns

again and again. "Ain't any use," he shouted. "They're gone. If

we

fool

around here

any longer, we're goners, too!"

Dune was I ain't

a-moving

horrified. till

we

"We

find

him

ain't leaving! .

.

.

You

can't

No! Jim's go

my

partner

.

.

." .

.

"Your partner is gone, sonny. Whether he makes it or whether he up to us anymore." English reached over and tugged at the bridle of Dune's horse, swung the animal around into line. Dune tried to scream out, but tears rushed to flood his eyes and his throat closed, convulsed and aching. Grief was like a paralysis of light and feeling. Next thing he knew for sure, it was almost dark. English had shouted at him again, thumped him and nearly knocked him from the saddle and ridden on and punched Cincinattus Miller, too. The horses were stopped and the riders sat stiffly, unmoving except when English came by and whacked them. He shouted to gather around. "Get down and unsaddle. Don't mess around with it, just -cut 'em off." He swung down himself and slashed his saddle off and dumped it into the snow. Then he made the men drive the horses together in a closepacked bunch and stand there pressed in against the horses to hold them. He then pulled a cap-and-ball Colt from his belt and began shooting horses. The miners watched, thick-witted. Shot horses simply slipped down into the snow. Of those still alive, one or two plunged a little and tossed their heads, but they were worn out and the snow blanketed the sound of the shots so that somehow they were docile enough. don't, ain't

92

When

was empty, English wrenched

the Colt

Dune

the leather cover and continued firing.

his big rifle out of

turned his back, but the

concussion of each shot pounded into his body. Next to him, English fished in a leather

of the

bag for paper cartridges

He swore when He swore anj'way

rifle.

cartridge.

punch

to

his stiffened fingers

— or

talked;

into the breech

broke or dropped a

was hard

it

he talked, he swore, and he never stopped talking.

to say which. If

He

talked to the

snow, to the horses as he shot them, to the cartridges he dropped and he talked to the buffalo gun.

He Dune's

and the

fired

nostrils.

thick,

ropy cloud of black-powder smoke seared

English jacked open the

rifle's

action with a stroke of the

thumbed another thick paper cartridge into the chamber. His elbow nudged Dune in the ribs and Dune staggered, but the waist-deep snow held him up. Then through the ringing in his ears he realized that the outlaw was talking to him.

big looping trigger-guard; he

"... a meat-getter, yessir, she's a real meat-getter

buffalo .

.

.

.

.

.

when

it

.

.

.

bull,

bear or

look there, bub, see the sharp edge on that block in there slides

up and

locks,

it

slices off the

paper and the powder's

..." Dune's eyes were almost frozen shut so that he didn't see at all. boom-m-m ... the shot jolted through his head and he caught the sharp stink and the outlaw elbowed him again. Dune heard ready to

fire

him laugh.

".

.

special built for

eighty rod and

.

she's slick as a peeled

me

more

.

.

.

it

Dune's knees buckled. to

.

.

.

hawg, bub ... a Sharps, but

why,

four hundred paces

BOOM-M-M. "That's done was thankful

Louis

in Saint

bub. They're

He felt the

go down to

it.

all

she's .

.

.

dropped

stepped

it

buff'lo off

cow

at

myself ..."

down."

snow reaching for him and he Then he was hauled up by the front of his soft

coat with a neck-snapping jerk.

"On your The onto the mound

horses ..."

face the

feet,

Climb up there

bub.

in

the

middle of them

voice rose to a bellow, calling out to them of horses.

Dune crawled over

warmth and wetness

English herded the

men into

of steam

the bodies, feeling

a cluster; then he

into his body.

his

packed the saddles around anything to trap and

—

hold the steamy heat rising from the slaughtered horses.

warmth seeping

climb

on

curling off the slippery hides.

them, had them spread blankets and bedrolls

feel the

all to

He was packed

in,

Dune

could

held upright

between Cincinattus Miller and one of the outlaws. The need to sleep 93

*

he

Buffalo

Gun

?^>^'^^

t^^

was more than he could stand. His head drooped. Then he heard himself he felt again the vicious prod of the cry out with pain and shock Sharps barrel in his ribs. English stepped back and laid the rifle over his

—

arm. His beard jutted like carved marble.

up with any quitters. All any of you has got to enough heat in them horses to last a spell, but you can't sleep." English shook the buffalo gun at them and his voice boomed. "So help me Fll blow the belly out of any man that tries "I ain't going to put

do

stay awake. There's

is

.

to sleep

.

.

." .

.

Dune watched him turn and plow into thick legs, swearing

and prodding

Sharps, driving again through the

around the dark

clot of

men and

the snow, driving with stump-

men

at the

snow

until

with the barrel of the

he had pounded a path

horse-flesh.

He

outlaw's hat was tied to his head with a scarf and he wore a buffalo

robe draped over his shoulders, belted at the waist with a length of harness strap; in the snow he

moved with

a rolling-gaited waddle.

Dune

watched him, fascinated, thinking that the next turn around the path the man would have gone and there would at last be a sure-enough bear in his place.

Warmth Next

sleep.

coursed through the seat of Dune's pants.

to him, Cincinattus Miller

poetry in a cracked voice.

The

was

He

fought off

reciting endless passages of

others were singing

— hymns and sad

no one had the strength for the raffish or gay ones. English circled and prodded. Dune's resentment came seething back. He turned to the smooth-faced outlaw next to him, the one he had songs, mostly, because

heard English

"What

is

call Nelse.

he a-doin'

this for?"

he fumed. "He don't need us alive

to rob us."

The outlaw shook likes a fight, that's all.

stand

is

that this

is

his head.

He

"That

don't care

fun for him

what

ain't

with.

it,

sonny.

Dave he

What you

just

don't under-

." .

Buffalo

patrolled the path,

thrashing and beating his arms against his body, bellowing into the storm.

The

J he

.

EngUsh patrolled for nine hours. Dune lost track of the number was prodded with the rifle barrel. The universe shrank down around him, a snowy cocoon. The thing that had happened to Jim was hard to remember; when he did remember for a moment, it was too hard of times he

95

Gun

and he pushed it away from him, back out into the snowy dark. The heat from the horses had long since drifted away on the wind and the men could feel themselves freezing again. Then quite suddenly the wind dropped and the moon appeared through a break in the clouds to believe

and feet.

after that the sky cleared rapidly. English

One man,

a

little

herded them to their

miner named Ross, was dead where he

sat, his

eyes wide open.

The outlaw headed due west into after him. By dawn they could see a followed

it

American

Guns

The

others floundered

thin feather of

smoke and they

to the scattered log shacks at Pataha.

The miners voted Kjreat

the snow.

to split their gold-dust with the outlaws.

laws were willing, but English profanely refused to take any, as ^^

would

spoil the fun.

Nor would he allow

— profanely — they were

bunch

his

men

The if

out-

taking

to take any, because

and if they had anything coming, it wasn't gold. In the spring, some Cayuse Indians brought a pair of boots containing bones of human feet into Lewiston. With the boots there was a tattered notebook. Scrawled across two pages were the words: all

a

of hly-livered pilgrims

Lost in the snow December 19. 1862 James A. Keel Macoupin Co., Illinois

—

Wesley Dean of St. Louis Ed Parker of Boston

A

search party of miners followed the Indians back to where the

notebook had been found and scouted around the wolf-scattered bones of three men.

A

until they

came upon

considerable quantity of gold

and nuggets lay where it had rotted from deerskin pokes. That same spring, robberies and killings in the Idaho gold country became so brazenly frequent that the miners organized a Committee of in dust

Vigilantes. In

one foray, the Vigilantes raided a mountain cabin; they tried, convicted and hanged them on the

captured three survivors and spot.

The outlaws were Henry

Peoples, Nelson Scott and

Dave EngUsh.

Afterwards, Vigilantes said that the big one, English, had shown such

courage that there was temptation among them to let him go. But having gone that far with it, they were equally impressed with his ferocity. No one dared let him go. 96

THE REPEATING RIFLE The Smoke Wagon Medicine

The Broken Medicine of Roman Nose The Buffalo Wallow

spencer

Winch

,

//

was big medicine for jighting men on

man

could claim the st?-ength of

y-i

tcn^

the plains

and make

— one

it stick

.

The

Repeating ^ Rifle ^

THERE

has always been something indescribably

warding about making a gadget work. Or

re-

just trying.

A persisting and deep-rooted emotional drive is in

the fiber

comes out crackpot. Gun tinkerers found no idea too ludicrous to try. The less cautious among them were exploding themselves long before the time of Elisha Collier and Sam Colt. And just as the idea for a revolving mechanism had been tried, perhaps agaih and again, so had almost everything else that was to be adopted in firearms design: breech loadof invention, no matter

ing,

if it

metal cartridges, repeating mechanisms. All of these

concepts were actually in use by 1700. These were good ideas, but along with crackpot ideas they died out

time passed them by.

It

was a century and a

and

half before

they would return, at last to stick. 99

(jookson-type

repeating

flint lock

with revolving breech-block

Great

American

Guns

As far back as 1664, there had been an EngHsh patent issued on a primitive kind of lever-operated repeating mechanism. Within a few years, a gunsmith named John Cookson had made his own version of the idea work. Such guns were made here and there about Europe for a century and more, though we still refer to them as being of the Cookson type. In this design there was a cylindrical breech-block operated by a lever. When the breech-block turned, openings in it lined up with tube magazines in the butt containing powder and

amount of thumping and shaking caused

ball.

A

certain

powder and ball to fall into their proper places in the breech-block. Then as the lever was returned, the powder and ball were dumped into the firing chamber in the barrel.

from

Movement

the

of the lever also deposited a priming charge,

dropped the frizzen into place and cocked the hammer. So, one forward and back stroke of the lever loaded, primed and cocked the piece. Remember that it was all done with loose components, not with a self-contained cartridge. That made it

still

a third magazine, into the pan,

doubly ingenious.

The amazing were indeed so British

thing, however,

is

not that such guns existed and

clever, but that so little actually

Major Patrick Ferguson designed

loading flintlock

rifle

— based on an

came

of them.

a very efficient breech-

earlier design,

it

should be noted.

The weapon required no cloth patch for the ball to engage the rifling, as did the Kentucky. The virtue of the breech-loader was that a ball dropped into the chamber simply rolled forward until it came to rest against the lands of the bore, that

grooves.

The

ball

was

cast with the

is

against the ridges between the

same diameter as the bore, measured snugly engaged the rifling on being

from groove to groove. The ball fired and emerged from the barrel without being mangled. The Ferguson could be loaded by a man who was prone in the dust, whereas 100

the

man

into a

charging the muzzle-loader had to get himself and the gun

more or

less vertical position

whether or not there were bullets

through most of the operation,

flying

about

his ears.

Ferguson himself demonstrated that he could get a minute, a devastating rate of

fire

for the time.

off six

aimed shots

He crusaded

tirelessly

on behalf of his rifle and actually saw it adopted by the British army. It was bitter irony, then, that Patrick Ferguson should have been the officer who led the redcoats at the battle of King's Mountain in 1780. It was a disaster for the British, a classic triumph for the Kentucky rifle. Ferguson had been ordered to keep the Carolina farmers

The Americans had no army with Tory connections

—

like

in the area.

Many

in line.

frontier farmers,

some

Daniel Boone, whose wife Rebecca came

—

were willing enough to let the from a family with Tory sympathies Revolution alone. But Ferguson, a snorting, coffeehouse redcoat to

would "lay their country waste with fire and sword." That was his first mistake. It was exactly the kind of arrogant nonsense that would put American hackles up. Plain-thinking folk may have found the revolution a little gauzy in its weave of ideals, but they understood well enough a threat to torch their cabins and trample their corn patches. Having no army, they built one. The word was passed along the trails from clearing to clearing, on into Virginia and what is now Tennessee. Soon a force of 910 mounted men, each with his own rifle and rations, gathered and drove after Ferguson. He must have laughed over his snuff-box, delighted to find the ragged bumpkin peasantry banded together so that he could crush them. He chose his own ground for the conflict and disdained even to have his men build breastworks where they came to a stand atop King's Mountain his second mistake. the teeth, blustered that he

—

The Repeating Rifle

Ferguson had onet charge

—

1

that

103 men.

was

He ordered

a volley

and immediate bay-

to be his tactic for the day. In his experience,

no undisciplined rabble could stand up to cold steel. He was about his third. The Americans half right in that, but it was still a mistake had no intention of meeting the charge, now or later. They were shaping the kind of fight they understood. Dismounted now, they slithered back through tall grass, brush, snaggy woods and stones and let the redcoats

—

run on. Out of position, exposed, winded, the British charge

fizzled

out

for lack of a target.

The Kentucky rifles rattled and cracked in loose volleys of aimed and redcoated bodies thrashed in the thickets. It took an hour. Major Ferguson sank to the red earth, the arrogance running out of him through eight bullet wounds. Dead with him or wounded were 387 of his men. The rest surrendered. fire

Great

American

Guns

And

bitter irony lay, too, in the fact that Ferguson's

King's Mountain was not armed with the Ferguson

rifle,

command a

weapon

— — General Howe had

superior to the Kentucky for military use. Earlier, in 1777

while Ferguson was recuperating from a

caused the Ferguson

rifles to

wound

at

far

in fact,

be stored and the troops carrying them to

be dispersed through other commands. So Ferguson, a hard-nosed professional,

was probably

when he spoke

still

seething with frustration and bitterness

so rashly to the Carolina farmers.

Incredibly, after Ferguson died not a soul put his use.

Had

the design been applied to other

would have had a

far different development.

rifles,

rifle

design to

even the Kentucky

The way would have been

at least a half century earlier.

