American Rifle - Alexander Rose [259]
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100. D.D. Scott, R.A. Fox Jr., M.A. Connor, and D. Harmon, Archaeological Perspectives on the Battle of the Little Bighorn (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989), p. 114, contains the results of these recent investigations. It’s worth pointing out that the Indians must also have suffered from jamming—and probably more often, owing to the troopers’ more stringent cleaning and oiling discipline when back at barracks. In the aftermath of the annihilation, General Nelson Miles wrote, as they traveled to avenge Custer’s death, his men “occupied themselves in polishing their cartridges . . . or in cleaning their rifles.” Miles, Personal Recollections, p. 215.
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101. See R. M. Utley, Custer and the Great Controversy: The Origin and Development of a Legend (1962; reprint Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), pp. 39–40.
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102. Sharpe, Rifle in America, p. 236; Wolf, Arms and Innovation, pp. 146–51, 154; Canfield, “Military Winchesters,” p. 39.
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103. Brinckerhoff and Chamberlin, “Army’s Search,” p. 22; Wolf, Arms and Innovation, pp. 162–70; Canfield, “Military Winchesters,” p. 39. Interestingly, the Hotchkiss did find a zealous admirer in Geronimo; during his surrender negotiations in 1886 army assistant surgeon Leonard Wood—future commander of the Rough Riders, of San Juan Hill fame—briefly lent him one. Having never seen a Hotchkiss, Geronimo was curious and asked to shoot some rounds. Wood, a little nervous as to the chieftain’s intentions, recalled that he showed him how it worked and Geronimo “fired at a mark, just missing one of his own men, which he regarded as a great joke, rolling on the ground, laughing heartily and saying ‘good gun.’” J. H. Sears, The Career of Leonard Wood (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1919), pp. 44–45. The original anecdote seems to have first been printed in Miles, Personal Recollections, pp. 513–14.
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104. Quoted in Hallahan, Misfire, p. 225.
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105. Sharpe, Rifle in America, p. 69.
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106. Quoted in Wolf, Arms and Innovation, p. 120.
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107. Ibid., pp. 158–62.
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108. On Lee’s mechanism, see D. Westwood, Rifles: An Illustrated History of Their Impact (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO, 2005), p. 94.
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109. “Improvement in magazine fire-arms,” Patent no. 221,328, November 4, 1879, available at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Web site.
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110. Wolf, Arms and Innovation, pp. 187–207; Brinckerhoff and Chamberlin, “Army’s Search,” pp. 24–26.
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111. Westwood, Rifles, pp. 95–103. On Mauser being present at Plevna, see Hallahan, Misfire, p. 224.
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112. “For an Army Rifle,” New York Times, December 23, 1890, p. 3.
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Chapter 7
1. See R. E. Rice, “Smokeless Powder: Scientific and Institutional Contexts at the End of the Nineteenth Century,” in B. J. Buchanan, ed., Gunpowder, Explosives and the State: A Technological History (Aldershot [U.K.]/Burlington, Vt: Ashgate, 2006), p. 355.
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2. “Sconbein’s [sic] Explosive Cotton,” Scientific American 2, no. 8 (November 14, 1846), pp. 58, 64.
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3. “Gun Cotton,” Scientific American 3, no. 3 (October 8, 1847), p. 22, quoted in S. L. Norman, Guncotton to Smokeless Powder: The Development of Nitrocellulose as a Military Explosive, 1845–1929 (Unpub. Ph.D. diss., Providence, R.I.: Brown University, 1988), p. 42. Norman’s doctoral thesis is the essential reference text on this subject.
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4. “Flying Cotton,” Scientific American 2, no. 16 (January 9, 1847), p. 125. In the same issue the editors mentioned that E.W. Kent, a chemist of 116 John Street, New York, had provided them with a sample of this “wonderful article.” The guncotton was “as white and delicate in appearance, as the raw material, and would not be suspected of having