American Rifle - Alexander Rose [85]
The great Wagon Box Fight—eight months after the Fetterman Massacre, and again involving the beleaguered occupants of Fort Phil Kearny—further demonstrated that at this early stage in the Indian wars Red Cloud’s Sioux were not only poorly armed but were unfamiliar with modern weaponry. On August 2, 1867, Captain James Powell and a detachment of twenty-six infantrymen escorting four woodcutters—the size of the bodyguard was testament to the prevailing sense of danger—were assailed by a force of anywhere between one and two thousand Indians. As the men sought shelter within an oval-shaped ring of wheel-less wagons, the outlook did look grim.
Since Fetterman’s death, “thanks to God and Lieutenant-General Sherman” (in the words of Private Samuel Gibson), the men at Fort Phil Kearny had received brand-new Springfield breech-loaders. Even so Gibson, fearfully sitting alongside Sergeant McQuiery and Private John Grady in a wooden wagon box, watched them take their shoes off and pull out the laces. He wondered why. Each man in the detachment, they explained, was making a loop to fit over his right foot and would tie the other end to his Springfield’s trigger “to kill themselves when all hope was lost.” His companions told Gibson that when the Indians overwhelmed them, “every man would stand erect, place the muzzle of his loaded rifle under his chin and take his own life, rather than be captured and made to endure the inevitable torture.” A splendid idea, thought Gibson, who “had just taken off my own shoes and made loops in the strings when the firing began.”
Once Gibson and his colleagues had fired their first shot, a group of Indians charged within 150 yards of them and halted. Gibson realized that “they were sitting on their ponies wait[ing] for us to draw ramrods for reloading, as they supposed we were yet using the old muzzle-loaders.” Their flipping open the breechblocks to reload “puzzled the Indians, and they were soon glad to withdraw to a safe distance.”20
Sergeant Max Littman remembered that some three hundred Indians advanced on his side of the corral on foot, very slowly, and after a volley they began running forward. Following a second volley, they “still came on with wild cries and shrill war whoops, thinking, no doubt, that once our guns were empty they could break over the corral and score an easy victory.” But after a third volley at two hundred feet, the mystified attackers “broke and fled for the hills.”
The new Springfields had performed wonders, but still Littman admitted that if the enemy had “advanced steadily with their entire force,” the fight would have lasted but five minutes, as “it would have been simply impossible on our part to have loaded and fired rapidly enough to have prevented” them from overrunning the wagons.21 Numbers still counted, and though breech-loading, single-shot Springfields were powerful, they were nowhere near as fast as a Spencer repeater. Other soldiers and settlers would soon take this lesson to heart.
Nevertheless, when Custer’s Seventh Cavalry—again armed with standard Springfields, and again engulfed by an ocean of numbers—was slaughtered to a man at the Little Bighorn, the conspiratorial idea that Indians were armed with the most modern weaponry gained traction. The government was blamed, mostly. Captain Charles King, a well-known commentator, blamed the “silk-hatted functionaries” from Washington whose “cheap oratory . . . about the Great Father and guileless red men” prompted them to invite chiefs into the White House, whence they returned to their reservations “laden down with new and improved rifles and ammunition.” In the meantime King and his men were left to bury their dead.22
Notwithstanding King’s accusations that advanced weaponry had changed hands,