And

during the next eighty-five years, hundreds, even thousands, of

men

clear for cartridge development

would not have been cut down when they stood to load their guns. Ultimately, any kind of successful repeating rifle was going to have some form of breech-loading and some kind of contained cartridge. That, taken as a fact, is easier to see now in retrospect than it was then. Gunsmiths went ahead with some rare ideas. The multi-loaded barrel was one notion that kept cropping up. It required a series of charges to be loaded at the muzzle and seated one atop the other. The bullet and wadding would separate the powder charges, it was thought. Each charge had its own flash hole. The flintlock mechanism was rigged on a track to slide along the breech and to click into position at each 102

rifle

—

sliding lock has just Jired Jirst shot; it is

ready

to

move back

to

second flash-hole.

was only necessary to reprime the pan and Not a bad idea, as far as it went, but the ball and wadding did not always form a tight enough seal. The explosion of the first charge had a way of setting off the others in train. flash hole. After firing,

move

it

The

the lock to the next position.

When caliber

that happened, the shocked musketeer found himself with a .65

Roman

candle by the

Chainfiring, remember,

tail

was

and no way

to cork

it.

also one of the dangers inherent in

the revolving pistols, like the cap-and-ball Colt. Because pats of grease

served to seal the ends of the cylinders well enough generally to stop chainfire, the revolving cylinder principle seemed applicable to shoulder arms as well as to the pistol. Elisha Collier made revolving long guns before 1812 and Samuel Colt was quick to produce revolving rifles he was still making them in 1855. A few Colt rifles saw service in the

—

Seminole wars in Florida and a number of them reached Texas. In 1840, a Texas newspaper

commented on an accident with

a Colt

rifle

in Austin, saying that "several accidents of this

kind have occurred in

that city since the introduction of these pieces,

owing

chiefly to their

being in unskilled hands, and the inhabitants, in consequence, by of ridicule, call the

weapon

'Colt's patent

way

wheel of misfortune'."

The trouble was that, even if there was no chain fire, the revolving mechanism allowed hot gases to flash out between the cylinder and barrel. The same is true of revolvers today. But a handgun is held out away from the face and body. A man shooting the Colt revolving rifle had his face and eyes only inches from the cylinder. Moreover, his left arm and hand, supporting the weapon, were well in front of the cylinder. They could not escape being scorched or stung by stray grains of powder or flying bits of copper from the bursting caps. And worse, in a 103

Repeating Rifle

Colt revolving

of 1855

rifle

chainfire with all cylinders disgorging themselves at once, that left

might be shot

hand

off.

With Patrick Ferguson's gun forgotten for thirty years, the concept was picked up again by John Hall. In 1811, he patented a flintlock action which allowed a breech-block to lift up clear of the barrel to receive a paper cartridge. These arms, some of them later of breech-loading

with percussion locks, were manufactured for the United States in limited quantities

fact is that these

from 1819

more or

sight for decades without

tional genius of to

less

any

advanced ideas could he there

in plain

real exploitation. It required the

promo-

Samuel Colt, who had a streak of

break through in the repeating arms

For years

Colt's pistols

Army

to 1852. Again, the almost unbelievable

P. T.

Bamum in

him,

field.

were so much better

in design

than any

became a foregone conclusion. It was years late in the coming and the good ones would not resemble the Colt in any way, but having the Colt there set up the demand in a far more urgent way than it had been voiced before. rifles

around that ultimately the repeating

The

necessity for a breech-loader lay in the old

to get a ball all the it

way down

with mallet and ramrod and

104

rifle

problem of how

the barrel from the muzzle without driving still

have

it

large

enough

to be held

by the

rifling.

caused

Wrapping a patch around it

point of

all

was to had shown

the experimentation

to load. Ferguson's rifle

dropped into the breech with to

engage the

rifle

rifling.

its

—

that an unpatched ball, simply

charge of powder, could be of a size

But Ferguson was dead and forgotten and

his

with him.

One

A

worked for the Kentucky, but and the get something both fast and easy

the ball

to be slower loading than even the smoothbores

solution to this problem turned out to be marvelously simple.

French army captain named Minie devised,

more accurate term,

in 1848, a conical (cy-

which slid which was expanded by the explosion of the charge on firing so that it engaged the rifling grooves perfectly. An American named Burton simplified the design and improved it though the bullet would always be called the Minie ball. It worked so well that it set the breech-loader and repeating rifle back another dozen years. lindro-conical easily

down

is

a

technically) bullet

the barrel in loading, but

—

known anyway, and was, with percussion igniNext there had to be a fully contained cartridge

Breech-loading was tion, a giant step. ball,

powder and primer,

—

all in

one

case. Breech-loading without that

had probably gone about as far as it could with a fast, efficient action designed by Christian Sharps in 1848. It consisted of a lever-operated which dropped down to open the breech for insertion hnen cartridge. When the block was raised by the return stroke of the trigger-guard lever, its sharp edge sheared off the end of the soft cartridge and exposed the powder charge to the primer flash. The piece was primed by a tape system at first, later by the Lawrence disc sliding block

of a paper or

method which automatically fed the hammer was cocked.

The

discs of fulminate onto the nipple as

needle guns invented by Dreyse and Chassepot in Europe

demonstrated that the priming

pellet

could be contained with the powder

by a long needle driven clear into and the powder charge itself, where the pellet primer was buried. Now began the development of metal cartridges in which the primer would be an integral, fixed part. The first successful one was charge (to be exploded in

this case

the paper cartridge

was actually a pin set through the wall of the and poised over the pellet of fulminate so that a blow from the hammer onto the head of the pin fired the cap. Many others were develthe pinfire, in which there

case

105

The Repe Repeating Rifle

oped through the

1

840's

—

one way and another,

ate,

Two American

cartridges were shaped to carry the fulmin-

cups and nipple-Hke projections.

in rims, lips,

gunsmiths got together

in the early fifties

with an

They were Horace Smith and Daniel Wesson remember along with Colt and Sharps. They had been

idea for a repeating action.

— names

to

impressed by possibilities inherent those by Walter

in certain earlier designs,

Hunt and Lewis Jennings,

involving lever-operated

repeating action. Starting there, they produced their lever-action repeater.

and

Great

it

They made both

Guns

—

as cartridge case as well as projectile, with

the base. fired

The leaden

and

own

rifles

design for a

on the action

called the Volcanic, but as

turned out, finding the right cartridge for they tried using hollow-based bullets

American

pistols

was a superb design which they

notably

it

was

to take years.

At

it

first,

the bullets themselves to act

powder and primer sealed

A

cartridges were ruinous failures.

into

few rounds

could destroy the gun.

Smith and Wesson had entered into business with a backer named Oliver Winchester.

He

turned out to be a bulldog of a man.

Volcanic failed, he refused to quit. Instead, he formed a

When

the

new company.

His engineer, B. Tyler Henry, designed a rimfire cartridge which, at long

last,

had been

worked with the Volcanic action. Another fateful combination It was the beginning of the repeating rifle as a working,

struck.

useful tool in the frontiersman's continuing struggle for survival.

The Spencer JUST

—

Rifle

and B. Tyler Henry were bringing out on the old Volcanic design of Smith and Wesson

as Oliver Winchester

their latest variation

a design

which they were going to

repeater was patented.

call the

The weapon was

Henry

rifle

— another

the Spencer, after

its

maker

Christopher Spencer, and the date was March, 1860. Physically, the Spencer looked something like the Sharps, with

the

same

big, looping trigger guard.

But mechanically, Spencer had

accomplished the same end as Winchester and Henry. of the lever

106

— down and back — extracted

One movement

the previously fired cartridge

cocked the big hammer and drove the next cartridge into position. rifle by itself might not have overcome the reluctance

case,

The Spencer

Union ordnance men to adopt something so lot. But by an extraordinary stroke of

of conservative

They were

made it Abraham Lincoln fired

the President of the United States

proving

grounds.

flatly that it

bitten

radical.

a hidebound

was the

gun of

best

deep into the tender

intended to turn

it

down

its

fortune,

a point to get out to the

weapon and

the

stated

kind, a judgment that must have

flesh of the

hidebound bunch, who had

as soon as the President's charade

But the judgment stuck and Union soldiers agreed to use the Spencer. It was probably the all-time

was

over.

— those lucky enough

arm was ugly as sin, but no amount of abuse could put it out of action and it was fast as lightning especially if the men alongside were firing their muzzleloading, one-shot Minie rifles. When Spencer shooters were later equipped with Blakeslee Patent cartridge boxes, the effect on speed was magical. This device hung from a man's belt and carried ten metal tubes, each one loaded with a full charge of seven cartridges. The idea was to put the tube to the Hp of the loading trap in the butt plate and in one quick motion insert with Billy Yank. With

its

favorite shoulder

paunchy, slab-sided receiver

—

the seven cartridges.

The Spencer

did not actually shoot too accurately, but

speed and reUability of operation more than

for

its

its

great

modest

A man armed with a Spencer felt nine feet tall. If we we now and fire it yes, fire the whole string of seven be thunderously delivered of any notion we may have had that

ballistics record.

this thing

was a

—

—

pick one up will

made up

toy.

This one

fires

a .52 caliber bullet from a rimfire

enough to hold a bunch of asters. The booming noise and thick pall of smoke are terrifying, the good old rotten-eggs stench of black powder is thick enough to give us a headache. The old Indian tactic in Plains fighting had been to circle and draw cartridge case that looks big

fire

before rushing in to finish off the

his muzzle-loader.

man, a chance

to survive

sharp fight of what, dangling.

To

man

The Spencer and Henry earlier,

the Indians

— gave him,

trying frantically to reload

rifles

gave a man, even a lone

in fact, the

would have been a quick it

means and a

kill

rp, le

it

to

make

a

fresh scalp

was magic, a matter of medicine. The red

man's world would never be the same again.

107

Repeating Rifle

The Smoke ffagon Medicine Good

tnedici?ie

was always hard

charms that had

o?ice

to be losing their

power,

ON

worked

so

to firid .

.

.

and even

the

well seemed

A DAY in late summer, a band of Cheyennes topped a long ridge and looked down to the valley of the Platte. They were dispirited

and poor, a tattered remnant of a tribe scattered in a summer of war. Spotted Wolf pointed to the east with his horsehair whip and grunted. The warriors saw a streamer of white smoke lying low along the

The smoke

ground, rising then in slowly drifting billows farther on.

seemed

to

come from

as they watched, they

the

ground

in short bursts or puffs.

And

then,

wagons moving beneath the smoke, They covered their mouths with their hands

saw a

line of

moving without horses. and watched the wagons pass, marveling. "See how it smokes like a pipe," Porcupine

said, "like a

white man's

pipe, puffing." It

was 1867 and

this

seen. It was, admittedly,

lated at length

was the first train these Cheyennes had ever beyond understanding, although they specu-

on the nature of the rare medicine required to move

wagons. Red Horse, a young

man proud

of a fancied talent for reading

nature and interpreting omens, offered a theory that the white

man

burned horses to make a medicine powerful enough to move the wagons.

"None of us has ever burned a horse," he said; "that is our trouble. Our medicine is too weak. We should burn horses, too." Spotted Wolf looked at him. "Supposing we found ourselves all 108

afoot after burning our horses and then learned that the medicine

came

from burning grasshoppers?"

The

many

others laughed, although

Red

with the quality of after the train

them had been impressed

of

Horse's logic. Spotted Horse looked thoughtfully

and fingered the medicine bag that hung from

his neck.

His breastplate of polished bones, said to be proof against bullets, clicked

moved.

as he

"Red Horse

—

partly right

is

this is a far greater

medicine than

They have Our blankets are full of holes. Our medicine is sick. We must ride down and see where the smoke wagons passed. If we study their trail, maybe we can learn

we

anything

The

have seen before.

beaten us in battle

and we have

whites are powerful.

lost everything.

The

something."

Repeating

The Cheyennes filed down the slope on their worn horses, chattering now with a new excitement. Red Horse galloped on ahead and leaped to the ground where the train had passed. A moment later, he was speed-

Klji^

ing back.

"My brothers!" left

an iron

he shouted. "I speak the truth

—

the

smoke wagons

trail!"

Together then, they hurried on to the railroad tracks, and

mounted

Spotted Wolf spoke, sighing, "Clearly, our

hke a hawk, but not just a

dis-

examine them.

to

trail

this is a

they have

road left

built for the

little

wagons

brother has eyes

to travel

upon and

behind."

Again, the Cheyennes laughed at

Red

Horse. But Spotted Wolf

looked down the tracks, in the direction the train had passed. Then he held his

left

hand

high.

On

the wrist sat a stuffed kingfisher, Spotted

Wolf's medicine bird, the magic figure that guided and protected him.

The

stuffed bird

"Yes,

I

seemed

defeated us in battle

wagons

to tremble. Spotted

that travel the iron road

overthrow one and break

try to

Wolf grunted.

now we ought to do something. The soldiers and took all we had and made us poor. These

think that

The Cheyennes babbled

must carry things of value. it

Now we

will

open!"

excitedly

and one young brave blew a

long broken blast on a brass bugle that had recently belonged to the 11 th

Kansas cavalry. Again Spotted Wolf held up the

stuffed king-

fisher.

109

"Good!" he shouted. "We need the white man's medicine. the white soldiers' horn

we can overthrow

the

—

let

We

have

us ride like the white soldiers, too, until

smoke wagon."

Spotted Wolf mounted and they formed on him by twos, a double file in

the fashion of the white soldiers. During the day, the

patrolled the tracks, riding in columns of twos and fours.

Cheyennes

Now

and then

the brave with the bugle would blow a ragged blast and the Cheyennes

would move into extended order, a line abreast, then back into twos. They saw several parties of whites riding up and down the tracks on light, open wagons, the men moving as if to row the wagons. These were

The white men

handcars.

