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a magazine rifle. (The basic version would go on to enjoy a long life—some sixty-plus years—in the British Army, and its genes are present in even today’s small arms.) Whereas the Colt-backed Chaffee-Reece and the Winchester-owned Hotchkiss were tubular-magazine rifles, the Lee was the first to use a five-shot detachable magazine in which the ammunition was contained in a narrow, vertical metal “box” inserted beneath the breech. As the shooter pulled back the bolt, the empty casing was ejected, while as the bolt was pushed forward, a Z-shaped spring at the bottom of the magazine pushed a new round upward into the chamber. The bolt action automatically cocked the rifle, so all the soldier had to do was pull the trigger.108 When the magazine was empty, the shooter would merely detach it and quickly replace it with a full one, so that, in Lee’s words, “the rapid firing can be continued with great rapidity.” Though its reserve held only a third of the am-munition of a standard Winchester, the Lee compensated by being far faster to load: other repeaters had to be manually reloaded by pushing cartridges individually into their magazines—which took no little time—but a Lee magazine came preloaded. It was ready to go in seconds and the gun could be used either as a single-loader or as a repeater.109

The board was dazzled by the Lee’s action but also a little worried that it was too drastic a change. Having only recently come around to the idea of testing repeaters at all, the army was wary of adopting a futuristic novelty like a detachable magazine. The Chaffee-Reece and Hotchkiss, despite their other problems, were at least based on widely tested mechanisms. In September 1882 the board passed the buck upstairs to General Sherman, who felt the Lee was the best and appropriated $50,000 to manufacture a batch of three thousand for field testing. But Benét, not yet content to let Lee have his victory over Ordnance, insisted that all three rifles be put out for trials. With any luck, the Lee would falter under real-world conditions.

In the end, 750 each of the Hotchkiss and Lee, and 200 of the Chaffee-Reeces, were ordered made. Lee by this time had contracted the rights to his rifle to Winchester’s archrival Remington, and the two companies furiously competed to gain the military’s favorable attention. While Winchester offered its batch at $15 apiece, with delivery in seven months, Remington bid $16 but promised its Lees within three months. Chaffee-Reece badly stumbled when Colt optimistically quoted a price of $150 each—in a leisurely eight months.

The Lee design (with detachable magazine).

Despite their sunny promises, Remington-Lee, Winchester-Hotchkiss, and even Colt-Chaffee-Reece all ran late on their deliveries. It wasn’t until the early fall of 1884, or nearly two years behind schedule, that all the firearms were received and sent out to company commanders around the country. In the summer of 1885 the results of the field trials dribbled in. Reports on the Lee were favorable, though opinion as usual divided on the entire issue of distributing magazine arms at all. Most of the complaints about the Lee centered on the soldiers’ dropping the rifle’s empty magazines on the ground—they were quite expensive. More positively, much to his surprise, a captain of the progressive school found that eight of the ten sharpshooters in his command preferred the Lees to their Springfields.

Benét had asked each of the 149 company commanders testing the weapons to express a definite preference for just one of the experimental arms, then to compare that favorite against the Springfield. Unfortunately, some performed one task but not the other, some neither. It didn’t help that some units received all three rifles, and others just one or two.

Of the ones who did complete the requirements, 55 voted for the Lee over the other repeaters, giving it a wide margin over the Hotchkiss (26) and the Chaffee-Reece (14). In the end no one preferred the Chaffee-Reece over the Springfield as a single-shot weapon; just one did for the Hotchkiss; and an