American Rifle - Alexander Rose [119]
Benét immediately directed that a small number of Hotchkisses (1,015) be issued to soldiers in the Dakota Territory and the Texas frontier for field trials. Unfortunately, however, Winchester had rushed through production, and mechanical defects were all too common. The company replaced nearly half the original batch with improved versions, but officers remained ambivalent about the Hotchkiss. For every soldier who praised it, another preferred the Springfield, with opinion often dividing along diehard-progressive lines. Bluntly reported one progressive officer, “I am . . . not in favor of a magazine gun for general armament.” Another, of diehardist persuasion, thought that his “men have more confidence in it then they have in the Springfield.”
Fatally, no one, even among diehards, could work up much enthusiasm for the Hotchkiss: one colonel (a persistent advocate of repeaters) went so far as to confess that even he was “not especially wedded to the Hotchkiss.” In 1880 about half of all company commanders said they wanted to stick with the Springfield and returned their Hotchkisses.103 Benét remarked that the Hotchkiss, once considered so promising, “is an improvement on the present Springfield arm only in its ability to empty its magazine of cartridges in one-half the time that the same number could be fired by the latter.”104
Oliver Winchester did not live to see the formation of another board in July 1881, this time to trial a new batch of magazine rifles, including ones from a fresh competitor, the Lee Arms Company (run by James Paris Lee), as well as a Colt-sponsored Chaffee-Reece. (Winchester, now the long shot, submitted new, improved versions of its lackluster Hotchkiss.)
Lee, a Scot, was born in August 1831, the son of a watchmaker. The family had emigrated to Canada when he was an infant, and Lee started work in his father’s jeweler’s shop when he was seven. Fascinated by the complex mechanics of watches, and boyishly intrigued by firearms, Lee opened his own workshop and store in 1850, worked on his beloved rifles in his spare time, and married one Caroline Chrysler, of the family that would found the car company. In 1862, now based in Wisconsin and a naturalized American citizen, he patented his first weapon, a single-shot rifle with a then-innovative breech-loading mechanism. Not until April 18, 1865—nine days after General Robert E. Lee surrendered his army to Grant—did Ordnance get back to him; Dyer, the chief, ordered a thousand of his rifles for trials. Unfortunately, the instructions weren’t quite clear, and Lee submitted his batch in the wrong caliber. The department, understandably, refused to accept them, and Lee sued the government for $14,350 in costs. He won, but not without making himself unwelcome at Ordnance for some time to come.105
In 1874 he tried again with an updated design but was brazenly rebuffed: “The Department does not intend, at the present, to consider the subject of breech-loading guns, with a view to their introduction to the service.” That was completely untrue, of course. Ordnance was at that very moment considering the subject very carefully. It was just that Ordnance refused to consider the subject of Lee’s breech-loading gun.106
By the end of the decade Lee had found, or purchased, enough friends in Congress to ensure a proper trial, whatever Ordnance’s feelings on the matter, for any rifle he submitted in the future.107 Lee didn’t waste the opportunity. For the 1881 round of trials he submitted a radical design for