Great

American Kjuns

did not see them, for at such times the Chey-

ennes would take cover along the

river.

Near dusk. Porcupine and Red Horse dragged a log up from the river with their ropes and tied it to the tracks. Then the Indians built a

^g

^jjjj

vvaited.

his tattered

Porcupine himself

agency blanket drawn

Porcupine cocked the gusty

with

Then he leaned down and listened, smoky hair in a thick cloud. The rails gave

his head.

wind whipping

off a singing sound, a

sitting close to the steel rails

close.

his

hum

that gradually swelled into a rumble.

nudged Red Horse and rapped the rail with "Listen. There are bees in the iron."

Then dimly through

the darkness they

He

his knuckles.

saw one of the

light

wagons

men working it. In that instant, men had seen them. The two men pumped

approaching along the track with two they could

tell

that the white

the handcar handles furiously, trying to race on by, and one cried out as the machine struck the log and overturned.

bodies rolling, and

came up

The white men tumbled,

half-stunned. Together they ran for shelter-

ing darkness. Porcupine hurled himself headlong and

felt his fist

thud

for he had counted the first, Other Cheyennes mounted and followed after the whites. In a minute they were back and Porcupine, picking gravel from his

into a

and

man's back — he whooped happily

best, coup.

chest and legs, saw one scalp waving.

Then Red Horse was

there, disap-

had it and now it's gone. It must have shpped from my belt." He complained bitterly and searched along the ground, but it was too dark to find the scalp. They went back pointed and angry. "I had the other scalp!

I

to the handcar.

Spotted Wolf was examining two

110

rifles

that

had belonged

to the

dead men. He found a lever below the trigger and worked it excitedly, seeing how the big side-hammer came back cocked as he did so. Then he found a hinged butt plate through which the piece was loaded, but he failed to understand

came apart

in the

this.

He

then pulled something and the gun

middle and the barrel

the pieces in disgust.

He

"See," he said, "our medicine

Spotted Wolf threw

fell.

tried the other rifle is still

and

bad.

broken now

it,

too,

Guns

came

fall

down

apart.

apart in our

— we might have had two

What a shame these are good guns to fight the whites." These were Spencer carbines. They were the first repeating rifles these Cheyennes had ever seen, and they were not, of course, broken. Still hopeful of plunder, of improving their medicine, the Cheyennes hands.

went ahead that night and pried up the ends of two rails. They waited again, until far to the east, a small bright light appeared close to the

young son of Spotted Wolf, thought it was the but then it flickered out and there was another in

horizon. Yellow Nose,

morning its

star, rising,

place.

had something to do with no opinion at all. Actually, they learned later, they were seeing the hghts of two trains, one following the other. Red Horse and some of the others rode off Porcupine concluded only that the

the

lights

smoke wagon. Red Horse sulked and

offered

what they meant. smoke wagon, yell and shoot at it," Spotted Wolf called after them. "Maybe you can scare it." When they saw that the light was on smoke wagons, traveling at a tremendous speed, they raced back the way they had come, the monster overtaking them rapidly. Some of the Cheyennes fired at it. It sent up clouds of red sparks and doubled its thunderous noise. Ponies squealed and bucked. Red Horse flogged his pony with his coiled rope and drove it up toward the "If

it

lights to see

is

the

alongside the smoke wagon. He was furious at the loss of the scalp he had taken. He shook out a loop in the rawhide rope. The smoke wagon thundered by and Red Horse swung once and cast his loop. The rawhide drifted across the nose of the monster, then caught and held. It snatched Red Horse through the air, like a fly on a length of spider silk, and

dashed him to the

flinty

ground, stunned and bloody.

But, having escaped these warriors and having eluded being roped

111

-*

^^

Repeating Rifl.e

by Red Horse, the train came at

break in the tracks. It hurtled smoking steel and hissing steam. The dust subsided and the sparks glowed cherry red and died. A man came running along the track carrying a lantern. He was calling out and last to the

into a grinding, shrieking tangle of

swearing,

down.

when

No

a

Cheyenne stepped out of the shadows and struck him

other trainmen had been

The second

train halted

times and the wailing of

A party

its

left alive.

some distance away and signaled many

steam whistle sounded far across the

prairie.

crewmen came hurrying through the darkness along the track until they could see what had happened. They ran back to their train and it sent up a starry shower of sparks and puffed back toward of

its

the east.

In the dawn light, the Cheyennes plundered the train. They found many more of the worthless rifles, but otherwise there were riches beyond belief.

Warriors tied the ends of bolts of calico to their horses'

galloped in circles on the prairie, calico streaming.

game

in

which they

streaming calico.

a

It

tried to cross

was great

one another's

fun. Their medicine

tails

and

They improvised

trails

and

a

pull off the

was good.

The Cheyennes were still playing and carrying away plunder when train came from the west with soldiers and Pawnee scouts. There was a

long running fight then and the prairie was

left littered

with bolts of

and lost buckets, tin cups and blankets, nearly all of the plunder looted from the train. Cheyenne warriors fought back mostly with bows and arrows. Ammunition for their old trade guns was scarce, the guns themselves now far gone in corrosion and rust from never having been cleaned. Their medicine was bad. They were blasted, routed, by the soldiers, calico

confused by guns that shot

many

times.

rifles left by Spotted Wolf. They Cheyennes had left behind so many perfectly good Spencer repeating rifles, for at that time there was no more advanced weapon on the plains. For Red Horse, battered and bruised, humiliated, the disappointment was almost unbearable; though he would be able to sing of the coup, the edge of his honor was dulled without the scalp. However, another man derived a desperate hope from the scalp so coveted by

Afterwards, the soldiers found the

could never understand

Red

why

Horse, the Cheyenne.

the

The Repeating l?iflp

When was

the handcar had overturned the night before,

Red Horse

Cheyenne to reach and touch one of the two white men, thus first to strike and count coup, and the scalp was his. The railroader, William Thompson, shot through the upper arm with a .58 caliber ball, had fallen, to be stunned an instant later by a blow from Red Horse's the

first

He

club.

could have been unconscious for only seconds.

He awoke

in a

haze of searing pain and dimly saw a Cheyenne spring onto a pony and ride away. He also saw something slip from the warrior's belt. After the Indians had disappeared back toward the train, Thompson crawled over to see

what the Indian had dropped. He found

his

own

scalp there

on the

ground.

Great

American

He

then feigned death through the night, stretched out near the

^'^^^ of his partner while the

Cheyennes prowled the wreckage. In the off, he staggered up and

morning, after the Cheyennes were driven

Kjuns

found a bucket on the into

prairie.

He

filled it

with water and put the scalp

Despite the queasy protests of soldiers and trainmen, he carried

it.

Omaha, where he consulted a doctor The doctor attempted to do so, but the operation failed. After what he had been through, Thompson could not bear to throw away the scalp. He had it tanned and it eventually came to rest in a museum. the bucket to see

if

250 miles on the

train to

the scalp could not be replaced.

Some

medici?ie

was

better than others^

but the best kind of all was bullet-proof medicine.

AMONG .

the Plains Indians, there were charms, or medicines, for

every conceivable situation or purpose.

man's

life

were subject

to magic,

The

simplest acts of a

omens, potions or mystic interpreta-

an incredibly complex nature. War was the principal occupation young men, apart from hunting. No wonder then that the medicines

tions of

for

proved

effective in battle were so sought after. Every man wore a medicine bag and carried his own blend of magic charms. These were expected to work by their own power, but they were

known

to

work

better in various combinations with the sun,

moon, winds

or weather, with animal figures, alive or dead, or with omens and 114

indications

derived from any of these.

medicines was elusive, as

it is

for us

The

combination of

right

all.

War, as the Plains Indians knew

it,

was highly formalized, a

kind of deadly serious game, with death as the stakes.

wanted or expected

to die of old age.

ously in the midst of the enemy.

event as long as possible. his

It

Still

His code directed him

No

warrior

to fall glori-

he wanted, of course, to delay the

seemed reasonable

to

want

going counted for something, that the glory was

to

make

real, the

sure that

honor

true.

The elaborate systems of counting coup were a part of the war ritual, a way of keeping score. They enabled a warrior to fight and win glory; in fact, to win particular degrees of glory, much as we measure a Bronze Star medal against a Silver Star. The warrior could do this, often, without killing or being killed.

Repeating

Of course, the white man had his own rules and counting coup was not among them, although scalping sometimes was. When the white man pulled the trigger, he expected results. War was war. Or, as Sherman was saying, it was hell. So, the Indian motivation in war was generally lost

on the whites, most of

To

whom

could not have cared

less.

war with the whites was a serious enough matter. But the Indian warrior was a Stone- Age man; for him it was not enough to train his sights on an enemy and pull the trigger. His medicine had to be right or it was useless to shoot. This worked both ways; the warrior's best and most powerful medicines were given to protecting him from the white man's bullets. With such strong medicine to protect him, a warrior could afford bravery of the highest order. In fact, it was expected of him, for, after all, what harm could befall a man who was bullet-proof? White Bull, an old-time medicine-man of the Cheyennes, was conthe Indian,

vinced that he had such a medicine.

been at peace with the white

man

It

was 1857, and the Cheyennes had

for thirty years. Nevertheless, Colonel

Sumner, commanding a column of infantry and cavalry from Fort Leavenworth, heard somehow that the Cheyennes were banding up to

was prophetic of the army's future them and fight them. When the Cheyennes realized that battle was imminent, they sought to improve their medicine. White Bull led them to a little lake near the Smoky Hill River in Kansas. He cast certain spells on the water and told fight,

and

in a piece of idiocy that

dealings with the Cheyennes, he set out to find

the

men

to dip their hands into

The

it.

115

.

i^tpe

"We

he

will face the soldiers squarely,"

lightning in our eyes.

hands

—

fall at

your

the

musket

When

the soldiers go to

balls will roll

"and there

said,

fire,

be

will

you must hold up your

from the muzzles of

their

guns and

feet."

Armed with this medicine and confident of victory, the Cheyennes, numbering around 300 warriors, drew up to await the soldiers. Sumner, seeing them, determined to charge and did so. Six companies of the First

— many times more than any Cheyenne had ever seen together before — responded

Cavalry, backed by three companies of infantry soldiers

to the bugle.

Great

American

The Cheyennes held their ground in perfect, disciplined order, and the whites heard the eerie sound of their war song drift across the prairie. The Cheyennes stood until the last possible instant, then, with a

broken volley of arrows, they

Guns

fled in utter confusion.

Sumner had done an extraordinary

thing,

unwittingly destroyed White Bull's medicine. sling their muzzle-loading carbines

and

and

He had

in

doing

so,

ordered his

had

men

to charge with the saber.

to

So the

Cheyennes waited out the long seconds of the charge, waited for the harmless bullets to fall at their feet. And when the soldiers fell upon them with flashing sabers, they ran helplessly, demoralized, knowing that White

Bull's medicine

WHEN

the

had only been made

repeating

rifles,

like

to

new

against guns.

the Spencer and

appeared, they caused consternation they opened up whole

work

among

Henry,

first

the Indians.

And

areas of speculation on the nature of the

medicines and charms required to

make

a

man

bullet-proof. Warriors

might spend hours before a battle dressing themselves, painting, praying,

making medicine offerings, chanting, dancing. If the medicine failed them, it was sometimes possible to look back and see where they had gone astray on some obscure but vital charm. It was that way with HighBacked Wolf and Roman Nose. Old White Bull had warned the Cheyennes that they must not hold any metal in their mouths, particularly a bullet. The implication was clear if a piece of metal could enter the body readily that way, it would be easy for a bullet to enter it also. In a fight at the old Platte bridge in Nebraska, High-Backed Wolf, his brother Horse Black and

—

116

a young warrior

named

Iron, all confident of their medicine, charged

into and through a small party of

soldiers

and chased them almost

to

the stockaded fort at the bridge.

— such — then turned and rode back. High-Backed

Iron counted coup with his hand on one of the troopers

coup ranked highest of all Wolf had emptied his pistol

When

in the chase.

to the gate, he turned to follow Iron.

Some

a

the soldiers galloped

up

distance away, he paused to

reload his cap-and-ball Colt. In his hurry, he popped the pistol balls into his

mouth

for a

moment. That broke him and he died.

his medicine, for in the next

instant a bullet struck

Roman

Nose, a great fighting brave, though not a

wore a war bonnet made for him by old White

chief,

always

Bull. This bonnet.

worn with the proper ceremonies and offerings, rendered Roman Nose bullet-proof. Being bullet-proof was a distinct advantage in 1865 for Roman Nose or any other warrior, since General P. E. Connor had if

just issued orders to kill all

Up

male Indians over twelve years

along the Powder River that year, some of

old.

Roman

Nose's

brother warriors encountered an enormous force of white soldiers, eighteen hundred

men

Powder River Expedition,

of the

sent out by

General Connor. Heedless of such numbers, the Indians determined to fight.

They, sent back to

camp

Roman Nose

for all the warriors.

asked

only that they hold up the charge until he had time to perform the complicated ritual of his

The

war bonnet.

Indians drew up and waited in plain view of the column of

soldiers until

Roman Nose

galloped up.

to hold as they were, then he rode

down

He

signaled to his warriors

the whole length of the line,

within easy carbine range, his feathers whipping, rustling in the breeze of his motion.

A considerable number of shots were fired at him, but

medicine was good; they

all

missed.

To

prove that

it

his

was no accident,

he galloped back and forth several times, savagely, superbly, arrogant.

He

was, indeed, on this day, bullet-proof.

Then

at last

he led out and the warriors charged down the grassy

slopes toward the blue line of troopers.

Spencer repeating carbines

.

.

