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hat, but after the war Hotchkiss discovered that the French were still using paper cartridges, and he quickly sold their army on the idea of switching to metal ones. Flush with lavish government contracts, Hotchkiss applied himself to designing a magazine rifle, the one subsequently exhibited in Philadelphia, that employed a bolt-action system: the firing mechanism was contained inside a metal tube that, when pulled back by means of a knob set to the side, opened the chamber for loading and then sealed it by pushing or rotating the knob back into position. The beauty of the Hotchkiss’s bolt action was that it lent itself either to single-shot loading or to magazine firing, and it was comfortably at home firing the army’s high-power ammunition. Perfect, thought the Winchester people, who purchased the rights to manufacture the weapon on February 14, 1877.97

Why the hurry? Custer’s shattering annihilation at the Little Bighorn fifty days after the Centennial Exhibition had led to calls to reopen the question of issuing Springfield single-shots to the troops. During the furious fighting of the last stand, it was reported, the Springfields’ breeches had badly fouled and become jammed by empty casings. The only way of extracting them had been to insert a hunting knife and force them out. Indian prisoners testified that they had seen Custer’s doomed soldiers desperately trying to clear their Springfields, and military investigators recorded broken knife blades scattered around the battlefield.98

Custer’s defeat was partly attributable, some contemporary observers darkly hinted, to an inherent flaw in the Springfield’s design. Not so, Ordnance experts countered, blaming poor maintenance and dirty cartridges for the jamming. The gun itself, they stoutly declared, was not to blame.99 In truth, neither side was completely right. Later ballistic and archaeological research has found that five percent of Custer’s Springfields suffered from extraction failure. It was a high rate—more than double that recorded during experimental trials (held under ideal conditions)—but faulty loading on the part of terrified, panicked soldiers doubtlessly contributed to the failures.100

The accusations might have been ignored, but 1876 was a particularly bitter election year, and Democrats keen to attack Ulysses Grant’s Republican administration made the Little Bighorn a rallying point. Custer’s defeat allowed them to hit Grant hard, repeatedly. Democratic newspapers led the charge from several different directions. The New York Herald linked the administration’s ever-widening corruption scandals to the president’s peace policy: Custer’s death symbolized the in-competence of Grant’s Indian Bureau, it thundered, “which feeds, clothes and takes care of their noncombatant force while the men are killing our troops.” The president was “what killed Custer,” its editorialists concluded. Anti-Reconstructionist papers below the old Mason-Dixon Line, such as the Mobile Register and the New Orleans Picayune, used the slaughter to tell Grant to end U.S. troops’ “political services at the South and send them where the honor of the flag . . . may be redeemed. The five massacred companies of Custer attest the inhumanity and imbecility of the republican administration.”101

President Grant lost the election, and as a result, the outcry over the “needless” sacrifice of the Seventh Cavalry prompted Congress to approve the modest sum of $20,000 to let Benét evaluate (not select) a potential magazine arm for the service. From the get-go, the experimental Hotchkiss was rumored to be the one. If all went well, thanks to Winchester’s opportunistic purchase of the rights, he would have a lock on the market. The reports streaming in from the Russo-Turkish campaign at Plevna in the second half of 1877, during which Winchester’s Winchesters had cut themselves quite a dash, only added to the growing feeling that maybe, just maybe, the repeater’s day had come.

In April 1878 a new Ordnance board met at Springfield. Twenty-seven firearms, all chambered for the regulation .45-70,