.

and horses down wallowing drew away, Roman Nose proud under

strings,

Bows and

arrows, then, against

white-smoking thunder, thrum of bowin spattered grass.

his feathers,

still

The Indians

bullet-proof

undefeated, but he could not break through the repeating

and

rifles.

117

The Rpijeatmcr

A:{A^

The Henry FAILURE

had galled Oliver Winchester. It had had not made him quit. And as soon as B Tyler Henry had produced that first good cartridge without which the gun itself was a piece of junk it was clear that the fight had been worth it. They dropped the Volcanic pistol from their plans. Its lever action of the Volcanic design

put his dander up, but

Great

American

Guns

Rifle

it

—

—

required two hands to operate so that

it

would never match the Colt

with that speed of action that a handgun had to have. But the Henry's closed breech and lever action overcame the big objection to the Colt

revolving

rifle.

The

Chainfire and caps spitting onto the

left

hand were

had been imperfectly sealed breech mechanisms leaking a spray of hot gases back into the shooter's face. Henry's cartridge expanded when it was fired and eliminated.

old ghost of

all

early breech-loaders

chamber against this blowback. The primer chamber too, safely tucked away in the rim of man could fire the Henry rifle without flinching.

effected a tight seal in the

was down

in there in the

the cartridge.

it

A

The new gun appeared in we sense a kind of

over,

integrity of design

and

art

1860. If

palpable

reflected

saw

its

dead

was

and also

set

was one

down

as fact.

look

in steel of

of the great ones

For

us, there is

— no

one of the beautiful ones. The Henry

Where

the

Kentucky had been a showpiece of the hand-

shaped wood and delicate inlay and inventiveness come to a

stop, the

Henry was

all

sculptured metal with only a severely

functional buttstock of walnut to set

The

It

an impression

origins in the technological revolution of the century that

its birth.

crafts, of

it

now and

take one in hand

vitality,

and purpose.

that has already been judged hesitation in saying that

we

old Smith and

it

off.

Wesson Volcanic design was

still

implicit in

the lines of the bronze receiver and the steel tube magazine under the

octagon barrel. That magazine was there to hold 118

fifteen .44 caliber rim-

fire

cartridges, loaded into the tube

from the muzzle end. Compared with and Henry

a potent, long-range piece like the Sharps, both the Spencer

were shy

in

pump

range and power. But the Henry would

man

shots as fast as a

hand

— on

there

was no argument

the plains, in the saddle, anywhere along the frontier

An advertisement armed with one captured." If

out fifteen

could work lever and trigger. For the business at

—

would hold up against those fifteen shots. Henry stated confidently that "a resolute man,

that

for the

of these

rifles,

we examine

particularly

if

on horseback, cannot be

we will many an adver-

that claim in the light of plain fact,

probably say that truth has been stretched farther in tising claim since.

Cartridges of copper and the bronze and bright steel Henry were familiar sights for long years in saddle scabbards, or in fringed buck-

The Repeating

skin covers across the blanketed backs of Sioux or Blackfoot ponies.

Colonel Richard Irving Dodge, writing breech-loading

rifle

in

about 1876, said that the

and metallic cartridge would transform the Plains

Indian into "as magnificent a soldier as the world can show." Of course, the trouble was, from the Indian point of view, that

it

was going

to take

many years to acquire enough repeating guns to make any difference. By then it would be too late, if it had not already been too late when the

first

matchlock was carried ashore back there

at

Jamestown.

The Volcanic pistol

forerunner of the Henry

rifle

I oltanic bullet-cartridge

Henry rim jire cartridge

Rifle

The Broken Medicine of Roman Nose

HERE,

Ree fork

the

of the Republican River

white sand and very

On

the channel.

this bar,

A

water.

little

among

a broad channel of

is

low island bar of sand

willows and

tall

grass

splits

and carcasses of

fallen horses, are fifty-one civilian scouts, two officers commanding them and a medical officer. They have dug trenches in the sand with hatchets, knives and hands. Since shortly after dawn, they have been fighting off a

force of

more than 300 Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors

Great

haps twice that

many

American

these, the scouts

have killed

more. Of their

thirty-five or

Guns first

five

or

six,

It is

a

now midaftemoon.

Henry

rifle

and a

Earlier, after the

hopeless.

He

although they

own number,

will

per-

Of

soon be saying

ten were struck

down

in the

charge, several fatally.

Forsyth, the colonel, twice wounded, his

shattered leg propped before him, is

—

take part in the engagement.

will eventually

is

directing the action.

first

Stilwell for one, is

him

he considers that they have a chance.

this long,

has determined to send a couple of

Forsyth

to

charge, he had privately thought their position

Having survived

young Jack

Next

belt of copper-cased, rimfire cartridges, caliber .44.

maybe

men

out for help after nightfall,

the old-timer. Pet Trudeau, with him.

having a hard time making up his mind about

this or

some degree of shock; the incessant gunfire and the agony of his wounds beat in upon his consciousness and blunt his thinking. Then, inexplicably, the gunfire tapers off and stops. There across the anything

else;

he

is

in

channel a group of warriors are gathered on a low

Roman Nose to see

what he

hill.

has come late to the fight and the others have stopped

will do.

Whatever

it is,

they will follow him to a man,

because the quality of his courage and of his medicine are legendary.

He and Tangle Nose

is

Hair

sit

in the grass

not wearing his war bonnet.

and look out over the

He is

troubled.

An

plain.

Roman

old warrior with

wrinkled cheeks rides up.

"Out there your men are falling!" he says sharply. "These men are you they follow you as the clouds follow the wind. There is nothing you could ask that they would not do. I see that you are content to sit in the grass and watch them fall."

loyal to

120

—

"My heart is heavy," Roman Nose says. "Today is the day You know my medicine at the feast in the Sioux unknown to me I was given bread that had been taken from the

—

death.

The

with an iron fork. medicine."

He

taint of the iron

me

.

.

.

there

is

"And

no time for anything

Roman Nose

Silently,

my

you

as

say, they are waiting

else."

and shakes out

paints his face

so that the feathers whisper in the breeze.

He

is

his

war bonnet

thinking of the long

ceremony, the too long ceremony, which might have

purification

renewed

skillet

looks out over the island in the channel and the waiting

warriors, then back to the old one. for

my

camp,

me. That breaks

in

is

of

his medicine.

Then he walks

to his horse,

mounts and

rides

toward the enemy without looking back. Behind him, a great many Indians form up and charge with him. The low island fortress of directly

the white scouts erupts white

—

smoke

the

smoke

against the ground, so that the island itself seems to

move through

the

Off one end of the island, across the channel and under the sandy itself,

three of the scouts have entrenched themselves in a

Jack Stilwell

is

one.

Roman Nose as he passes, he

They

are very hard to see in the

tall,

is hit

in the

back

just

above the

hip.

He

gasps with the

Roman Nose

blue sky spins and the wet-brown sand rushes up, pounding.

He

^ I

^HE

is

grass.

passes close by, riding hard, his eyes fixed ahead, and

impact, but holds his seat for a long moment, then for

tering prairie

rifle pit;

waving

wind

stirs

bullet-proof

broken feathers

in the

nodding

The

the

skit-

grass.

no more.

siege continued into the

third

day, although the Indians,

undisciplined as always, were no longer capable of organizing a

concerted attack. After that, the scouts stayed where they were

were without horses and could not, otherwise, move

their

Repeating

low

drifts rapidly,

mirrored pools in the stream channel.

bank

^ ^^

— they

wounded.

and Trudeau had long since slipped away. The scouts sank a and so had water, which probably saved the wounded. They ate spoiling horse meat at first, but were starving when Stilwell rode up with the rehef column on the ninth day. Six men were killed and seventeen wounded. Those who survived considered that they were rolling in luck to have made it. Stilwell

well

121

Rifle

The Winchester

THE HENRY

rifle

Rifle

gavc way to the Winchester in 1866. The two

were really almost the same, but there were certain improve-

ments. Shooters

who

fired a

whole magazine or more from the Henry

found the naked barrel hot enough to

broil their hands, so the

Winchester 66 had a wooden forearm put on through, a gate in the receiver back at front of the tube magazine as before.

brass

—

new

Loading was done the breech rather than from the

The

it.

receiver

came now made

of

the brass gleaming bright in place of the soft reddish glint of

—

and on the plains men took to calling the new gun "Yellow Boy." Meanwhile, Oliver Winchester saw that his only real competition came from the Spencer. He judiciously put an end to that by buying Spencer out and retiring the gun. the Henry's bronze

Hunters and plainsmen who knew the Sharps and other heavyweights, liked the

Henry and Winchester 66

they could do, but wanted more power.

The

enough for what

well

rimfire .44 load carried

only 25 grains of black powder. Sharps .50 cahber

over 150 grains of black powder by buffalo loads.

The answer was

buffalo gun.

was

It

this

that the Winchester

66 was

just not a

basically a horseman's carbine, to be slung

saddle horn or carried in a boot under a rider's leg, and to

were using

rifles

time for their long-range

it

from the

was meant

be as quick to the hand as a six-shooter. Winchester was not going

to sacrifice this virtue for

power or anything

else.

The Winchester Model 1873 retained the best features of the Henry and the 66. Beyond that it drew on more than a decade of the roughest field-testing in the world. The whole design was sharpened still up. The new piece was still a saddle gun, still a quick-shot gun

—

a survival gun. But the old Henry .44 rimfire with

was replaced with a new and huskier 122

its

cartridge,

fragile

a

copper case

center-fire.

This

Witichestcr '7J

and

cartridge

centerjire cartridge

had a separate primer mounted

in the

base of the shell case,

so that the shell case itself did not have to be of soft metal to receive the blow of the hammer. It was an improvement made by Colonel Hiram Berdan, great soldier and small arms expert of the Civil War. The new cartridge was loaded with a .44 caliber bullet that weighed

200 grains and

it

now

carried

40 grains of black powder. It was still it meant to be, but it

not in a class with the big buffalo loads, nor was

had the range and power for almost anything happening to a man. From the bare a

name

— "Forty-four

Forty." There

promise of high adventure

same way,

it

is

in the

that

statistics of its size is

was going to be and power came

a kind of singing magic, a

sound of the words alone.

And

in the

not possible to utter the words "Winchester Seventy-

three" without stirring old ghosts, without hearing the low hoofs, without seeing yellow prairie grass

drumming

bend before a breeze.

of

M allow

The Buffalo Great Amej'ican

Guns

LIEUTENANT BALDWIN limped toward the campfires of his scout J detachment. He stepped into a flickering circle of light and stopped there. Men looked up to see who he was, but that was all. They were scouts and did not salute at any time; after three months in the field Baldwin neither received nor expected so much as a nod from them. What he did expect from them was scouting and, as the need arose, fighting. The need had been constant for two weeks now; they were all tired bone-deep,

and Lieutenant Baldwin

been a poisonous sight to them. "All right.

Supply and

I

I

He

reflected that he

must have

grinned wryly.

have dispatches going from General Miles to

need two men."

He

Camp

looked around and went on quickly,

"You, Chapman, and you, Dixon.

You

look like volunteers.

Come

with me, then. The rest of you, carry on."

He

turned and walked away.

shrugged at one another their moccasins.

Each

in the

carried a

part of his natural arm, flesh

The wind,

dim

scouts he had named and followed him silently in

The two light

new Winchester,

carried

it

as

if it

were

and bone.

wind of the Staked Plains, had died for a time to blow again and puffs of sand whipped away under foot and mingled with the blown dust and the dark. Lieutenant Baird, who was adjutant to General Miles, stood talking to Captain Chaffee. He carried a thin, oilcloth packet in his hand. Next to them, all with collars up and backs to the wind, were three enlisted men. They were partly sheltered by a parked row of four Gatling guns, muzzled and shapeless under their brown canvas dustafter

sundown.

the wild

Now

covers. Lieutenant

it

commenced

Baldwin smelled the clean,

"Thanks, Frank," Lieutenant Baird 124

oiled-steel, artillery smell.

said, "for getting the

men."

Baldwin nodded. He

Company

"One from each company. Sergeant

said,

Company A, Private Harrington, Company H." Each stood to attention briefly as his name was spoken, and Baldwin said, "Chapman and Dixon, scouts." Woodhall,

Private Rath,

I,

"One more man?" Baird

said.

"He's coming," Captain Chaffee said. trotted

up out of the dark and

"Private Smith,

At

moment, a man

that

saluted.

sir."

Chaffee grinned. "Smith,

thought you knew enough by

I

now

not

to volunteer for anything."

Captain please, promotion the Captain promised."

"Sir," said Private Smith, "if the

Great

to git that

I'm workin'

tired

and wanted

Chaffee laughed explosively.

American

Guns

sir,

"What does he mean?" Baldwin to get

on with the business

"It

under I

was

fire

at

we had on

that fight

there under the bluffs.

said to the

men

if

any

asked.

He was

hand. Chaffee laughed again.

man was

when your scouts came company up and would make him a corporal."

the 30th,

moved

I

killed, I

to bring

M

spirit, Smith," Baldwin said. "All right, listen carewant you out of here in ten minutes. You will need all the darkness and dirty weather you can get to get away without being observed. Sergeant, draw field rations for five days from the packmaster. We've had rain and the grass is good, so you won't need to carry

"That's the

fully,

now.

I

either extra water or forage for the horses."

A own

week

desperate with

earlier, soldiers,

veins to moisten their blistered

and found

that

it

did not help.

lips.

He was

thirst,

had opened

their

Private Smith had tried

it

thankful for the rain.

"I don't want you getting into a fight if you can help it," Baldwin went on, "but you had better draw extra ammunition. Just deliver these

dispatches to Colonel Lewis. all

Any

questions? All right. Sergeant,

it's

yours, then."

Dismissed, the

men

turned to go. Captain Chaffee said, "I won't

forget the promotion, Smith."

"Yes,

sir."

The words

drifted

nineteen, of

M

slender thread.

126

back on the wind.

of Private George W. Smith, age company, 6th Cavalry, would be hanging by a very

Within a few hours, the

life

IN

the year

by

east

1873 alone, there were 754,329 buffalo hides shipped

rail.

These represented probably half of the

total

number

of

animals slaughtered that year on the plains from Mexico up into Canada.

The southern enne, were

They met

filled

plains tribes, Kiowa, Comanche,

Arapaho and Chey-

with awe and loathing at the immensity of the slaughter.

in great council at

Medicine Lodge, Indian Territory,

in the

spring of 1874. Desperate, with a vast tribal fear, a sense of onrushing

doom, they burst

into war.

Early in June, they struck a camp of the despised buffalo hunters at a trading post called Adobe Walls on the Canadian River in the Texas Panhandle. The Indians had no way of knowing that they were the Sabbath, the one day when all attacking on a Sunday morning

—

the hunters were in from the plains.

A

Repeating

hide hunter, firing his heavy-barreled Sharps, could trigger

killing shots all

day

at distances of

300

to

600 yards. The Indians

attacked and fought with suicidal courage, carried in their ferocity to the riddled doors of the stockade.

The hunters

sat

behind three-foot-

and picked their shots. The fight was made to order for them. In a few hours, half of the two hundred warriors were dead or wounded, according to General Miles' report, though Indian claims differed. After the battle, the hardened hide hunters decorated corral posts thick walls

with heads of slain Indians.

But other attacks carried all across the breadth of the southern plains. Columns of smoke coiled darkly into the sky; sod-roofed settlers' huts crackled in flames and sank in upon themselves. On the plains of Kansas that spring, astronomical billions upon billions of locusts stirred from their pellicular skins and came forth in clouds to darken the sun. The grass and the spring crop planting, blistered and shriveled by

now were chewed to the last fiber. Four separate columns of soldiers, like probing tentacles, snaked out from the four quarters of the compass, straining to come together in the Staked Plains and crush the Indians. General Miles' Indian Territory Expedition, the northern arm of this movement, left Fort Leavenworth, picked up strength at Fort Dodge, turned and crept south. drought,

Settlers, stupefied

by

could not do anything to locusts,

^ he

maybe they could

disaster, tried to take courage. If the soldiers

make

it

at least

rain, it was thought, or to stop the do something about the Indians.

127

Rifle

Throughout July and August,

and fought.

the soldiers stalked

Lieutenant Baldwin and the scouts turned away a second attack on

Adobe

Walls.

Creek.

The

A

few days

expedition

later,

moved

Kiowa force on Chicken Wolf Creek, Commission

they routed a south, past

Hills. On August 30th, they at last encountered main force of Kiowas and Comanches and drove them for twenty

Creek, the Antelope the

miles, a raging fight through

canyons and torn

alkaline bed of the

Red River and

where normally the

river ran a half mile wide,

cliffs,

down

to the dry,

out again on the other side. Here,

was only white

drifted

sand. Thirsting troopers opened their veins and sucked salty blood.

The

Great

into the

badlands.

The

America?!

p

away

hard-pressed Indians broke off the fight and slipped

excruciating heat broke suddenly.

Men

turned in awe to watch

towering thunderheads mount white against the sky, cloud upon cloud.

Thunder rolled and the bullets. Then the deluge. near to drowning the

Red River

A tory,

in the

first

drops

Icy rain,

open

air

fell,

splattering dust like striking

men and animals gasping from the very fury of

it.

for breath,

Once again

ran red with flood, a half mile wide.

supply train moving

down from Camp Supply

narrowly escaped annihilation

in

Indian Terri-

in a siege that lasted for days.

scout, Billy Schmalsle, dashed out to

make

a run in the dark.

The

With

Indians screeching after him, he rode his horse into a herd of buffalo.

There was a

brief

stampede and great tumult. The scout's horse

with him; they scrambled up together

But the

in

panic

among

fell

the shaggy bodies.

was gone and the horse was injured beyond saving, in a clump of willows. Two nights of walking, paced now and then with some strategic crawling, brought Billy Schmalsle to Camp Supply and to help for the beleaguered train. So, on September 10, 1874, when the six-man detachment rode out toward Camp Supply, the Staked Plains and all that Panhandle country was crawling with Indians. scout's rifle

soon to be abandoned

Kiowa

A

..

was

sundown on the Uth. The sun him and he watched them for a quarter of an The dispatch bearers prudently made a fireless

scout saw the six riders at

directly behind

hour without being

camp and were

seen.

not troubled during the night.

Miles away, campfires burned long in the night and dancing mocca-

128

sins shuffled

and thumped

sandy loam. Firehght shone on ver-

in the

milion-streaked faces; warriors recited their coups; feathers rustled,

bone charms clicked. A warrior grunted and pointed; there the dark sky opened and briefly the moon fled until it was snuffed out by scudding clouds. It was good medicine, strong medicine.

At daybreak,

the detachment saddled

gray and cold, the norther half a

still

blowing.

up and moved on. It was scouts rode ahead for

The

dozen miles, then drifted back. Billy Dixon, twenty-two years

old and a veteran scout, saw just a fresh tint of green along the earthen creases in the prairie face, where a late growth of grass struggled to take

hold in the seared stubble.

Amos Chapman, who was father,

nearly old enough to be Dixon's grand-

thought afterwards that he should have

Indians intuitively had allowed the scouts ample their characteristic

motions of caution. But, a

known better. The room to go through

little

further on where

up along the banks of the Washita, 125 Kiowa and Comanche warriors lay in wait. The four soldiers felt secure enough to relax and chatter. But old the prairie began to break

Amos Chapman

plucked with nervous fingers

at his

gray beard, instinc-

if he had somewhere gone wrong. He thumped his moccasined heels into his horse's ribs and cantered forward. Indian-like, he signed to Dixon to

emptiness of the horizon, wondering

tively distrusting the

stay with the soldiers.

Seeing him out there, a hundred yards ahead and moving on against the gray sky, Sergeant

"Hush Private guiltily.

Woodhall

felt

the

same twinge of unease.

that skylarkin'!" he snarled suddenly.

Smith,

caught

There was sudden

clowning,

silence

now

forgetfully

— only

loud,

choked

the split-note

trill

off

of a

meadowlark, the dull clop of hoofs, the whisper of the cold wind across stunted grass. Private Smith saw old Amos Chapman yank his horse back in a sudden rearing turn, saw the open mouth before the warning shout ears. And the first instant's sound was the smack of a bulhome, a man's startled grunt, and only then the distant crack of a rifle and the whole tearing volley thereafter, mingled with the turkeygobble warwhoops. Horses were down, kicking. Private Smith found himself on hands

reached their let striking

129

-*

^^

Repeating Rifle

and knees, wrestling shuddering horse.

his Springfield carbine

free and couldn't. Woodhall with a hand clasped

The

to his side

above

downed

horse,

Sergeant, kneeling behind his

"Fight on foot!

The

from

its

boot under his

He started to run, then tried to get his saddlebags He looked to see who was hit and saw Sergeant

Form

his ammunition waved his rifie.

belt.

here on me!"

were too scattered for the men to fort up well behind them. Private Smith saw Dixon trying to lead his wounded fallen horses

horse to Sergeant Woodhall's position, but the animal collapsed and

Kjreat

American

^

Dixon ran then and dived behind the Sergeant's

horse. Private Smith,

close behind, slid hard against the horse's neck.

He saw more

fgU g^j Private Rath

still

in the saddle

horses

with a surprised look on his

Then they were all together with Woodhall behind the one horse. Not until then did Private Smith see the Indians, or really look for them, as if he had hoped to hold them back by not seeing them. He was surprised to see how close they were, Amos Chapman still out ahead, his horse running with an agonized slowness. The horse went down. The scout rolled and came up running, a swinging, stiff, highi^^^-

kneed, old man's lope, his gray hair and long buckskin fringes drifting

out behind him until he

slid

down

next to Private Smith.

Together behind Woodhall's dead mount, the detachment huddled in the last seconds before the

charge swept over them. Over the sights

saw the writhing line of mounted warsaw them grow to immense size then, and

of his Springfield, Private Smith riors, the splashes of color,

loom over him. "Fire!" Woodhall snapped. The volley shattered Private Smith's ears and he felt the numbing kick of his weapon. Then the Indian horses were on them, and over them, riders firing and whooping, the scouts, Amos Chapman and Billy Dixon, both pumping fire from their Winchesters.

The

soldiers,

at their Colts,

having fired their single-shot carbines, snatched

snapped shots once, or at most twice,

at the

massed

Indians before Sergeant Woodhall's calm voice stopped their hands.

"Cease

fire.

Reload."

Troopers flipped up the loading leaves, drove single brass into the receivers.

The

scouts

thumbed

.44 caliber cartridges into the hot

Winchesters. Scattered brass cartridge cases beside each firepower story

130

— one

rifle shell

shells

man

told the

for each trooper, seven for Dixon, five

Amos Chapman. The old scout had cut his teeth on a flintlock and now he still picked his shots as if each one were his last on earth. As if on a tether, the overrunning Indians came to the end of their for

charge. Screaming horses wheeled and bucked and straightened out

again in a dead run to charge again, goaded by rawhide quirts and pound-

The range closed and the Indians fired as they could, own ranked masses and the violent motion. "Fire!" barked Sergeant Woodhall. The center of the Indian line disintegrated into a churning mass of downed horses and frantic riders. The charge swept by on both sides so that warriors could scarcely avoid shooting into their own men. ing

rifle butts.

hindered by their

Driven, herded, battered by the scouts' Winchester

fire

and the

^ he

booming carbines of the troopers, the Indians could not regroup again as before. They rode on and straggled to a halt out of range, still firing

Repeating

raggedly.

Rifle

"Cease fire and reload," Woodhall's flat voice said. Old Amos Chapman put his hand on the Sergeant's arm. "One more run like that and they'll have our hair," he said. "I seen a buffalo waller over yonder, mebbe fifty yards from here. It ain't much, but we could dig

it

out some."

Woodhall turned to the men. "Who's hurt?" One look was enough. They were all hit, one place or another. Woodhall, hugging

his elbow tight against the burning hole in his side, saw Private Smith's white, strained face and clouded eyes, saw the hole in the front of the boy's blouse, the hands twitching at the fallen Sprmgfield.

"One of you boys has got to tote Smith," he said. "Let's go." Dixon handed his rifle to Private Rath and picked up Smith's painstiff body. Crouched low, the men filed away from the dead horse and the litter of cartridge cases. Dust spurted here and there around them, but the Indians did not, as before, charge headlong. They had been hit too hard. Single riders dashed out then, but broke off skittishly and the soldiers heard voices barking, haranguing. ing, galloped out.

Then

a clot of riders, screech-

Behind them, others whooped and danced

up to another charge. Billy Dixon carefully let Private Smith slump

their ponies,

building

and Chapman

fired deliberate,

to the ground.

paced shots at extreme range.

He

The braves 131

galloped on into five

it

as far as they could stand

men, Private Smith limply

carried,

it,

The

then swung away.

dropped into the buffalo wallow.

Saucer-shaped and shallow, the buffalo wallow was

feet

fifteen

worn there by the joyous wriggling of countless animals taking dust baths. With knives and hands, the men began to dig along the lip of the saucer. For the time being, the Indians would not, could not, across,

charge; instead, they galloped into their classic maneuver, a broad circle loosely ringing the troopers.

Here they held

until

Amos Chapman,

look-

ing up from his dipping, saw a warrior galloping back and forth, waving

a feathered lance and urging them out of

line.

A

few

at a time, they

gathered together, and again the soldiers heard the sound of chanting.

Lrreat

American

^

Amos Chapman

"gjg medicine,"

He

fired.

prairie.

Then he and Dixon

clusters of Indians

seemed

grunted.

He

steadied his

and

rifle

heard taunts screamed in return, the sound quavering over the

—

if

together began firing again, breaking up

their shots did little

to stir confusion.

At

damage

length, the Indians all

at that range, they

drew

off,

some

lob-

bing parting shots as they cantered away.

"Look slapped his

there! Smitty, look there!" Private Harrington gasped. rifle

butt with a big-boned hand. "We've drove

Amos Chapman

sat looking after

them.

A

He

them

off!"

gobbet of red

mud

and Woodhall realized that rain had been falling, gust-blown and icy. He looked down and saw that he, too, was spattered from head to foot with bullet-thrown mud. He saw rain puddle the dust of the buffalo wallow and run together in little pools. "Not yet they ain't goin' yet, I'm thinkin'," Amos was sluiced into his white beard in a spreading stain

.

.

.

They know they got to run us right into the mud. There ain't any other way. They ain't going to ride off now after the way we done saying.

them."

The Indians gathered now

far out of range.

A mile away, they were

a long slash of color against the blue-dark sky, color that melted and

flowed along the horizon as they moved. There they harangued one

men and war chiefs crying out, the sound waves to the stricken men in the buffalo wallow.

another; medicine in

"I

had a

reckon

lip of the

the trench.

132

that's

fair little

deep enough for now," Woodhall

said.

drifting

The

back

soldiers

trench scraped out, with the loose dirt piled along the

wallow. Dixon and Woodhall put Private Smith gently into

"Leave

me

sittin'

up," he whispered. "It won't hurt."

Amos Chapman said. "Let him hold his want to look as sassy as we can." What bothered Private Smith most, apart from the heavy agony of his chest wound, was knowing that he had only fired two shots. He hoped that by sitting up in the trench with his carbine at the ready, he would shortly regain strength enough to shoot. That thought would sustain him through the day, although at no time would he be able to lift "Best do what he says,"

gun, too,

if

he wants.

We

his hands.

There were no greenhorns among the

soldiers.

They used

their time

and out with black-powder fouling and mud. Privates Rath and Harrington wanted Private Smith to stretch out in the trench, but he insisted so bitterly on sitting up that to clean their weapons, thick encrusted inside

they

The Repe Repeating

fell quiet.

come

Dixon said. Amos Chapman grunted. He wiped beads of water from the brass receiver of the Winchester. He was confident that in another hour or less they would all be dead. And yet he remembered suddenly the fight Kit Carson and Joe Meek had made up there on the Cimarron. Five or six no Colts or that time, too, against a hundred or more. Flintlocks, too

"Amos,

I b'lieve

they're fixin' to

Winchesters.

His mind went back, back hear Joe

Meek

it

was so

— long ago — and he could

laugh again there in Bent's Fort, making his brag after

the fight. Kit watched, grinning,

dandy

—

at us,"

and he said

to

Amos

that, oh,

it

was a

little fight all right.

Then he saw are you a-laughin'

Billy at,

Dixon

Amos

.

staring tight-faced at him, saying, .

.

can't

you see

"What

they're comin'?"

The charge carried to the edge of the buffalo wallow. There it broke and the Indians fell back. Where Amos Chapman had expected to be dead, he was wounded again, this time severely, shot through the body and one leg. Most of the others, too, were hit again, Harrington badly. Private Smith still sat upright, without strength, alive and no more.

off

Surprised, really, at being alive,

Amos Chapman now

intended to

With the others, he settled down to outlast the siege, to outlast the storm and the pain of wounds, to outwait death. The Kiowas and Comanches carried on until dark. It was as if they had waited for dark so that each could leave without showing himself

five.

133

Rifle

to the other, though over future council fires they

blame one another talk, the singing,

the six

fight,

although the

The

common

had kept them

down

Woodhall

for the

men on

the

first

six lay

at

it;

pass, or

wounded, ready enough for

stiff

to

the medicine failed to cut

soon thereafter, they had

cold storm continued through the night. rolled over,

would be quick

The harangues, but when they had

failure.

lost the

scalping.

At dawn. Sergeant

with chilled wounds, and looked at Private

Smith. "Well, he's

come due

for that promotion," his voice

came dry and

croaking through mud-caked beard. The others stared dully.

Great

American

Guns

Near dusk that day, the 1 3th, a lieutenant leading a scouting patrol from Major Price's command the western arm of the Army's fourpronged campaign came upon signs of a fight. He saw the dead horses,

—

—

strewn saddles and equipment, bullet-cut feathers, the torn earth.

rode on the five

134

until

he came to the buffalo wallow and the

who had

outlasted death and Private Smith,

men defending who had not.

He it,

THE PEACEMAKER COLT The Fastest Gun

For

easj'y

shaped like

natural jit

like

in a

a ploivhatidle^ hut

thunder and strike

The

T-v

man

like

s

it

hand

it

was

could bark

a rattlesnake...

Colt

1

Peacemaker HORACE

SMITH and Daniel Wesson backtracked

after the failure of the Volcanic bullet-cartridge.

They had provided the basic design for what was to become the line of Henry and Winchester repeating rifles, but their paths did not go that way again. There had come from Europe, remember, the needle-gun with

its paper cartridge and self-contained and then a rash of metal cartridges after it. Among them was the rimfire designed by Flobert in 1 840. There was no powder charge in that early rimfire; it depended upon the fulminate primer to propel the bullet. Nothing much came of the design for years. The

primer

pellet,

explosive characteristics of fulminates were too violent and eccentric to allow their use as the propelling charge. But Smith and Wesson designed a new rimfire cartridge just as B. Tyler Henry was doing for Winchester at about the same time using stable, slow-burning black powder for the charge. They had an idea for a breech-loading pistol that was to be nothing Hke the

—

—

Volcanic.

The Colt

revolver allowed loading from the front,

or muzzle end, with paper cartridges or loose powder

136

Smith C^

IVessofi First

Model

cartridge-loading pistol and

Great

American

Guns

ball; percussion

caps were separately

of each chamber. Smith and

chambers were bored

fitted to nipples at the rear

Wesson designed

a cylinder in which the

straight through so that the rimfire cartridges

could be loaded from the rear or breach exactly as revolvers today are loaded. It

turned out that a

man named RoUin White had just

patented the

bored-through cylinder, but Smith and Wesson bought the rights to

from White and went forerunner of

all

into production. Their

modem

cartridge revolvers. It

shot pistol with a brass frame. For loading, the barrel

allowing the cylinder to be slipped off the pin and loaded.

but

it

was a

it

gun thus became the was a .22 caliber, seven-

first

was tipped up, was awkward,

It

start.

Commerce and

was a dog-eat-dog affair. and Rollin White cylinder was too good to be let alone. Other manufacturers snapped up the idea and moved in like vultures to gobble up the profits. Patent rights were often so clouded by infringements that suits could run on for years. Many an inventor in these early years of the new technology drank more gall than champagne as payment for his labors. Smith and Wesson and Rollin White hung on in rough-and-tumble court fights for years to defend their patents. It cost tens of thousands, but the vultures were driven off. The patent allowed them a virtual monopoly until it expired in 1869. In the meantime, the Colt handgun had not fallen out of favor. A great many Smith and Wesson revolvers were being sold, and they worked fine, but the rimfire cartridge was not readily adaptable to large calibers. The copper cartridge had to be soft enough to take the denting

The combination

action of the

138

industry in those days

of the metallic cartridge

hammer

over the primer

—

that

made

it

too soft to with-

Savage - North second model

Savage-North .36 double-action^

Jirst

model

Butterjield Single-action

had automatic

tube-fed

priming system stand the pressures of heavier loads. Cases were apt to rupture and jam in the

chamber. For that reason, mostly, the largest rimfire gun Smith

and Wesson produced was a .32 six-shooter. The War Between the States took the fashion out of pocket-sized pistols. A new generation of cavalry troopers, among others, was learning what Rangers Jack

before —

Hays and Sam Walker had known

for years

that nothing else quite took the place of a four-pound plow-

handled Colt

.44,

even

way

was slower loading than a cartridge gun. The slow loading was to do as John Cremony had

if it

to get around the done and carry two, three or four of the big

irons, or to carry extra

loaded cylinders.

The Colt

patents had expired in 1856 so that the race had been

thrown open to

all

comers, including Smith and Wesson, within the

limits of those patents. all

So

it is

far

from true that Colt was responsible for some origi-

the pistols in the Civil War. There were plenty of others,

nal,

many

Uttle

more than copies of

the Colt.

Remington was producing 139

.44

Double-action Starr

an excellent revolver that was similar to the Colt; Manhattan Arms Company's pistols were virtually indistinguishable from the Colt proto-

Leech and Rigdon of Augusta, Georgia, and others made so-called Among the independent designs were the Savage, the Starr, the Rogers and Spencer, and the Butterfield. Some, like the double-action Starr, were good, serviceable pieces. Others, like the Buttypes.

"Confederate Colts."

terfield or the double-action Rogers and Spencer with hammer, were overweight and awkward.

None

concealed

of them, with the possible exception of the Remington, cap-

tured the imagination and the everlasting loyalty of the Colt did.

The

great Confederate Partisan

— who has been thought be — held cavalry who ever

Mosby lar

its

to

lived

repeatedly referred to

it

its

users the

way

Ranger John Singleton

the finest leader of light or irregu-

the Colt revolver in awe. Later, he

as "the remorseless revolver" or the "death-

deaUng revolver." "There was a gate across the road, between us and the enemy," Mosby wrote. "We dashed through and in the moment of collision the [Yankee] lieutenant fell, severely wounded. Several others in the front met the same fate; they had drawn sabers, that hurt nobody, and we used pistols." Speaking of the saber, Mosby said, "My men had no more use for that antiquated weapon than a coat of mail." Mosby's was not a regular command, except for a few key men. 140

Cavalrymen on leave from their regiments often joined him for a few days or weeks on the reasonably certain chance that a raid with Mosby would yield a fine horse and a pair of Colts. Mosby once sent a lock of his hair to President Lincoln with the message that he would be along one night to collect a lock of the President's hair in return.

He

did, in fact,

Union army at Fairfax, Virginia, one night, asking his way to headquarters where he awakened the sleeping Yankee general, Stoughton, by lifting the blankets and nosily thwacking the ride into the midst of the

general's behind.

"Did you ever hear of Mosby?" he asked. Confused and angry, the general said, "Have you caught him?" Mosby slipped the icy muzzle of his Colt against the

man's neck and grinned. "No, he's caught you," he

said. Mosby bagged some rare game during the war, but he counted among his greatest prizes a wagon full of Colts, taken one night with a Yankee supply train. The favorite Colt of all during these years was the 1860 Army model, a .44 caliber six-shooter with a streamlined frame. It was much

hghter than the old Dragoon models and was sometimes issued with a detachable carbine stock which allowed carbine

A

—

it

was not a new idea

smaller, scaled

then,

and

it it

to

be held and

down model, generally called the Navy Colt, was As a matter of pure, sculptured artistry, there has

offered in .36 cahber.

never been a more handsome handgun than the 1860 Colt.

1860

Army

Colt

fired like a

continues to crop up today.

The Peacemaker Colt

Cartridge-loading Smith and Wessons displaced a lot of pocket der-

and pepperboxes

after the war, but nothing could nudge the big and 1867, the Texans began driving their immense herds of wild longhoms north to market, to the new railheads in Kansas. They packed cap-and-ball Colts and Remingtons. In Abilene or Ellsworth

ringers

Colts. In 1866

or Hays,

when they went

to

hoorah the town and run

the saying went, the overworked marshal

who had

up the stump, as was likely was half obscured

it

to step in

too. It was the beginning of a time that myth even before it was well started. Still, fragments of reality, stark and true, come down to us it is clear enough that the pistol played a

wearing a Colt, in

—

disproportionately prominent part in

Great

American

The Smith and Wesson and The

cartridge

wanted

Guns

to put

it.

Rollin White patents expired in 1869.

and bored-through cylinder belonged them to use. It was common practice

to

anyone who few years,

for a

then, to convert the old cap-and-ball guns to take cartridges. It was done by cutting off the rear of the cylinder and filling the space with a breechblock and loading gate, and replacing the rammer-lever with an ejector

rod.

Most

of these conversions took rimfire cartridges

for example, were often altered to take the centerfire cartridges

Cap and

Navy

were beginning

Henry

—

the big Colts,

.44 cartridge.

But

to appear, also.

ball .36 caliber

Colty converted

/

cartridge-loading

Remington .44

Army

Smith and Wesson brought out 1869.

It

was a

their .44 centerfire

good weapon — with improvements over

American

the years,

it

in

got

breakdown action and system of ejecting all six empties in an instant were fast and efficient. There was nothing wrong with the American except that it did not have the magic that clung to the Colt. Same with the Remington. Same with all the others that had sprung up, including the Merwin and Hulbert. Except that with the Merwin and Hulbert it was not so much a matter of not having the magic, but of having a dark curse on it. Fred Merwin, on a sales trip in 1876 with his sample case full of single action Merwin and Hulbert pistols, was picked up by Indians near Lodgepole Creek in southeastern Wyoming. That was the year of the Custer massacre, a bad year all around for stray whites. There is no telling how it might have gone for him if he had been selling jewelry or corsets. As it was, they burned him at the stake. It was a gesture so loaded with implication that it is hard not to see in it some kind of poetic justice. The same year that saw the introduction of the great Winchester, 1873, was the year of the new Colt cartridge-loading pistol. It was a .45 caliber centerfire six-shooter. The frontier was bowing its back for the last convulsive spasms of violence, of exploitation of the land and its resources. In a country which had only lately got done with a great civil war, which was in the midst of settling the Indian's hash and in the midst of wiping out the buffalo, the 1873 Colt was just in time. There were even better.

still

The Peacemaker

Its

Colt

a lot of coaches, banks and trains to be robbed, a lot of grievances to

be aired and

it

was a country peopled by

folks

who understood and

/

accepted the smell of black-powder smoke. 143

This Colt revolver was

was sold

as the Frontier or

known

Army

at the factory as the

Colt.

"Model P."

The Cavalry model had

It

a IV2-

inch barrel; the Artillery model had a SVi-mch. barrel. Apart from these

more or

less official designations, the

the old cap-and-ball guns

handle, six-gun, equahzer

One name

— names

weapon

inherited

all

the

names of

like hog-leg, thumb-buster,

plow-

and so on.

in particular stuck to the

new

Colt: the "Peacemaker."

was a good name, indicative of the times and of the sort of employment the gun was going to have. Of course, a moral standpoint does not rightly belong to a piece of machinery, though we live in the everlasting hope that virtue will, in the end, triumph. The Colt factory built a piece of ordnance which was designed to expel a projectile when the trigger released the hammer that was all. If it is true that the Peacemaker brought peace to the West, it is, of course, equally true that assassination, murder and dry-gulching were within its province. On that basis, the gun might as well have been called the "Bankrobber's Friend," the "Gunshark's Companion," or the "BushIt

—

whacker." 144

But, for

all that,

Peacemaker was the name that stuck. characterized by the familiar Colt plow-handle

The Model P was grip

and a

was

cut into the top strap of the frame.

sliding ejector-rod housing alongside the barrel. Its rear sight

changed from the

The

today.

flat

earliest Colts

and

The

mainspring imparted a long, slow

The fork-shaped

trigger-

breaking, though

it

were not much

insides

are, in fact, pretty

much

fall to

the

same hammer.

the

and cylinder-stop spring seemed always to be was easy enough to make a new one out of a piece of hacksaw blade providing that was handy. it had to be cocked with a The Peacemaker was single action separate motion before it could be triggered. Its hammer fall was slow, too. But the old Colt had balance to it, a way of laying down on the

The

mark

Peacefnaker

—

like a bird-dog. It

This Colt had

all

was

the old magic

began to build up around fantasy.

deal of

as natural as pointing the finger.

a

it,

myth made

There was a core of truth it

and then some.

to the

A myth all its own

of gunshngers'

myth,

all right,

yams and

though a great

was invented in a later age and apphed to the frontier days

in retrospect. It gets

obscure.

Some

of

it

was

just

gunsmithing: honing the sear,

for example, for a hair trigger; or taking the trigger out altogether, so

the piece could be fired by just thumbing the

hammer instead

of

thumbing

it

— fanning

it,

hammer; or fanning

that

is,

the

with the edge of the

other hand. For that trick, the target had to be man-sized and close

enough

to

be powder-burnt.

Old-time gunfighter's Colt with front sight filed off and gun was trigger taken out fired by thumbing or fanning

—

the

hammer.

Modern Peacemaker, custom SI gilt ed, engraved and "accurized."

Colt

Hol/vwoori fast-draw holster a?id husvadero

^s

^

y^ worki?ig cowhand's outjit in 1880'

hard not to get entangled

It is

belt

in the

Most

myth. The old-timers were

them would have polished gun alone. •There was always some tinkering with trick holsters, hideout rigs and sleeve or boot guns, some hilariously complicated and plainly pure generally a direct bunch, though. the sear a

little

to get the trigger pull just right, then left the

suicide to get entangled with.

tucked into waistbands,

And

Most of

The

pockets or in regular holsters.

draw, as such, got a good deal

fast

and

eighties than

and did get pretty

fast,

it

but here

television horse operas of the last

is

stories,

fast

were going signal

—

to

all

draw

is

in

movies and most of

all

the

hard to find in

all that.

based largely on the assumption that gunmen

meet face to face

in a ritualized duel,

drawing almost on

necessarily at fairly short range. Reality just wasn't so

accommodating. Serious gunplay was blast of spUt

and study

decade have done a job of propaganda.

tiny nuggets of historical reality are

The

less attention

Some gunmen did practice where we hit the myth head-on.

gets today.

Generations of dime novels, pulp

The

the old-timers carried their pistols

belts, sashes,

a holster in those days really covered the gun.

the seventies it

of

just as apt to take the

double-O buckshot from a brushy draw

kind of shootout was bound to be a spontaneous

at night.

affair.

shape of a

Any

other

Range, timing

and other circumstances were variables. So being fast was all right up to a point, but being cool enough to make the gun do exactly what it was meant to do was important, too. 146

Hollywood there are probably half a dozen men, profesand fast draw artists who coach actors in Westerns, who are without doubt faster than the deadliest gunman, whoever he may have been, that the frontier ever saw. The actors themselves are no slouches. These gun-handlers wear specially designed, cutaway holsters,

Today

in

sional gun-jugglers

some with patented steel linings. Their brand of showmanship and guntwirling demands dazzling speed and these are the rigs for it. In their hands, the old hog-leg comes out spitting like a trained rattlesnake. They tie the holster low. The whole top of the Colt is bare; the leather gently hugs the lower half of the cylinder and the frame below the trigger guard. Fingers spread, the hand sweeps back, not down, and the thumb hits and rocks back the hammer. The gun is cocked by the time the fingers curl around the grip. The slapping motion rocks the gun out of the holster and the hammer is released as the gun comes up on target. A wonderful line from an old Gary Cooper picture said it just right: "You just sort of wipe it out of the leather." That is the fast draw. The funny thing is that a whole cult has formed around it. Fast draw and gun-twirling clubs have spread around the country like an epidemic of athlete's foot. Members, legs a-spraddle and wearing their corset-like buscadero

belts,

stand by the hour slapping leather with a kind of

relig-

ious intensity while electric-eye timers clock them to the nearest hun-

dredth of a second. There are some fast ones

make Wild looks no

Bill

sillier

Hickok look

arthritic.

of safety in gun-handling.

on the

—

off,

the whole thing

draw thing

it is

more fun

thumb

hammer

rarely slips, really.

electric timer, unless the

down from

gun

if

is

against every rule

is

someone, sooner or

that trick of cocking the

the

bullet ranges

upon

—

And

with guns, gets the idea that

Take

— they would probably

analysis, the fast

than eating goldfish or stuffing sophomores into telephone

booths. Except for one thing

leather

On

later,

the gun

is

when playing

loaded.

while the gun

And

if it

does,

loaded. If the

is still in

it

thumb

the

only shows slips then,

a

thigh to knee into the lower leg. Depending

the shooter's exact stance, the knee-cap or heel can be blasted

or a soft-nose slug can explode the ankle joint like a quart can of

tomatoes.

The

fast

draw

cult thrives in unlikely places,

even parts of the

country that have been tame since the French and Indian wars. Lately, in such a place, a

man

practicing his fast

draw decided

to liven

it

up a 147

The n ^olt

i

by loading the gun. Of course

little

The

things, a shoulder holster.

it

bullet

happened.

He was

plowed through a

using, of all

rib,

grazed the

and diaphragm, burst through the spleen, punctured the intestines and came to rest in a kidney. He lingered on for nearly a week. One of the attending physicians was heard to say, "Well, polio is under control and we're doing pretty well with cancer and heart disease and multiple sclerosis, so now look what this joker comes along with ..." So much for the fast draw. Now, what kind of shooter was the Frontier Colt? The Peacemaker, like the Kentucky rifle, seems to have a lot of critics who are eager heart, pierced the lung

to point out the

Great

American

p

the

weapon's deficiencies. These unbelievers

Peacemaker was inaccurate, or

that at best

—

like to say that

was only good at and at the same time it

They are partly right wrong can be. They are right so far as nearly all shooters are concerned dead wrong where those few others, the good ones, are concerned. The gun itself was a superb weapon in its own time, though never really a target gun. It is still good in many respects, particularly in the updated and modernized versions. The point is that the criticism about accuracy and cross-the-room range applies really to pistol shooters, rather than just pistols. In that sense, all handguns come under the same cross-the-room distances.

wrong

as

—

criticism. It

could almost be reduced to a formula. Pistol: good. Pistol shooter:

not so good.

The weak

factor

not the mechanical, but the

is

human

element. It is

a

phenomenon

of gunnery that very few

and of course no one

men can

handle a

Even a good deal of practice seems to yield small returns for most shooters. Take such a shooter, then, add heart-stopping fear, hurry it up with a fast draw and an itchy trigger

pistol,

likes to

admit

it.

—

lead will splatter all over the place. There are plenty of cases with a man, on record of guns being emptied at a range of six feet armed or unarmed, as the target and all shots flying wild. On the other hand, a very few shooters do well the first time up,

finger

—

—

even ing

is

if

they have never held a pistol before. In that respect, pistol shoot-

a lot like throwing rocks

as scientific about

it

—

it

—

there

responds to

is

something instinctive as

talent.

For

much

that reason, the great

have been graced with a touch of that rare magic that sets them apart from ordinary men. Those are the boys who make the hand-

pistol shots

148

gun

sing.

No

nonsense about cross-the-room distances

their shots out to incredible distances

The Peacemaker was

— and

the most popular pistol ever made.

tracts finally forced the Colt people to

that time

of

it

had come

— they

suspend production

to be considered a relic,

will lob

hit.

most

places.

War

con-

in 1940.

By

The windows

hock shops everywhere in the West were cluttered with them for years; and $ 15 were scrawled on grubby little price tags attached

prices like $ 12

to the trigger guards.

were made to

The

old die-hards

realize that they

who

were being a

still

carried

little

them gradually

eccentric.

After the war, there was an extroardinary resurgence of interest Americana in general and a big revival of the frontier myth. It was Uke a kind of vast national nostalgia finding voice. In a short time the Colts were gone from the hock shop windows; if one did turn up there among the guitars, zithers and ice skates, the price tag was apt to read in

closer to $100.

A new company, Sturm Ruger, Peacemaker it was redesigned and refined, but it was unquestionably the old hog-leg incarnate. Other and in due companies followed it was like 1860 all over again It

caught the Colt people napping.

began producing, of

all

things, the old

—

time, Colt returned to the

—

—

market place with the

original, the nonpareil,

the Peacemaker.

Now, there are even companies offering the old cap-and-ball Colt and Remington designs. Gun technology has gone so far that a lot of shooters have been driven back to muzzle-loading. For those who like that sort of thing, there is still some of the ancient magic in the old charcoal burners, whether caplock or cartridge.

FEW YEARS

ago in Arizona, an old-timer there showed me a handsome pair of Colts. They were Peacemakers with 5Vi-inch barrels and they had once been a matched pair, but were no longer. He was not a two-gun man and had always favored one of the pair over the other. He had carried that gun to the gold country of Alaska as a young buck and there he had made grips of walrus ivory for it. He had inlaid a flat gold

A

nugget into one

grip.

A couple of years later when he was in the Phihppine

Insurrection

fighting Moros under Aguinaldo, he had replaced one ivory grip with ebony. During the Pancho Villa troubles in Mexico a decade later, he

149

-*

^^

Peacemaker

^

j

had been shot

in the

shoulder

(

he quick whipped his shirt back to show

the old glazed-blue scar where the

A

Mauser

bullet

had

hit)

second shot had splintered a chunk out of the ivory

nicked his hip (up went the

shirt tail to

show

and captured.

pistol grip

and

that one).

But, he said, he had got his gun back in a quick

little

fracas,

and a

horse too, and got to El Paso in four days. Didn't need no doctor, he said, for the

shoulder had healed fine in four days. After that, in 1918, as

an over-age

pilot,

he packed the black-and-white handled hog-leg in the

cockpit of a Spad pursuit airplane in France.

Kjreat

American

Guns

In the years after that, it was pretty much all downhill, though the gun put on a lot more mileage and got a lot of camp meat here and there. When I saw the Colt, there wasn't a sharp edge left on it. The ivory was yellow and spider-webbed with tiny, hairline cracks and the old bullet

mark was dished the ebony

was

in

and

slick

glassy; the

with wear.

The nugget was

polished and

muzzle and trigger guard were rounded right

back with holster wear.

The hand

that held the

gun was paper-skinned, blue-veined and

shaky and the old-timer's voice had a quaver to

it.

"She'll

plumb center, I tell you. Plumb center. You b'lieve me?" The gun waggled in the paper-skinned hand. "I believe you," I said. I did, too.

150

still

throw

f

You

HEAR

a heap of talk about

A fast gun was something to see, all right. I seen a few, here and there I b'lieve the fastest was over in Indian guns these days.

fast

in action

—

Peacemaker

Territory.

remember it was the dustiest was ever in. Last thing before

I

town I I went

to catch the train,

bath at the barber shop. hog-grease soap and

than

it

took out, but

it left it

I

took a

was old more smell It

settled the dust.

more when this happened. That was a line of work that never set too well with No,

me.

A

I

wasn't a deputy any

man who wears

a big hog-leg

on his hip ought to be ready to use it and I never was. Oh, when I first went down into that country, I wanted to be notorious.

I

wore a pair of boots

with stars on the front and heels so high

it

Then Police

I

was went in

Fastest

Gun

like

to

the

packed a big

The

The

walkin' downhill.

work with the Indian Osage Nation and

forty-four.

There wasn't

any other whites allowed on the reservation. My job was to watch out for small-pox and help round up the horse thieves and outlaws

out in there.

It

was

ticklish

who

hid

work. isi

Colt

For a while

I

had charge of the holdover, the

those boys until the U.S. Marshal's deputies to sleep

on there

at night

and

come

jail

where we kept

for them.

I

had a cot

and I used to lay there Once there was Wiley Haines and the

in the office in front of the cells,

listen to the stories.

one they called Bosco the Snake-Eater, both jugged at the same time. The yarns they told would curl your hair. They never did hold it against me that I carried the keys, but they had a way of lookin' sideways and a-watchin'

me

that let

me know you

wouldn't have to skin very deep to

run into bear.

Ureat

American

^

In those days, the Bill Doolin gang was broke up and Bill Doolin and Red Buck was both dead, along with Bitter Creek Newcomb. But there was still plenty of ornery customers around. When I quit the Indian Police, I went over to Ponca City. My brother, Bill, was a deputy there. One night I run into one of the outlaws I had kept locked up in the holdover. When he seen me, he looked disagreeable as a skinned snake in hot sand. I said I wasn't wearin' a badge anymore; so we went over to the hotel and had supper together and then set up half the night yarning. He told me, "Kid, I had a bellyfull of this outlawin' around. It's got so they make too much trouble anymore, especially if you shoot a man." He said he had a piece of farmland he didn't say where and he aimed to work it. That was the last I seen of him. A day or two later, I told Brother Bill about it and he said, "Dadbum it, kid, why didn't you tell me?" I could see he was upset, but all I said was, "I ain't paid to catch your men."

—

—

—

Brother Bill wasn't like me he was a real lawman. You could tell. He looked lop-sided without his gun and he had a bullet-notched ear. He had a way of coming into a room and closing the door with his foot, like he didn't want his hands full of doorknob at the wrong time. And

he would stand there and

size

marshals there

Heck Thomas and Bud Ledbetter and was cut from the same hide.

Bill

Tilghman. Brother

They was hear

everybody up. There was some good

in those days, like

all

much about

Bill

good with a gun. Fast? Well, a

man

enough.

fast

You

didn't

being jast with a gun. Folks would say that so-

and-so was good with a gun. There's a difference. Being fast was a part of it,

all right.

No,

But being slow was something,

I ain't

forgot the story

put that badge away and

152

I

too.

was about

to tell

sold the forty-four that

.

.

.

Well,

went with

sir, it

after I

—

I re-

—

member

I got eleven dollars for it I went back to the tailor's trade. had been apprenticed to a tailor back home in Missouri. So I was what we called a boomer tailor. I would travel from town to town with a suitcase full of samples suits and pants and a lot of bolt ends of woolen goods. Wherever I'd light, I'd set up shop right there. Barber shops was good because there was men in and out of there all day. Saloons had the

I

—

traffic, too,

When

but there the

man

a

is

getting

men

all

wasn't interested in

slicked

up

is

how their pants looked.

the time he's

man was

most apt

to think his

some and dye-color put to his mustache, I would make my pitch and show the goods I carried. When I made a sale I could take the feller's

pants

shabby. Right there while a

is

getting a haircut or

curl

measurements and hurry

start cutting in the hotel

would make up the britches

I

later

room, or

if

there wasn't any

and dehver them next

trip

or

The Peac Peacemaker

mail them.

Those men all spent a lot of time in the saddle. Pants went fast, but a coat would last forever. But times was hard then and there was precious little work you know, a man would let his pants go till it was a scandal. It's

a funny thing

.

.

.

there wasn't

much

call for coats.

—

Where was

I? That's right, I carried

to wait for the train. It

was hot

my

suitcase over to the station

as a blister; I

remember how

the dust

puffed underfoot with every step. There wasn't a soul on the street that

time of day. The town was laid out on one side of the tracks. It wasn't much, only a few false-front buildings with a boardwalk. The train depot was only a tin roof set on some rough-sawed, four-by-four posts. The street lay between it and the buildings; all around was open country, rolling yellow prairie.

There was a big freight wagon standing across the street from the and a team of dray horses switching clouds of flies off one another with their tails. Dogs sprawled here and there, asleep and twitching with dreams, or scratching. It was Indian Territory, remember, and for every Indian there was between three and seven dogs, at a guess. The way they used to bark and carry on at night would put your hackles train shed

All right, I'll get on with it. walked into the shade under that tin roof and put down my suitcase, and set on it. There was only a little time till the train was due. Then I seen two men walking toward the depot shed where I was waiting. They had their heads together, talking as they walked, and one looked

up.

.

.

.

I

153

Colt

back over

his shoulder

shoes, not boots,

now and

then.

and one wore a hard

They both wore hat.

more used to straddling horses than footing it. They walked right on by me and took a look down then stood there in the shade a few feet away, low, but excited his

head and

—

strained,

maybe. The

his coat pulled aside so

I

tall

still

and

like they

and was

the track

and

suits

But they walked

ties

talking, their voices

one took

off his hat to

mop

seen his Colt tucked in next to his

Then I recognized him. I had seen him once over around Pawhuska where he was suspicioned of being in on a train robbery. That was all I knowed about him. The one in the hard hat was a stranger to ribs in a holster.

me. yjreat

American

^

was uneasy. I set there and wondered how it would look There wasn't a sound except the low hum of them two voices, or a little creak and jingle of harness when one of the horses would move under his canopy of flies. Sound just didn't carry in Well,

^^ ^

sir, I

didn't catch the train.

that heat.

I

almost didn't hear a slow clop-clop-clop from over beyond

the line of buildings.

You

understand, now, none of this

was

a-goin' to

still

as clear as

—

is

what a

feller

mind to it's only because of what remembered later, and let me tell you, it's

generally remembers or pays any

happen that I if it happened day before yesterday. The sound of that wore-out horse had stopped. A minute later a man walked out the front door of the livery stable down the street. He wore boots and was all one color from the dust. There was a gun on his hip, but that wasn't uncommon. He walked along the boardwalk and started to go in the Chinaman's restaurant, when he seen me and them other two. He stopped half in the door; then he turned back toward us and stepped down into the street, a little more than fifty yards away and off to one side of the freight wagon. For the first time, I seen a little flash on his shirt front where his deputy's badge caught the sun. I turned. The tall one stood there, froze, and his jaw hung down. Then his teeth come together with a snap like a beaver trap and his hand clawed past his coat for that gun. His partner, white as flour paste, grabbed ahold of his gun arm. "No, don't do it!" he screeched, but the tall one grunted and throwed him off and that gun came out. ¥ast\ That was when the lid blowed off. I was right in the way and caught the muzzle blast from that first shot. Little sparks of burnt powder stung 154

'^

nesr^:

^if^'ig

—;p.--i^??^#V" v--^?**'

-^

my

cheek and neck, and

rock.

—

it

I

jumped

like a

wasn't far

my

ears clanged like a skillet you've beat on a

scorched cat and scampered behind one of the posts

away and

it

wasn't safe, but

dray horses come alive and bucked

in the

it

was

there was.

all

The

harness and dogs was running

ways and yelping. The deputy had stopped and pulled his gun he was about as fast as a man reaching for his watch to see if it's time for lunch. The outlaw he was fast. That big Colt roared and bucked and each time a long

all

—

—

streamer of smoke would lance out. The deputy squared away, both feet

Great

planted, and he settled his gun butt into the upturned

palm of

hand, a two-handed grip, both hands right straight out

in front of

Then he

him.

fired.

There was a puff of dust and padding flew out the back of the like that. The threads sailed back in a long fffss-s-t\

Ameriran

—

outlaw's coat

Lruns

his left

—

arc and floated down. His gun bucked once more, and at the same time the deputy fired again

time there was

.

.

.

and again

.

.

.

like that,

timed slow; and each

a little puff of dust like the first one.

On

the third shot,

come uncoupled and slid out from under his hat. There wasn't a sound. Black powder smoke hung in the

the outlaw

that shed roof so thick you could swing on

stopped, the dogs

and

all

stopped running

all

it.

When

air

under

the shooting

— they was everyplace,

tails

tucked

hunkered down and shivering. The outlaw's partner had run

a ways with his hands in the

That Colt was

still

air.

right out there in front of

off

moved a muscle. him and the hammer was

The deputy

hadn't

eared back. There was a big wheezing sigh; one of the dray horses its knees, then flopped over against the wagon was shot through the heart. Somewhere a door slammed. I come out from behind the post. The deputy still hadn't moved you wouldn't call him rash. A dark patch showed on his right leg, just above the knee. I walked toward him then, out from under the tin roof and into the sunlight and I seen his eyes glare at me over that gun barrel. "You're hurt," I said. "Can I give you a hand?"

buckled and dropped to tongue.

It

—

"Hurt

He

156

.

.

."

he

said.

"Hurt?

looked burned up that

I

Why

that so-and-so couldn't hurt me."

had thought

I

Then he

eased his gun down.

finally

said. I

it.

could see the blood running into his boot.

"I reckon not,"

He walked

over to where the

outlaw lay and bent down and picked the man's Colt out of the dust.

He punched

A

out the empties; every shot had been

crowd began

scratching again. hollering

who was

him and limped of

flies

asked

must've been

"No,"

A night

my

me

to gather

The

freighter

going to pay for

off.

did

A I

fired.

and mill around. The dogs went to had found his dead horse and was it.

The deputy looked

right through

meat-cutter with a dirty apron and his see the shooting. I said

yes and he

own

cloud

said that deputy

fast.

I said, "it

was

the other one

who was

fast."

come in and I climbed aboard. That in El Reno and got to a hotel, I opened up folds of woolen pants goods was a forty-

little later, the train finally

when

I

got off the train

and there in the four bullet. It was hardly mashed. Must've been that first shot, I thought, the one that stung me. I went to sleep with my ears still buzzing and I was thinking how fast that outlaw was with a gun and what it had got him. suitcase

He was

fast, all right.

The Peacemaker Colt

A

Barrel

J

B

Frame

K

C Cylinder D Hammer E Forearm

L

Butt-plate

Receiver Trigger guard

M

Muzzle

Ki

Ejector rod

Tubular magazine Gr/p5 H Butt or butt-stock

Sight

F

G

Trigger

Recoil shield

Glossary

action. firearm;

The operating mechanism also refers to the

in

a

receiver or

frame housing the action.

action, single. System requiring the ham-

mer

to be

cocked manually before trigger

pressure can

fire

the piece.

action, double. Mechanical system in a revolver in which one continuous pull on

B

the trigger revolves the chamber, cocks

and releases the hammer. action,

falling-block.

mechanism swings the

which the breechblock

in

down out

chamber

Lever-operated

of the receiver to expose

One

of several systems of

breech closure and action operation by

means

bullet, regardless of

ballistics.

The

science of performance of from explosion of charge to

the end of flight-path, in

all

details of

energy, velocity, range, impact characteristics, etc.

rolling

block.

Mechanism

barrel. in

which the breechblock pivots down and back to expose the firing chamber.

158

any

shape.

of a lever, the lever usually serv-

ing as a trigger guard as well.

action,

projectile, usually lead;

later applied to

projectiles

for loading.

action, lever.

ball. Spherical

The metal tube through which

the

explosive charge propels the projectile.

blunderbuss. Bell-muzzled, large ber,

smoothbore gun, usually

cali-

flintlock.

bore.

The opening

in a

gun

barrel.

the general

rel; also,

mechanism of the

receiver or action.

piece of silica or volcanic glass

capable of producing sparks when the

edge

is

struck against

flintlock.

breechblock. The piece which locks and seals the cartridge or charge in place in

Mechanism

steel.

powder and weapon using such mechafor igniting

charge with sparks struck from or the

steel,

flint

nism.

the firing chamber.

Any arm

breechloader.

A

flint.

breech. Usually, the rear face of the bar-

that

is

loaded

at

the breech or rear of barrel.

forearm or fore-end. The portion of wooden stock extending forward from the receiver under the barrel.

from a firearm, as distinct from a cartridge, which includes bullet and powder. bullet. Projectile discharged

The

frizzen.

as priming

butt. Rearmost face of the stock, or,

piece of steel in a flintlock

against which the

mer

flint is struck. Also acts pan cover. Called the ham-

in early flintlock times.

loosely, the buttstock or grip.

caliber. Diameter of the bore, measured

from land

to land in .00 or .000 of an

inch, or in millimeters;

measured

merly by the number of balls of that

fordi-

ameter to a pound of lead. cap. Priming or ignition device of metal or paper containing metallic fulminate.

carbine. Short

mounted

rifle

gun. Loosely, as in this book, any weapon firing a projectile. Technically, a long-barreled, long-range artillery piece.

gunpowder.

Fast-burning

mixed.

H

or musket used by

hammer. Formerly

troops.

granulated

composed of saltpeter, sulphur and charcoal. Black powder was the early form, mechanically propellant mixture,

referred to the friz-

zen on a flintlock; also referred to the cartridge.

Metal or paper container

holding explosive charge and bullet, with,

cock or striking piece; now, a pivoted striking piece.

in

modern metal

cartridges, the primer I

self-contained.

cock.

The hammer,

or piece that strikes

ignition. Firing, or

the firing pin or cap, or, in flintlocks, that

powder charge.

holds the flint. Also, to draw back the hammer, ready to fire. At half-cock, the piece was in safety position where trigger would not release hammer.

lands.

corrosion. Rust and pitting in a gun bore

interior

been lock.

The

revolving part of a revol-

portions of the

bore surface, after the

rifling

has

mechanism assembly,

as

cut.

Firing

flintlock,

ver which contains the several cartridges.

firing the

L The ungrooved

or parts.

cylinder.

method of

percussion lock, mounted on

the lockplate, which

is

in turn

mounted

on the gun.

159

M

receiver.

matchlock. Primitive mechanisms for igniting powder charge by touching off the priming powder with a lighted match.

muzzle. The front end of the which the bullet emerges.

barrel,

from

The metal housing containing

the action assembly, to which the barrel

and buttstock.

revolver.

A

weapon having

is

attached

single, fixed

and revolving cylinder designed place each of several firing chambers barrel

to in

position at the breech successively.

A

muzzleloader.

piece

that

must be rifle.

charged through the muzzle.

Long-barreled gun with

rifled bar-

rel.

O

rifling. Spiral grooves cut into bore so

over-and-under. Piece having two barrels,

with one placed over the other.

that a rotary

motion

the ball as

leaves the barrel, for gyro-

it

be imparted to

will

scopic stabilization in

flight.

pan. The receptacle for holding the loose

powder priming charge.

sear. Trigger-operated latch in the firing

patch. Piece of leather, cloth or paper,

cocked position

mechanism which holds usually

greased,

around the

used

as

a

fit

the

it is

hammer

in

released.

wrapping

ball in a rifled muzzle-loader

to insure close

until

between bore and bullet.

sight. Device for aiming the weapon,

usually includes any one of a variety of rear sights used in conjunction with a

pepperbox. Hand gun with three or more clustered barrels revolving around a central axis.

foresight.

stock.

The wooden

part of an arm, by

means

of which

held.

it is

percussion. Ignition system in which the primer

is

set off

on a cap or

by a sharp blow, usually

pellet containing

an explosive

fulminate.

trigger. Device for releasing the firing

mechanism by

pistol. Loosely, as in this book, a

hand

gun, including the revolver.

primer. The means of

is

adjusted, or adjust-

able, for very light pressure.

firing the

main

charge, as percussion cap, or, in

flint-

locks, the loose

the touch of a finger. Set

or hair trigger

powder priming charge

trigger guard.

A

looping piece of metal

to protect the trigger

and

to prevent acci-

dental discharge.

in the pan.

W wheellock. Mechanism, or weapon

rammer, ramrod. The rod used to ram home the bullet in a muzzleloader and to clean or

wiping

160

swab stick.

the bore. Also called the

era-

ploying this mechanism, by means of

which the priming charge sparks struck from holding

is

ignited by

flint

or pyrites

against a revolving, toothed wheel.

f

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