American Rifle - Alexander Rose [87]
During the 1870s, efforts to staunch the flow of modern guns were clearly failing. As early as 1873 Custer noticed during his expeditions along the Yellowstone River that he was up against Indians armed with “the latest improved patterns of breech-loading repeating rifles, and their supply of metallic rifle-cartridges seemed unlimited . . . Neither bows nor arrows were employed against us.”32
That was something of an exaggeration, but Custer’s observation was nevertheless a telling one. At the Little Bighorn in 1876, remembered Medal of Honor recipient Sergeant Charles Windolph of Captain Frederick Benteen’s Troop H, at least half the braves brought bows, arrows, and lances (as well as clubs, axes, and knives), and about a quarter used “odds and ends of old muzzle-loaders and single-shot rifles of various vintages.” Thus “not more than 25 or 30 per cent of the warriors carried modern repeating rifles.”33 Assuming fifteen hundred Indian warriors fought, then there were between 375 and 495 repeating rifles at the battle, the lower number being the more probable (according to statistical projections based on artifacts found at the battlefield).34 Whatever the exact number, Custer’s 220 men, armed with their single-shot Springfields, were hugely outmatched by just the repeater-armed Indians, let alone those carrying traditional weapons and old muskets.
In the early 1880s, having quit trying to reduce the supply of weapons—General Crook admitted in 1883 that “the Indians are now no longer our inferiors in equipment”—the government instead concentrated on controlling that of ammunition.35 The thinking was that since the newer types of cartridges could be manufactured only in specialist workshops and armories, eventually the Indians would be left with empty repeaters and forced to parley. Accordingly President Grant banned the sale of such ammunition in “country occupied by Indians, or subject to their visits, lying within the Territories of Montana, Dakota, and Wyoming and the states of Nebraska and Colorado.”36
Initially the prohibition seemed to work. On his first brush with renegade Indians, Private James Gillett of the Texas Rangers was confronted by one armed with a repeater but lacking any cartridges. Nevertheless Colonel Dodge soon noticed that the shortage had stimulated the “ordinarily uninventive brain[s]” of the Indians, and they had begun jerry-rigging their own ammunition. After buying from a trader “a box of the smallest percussion caps,” they forced one into the base of a spent casing until it was flush, then poured in some easily available powder before inserting a lead bullet produced by means of a conventional mold. Voilà, a homemade cartridge. The “Indians say,” reported Dodge, “that the shells thus reloaded are nearly as good as the original cartridge, and that the shells are frequently reloaded forty or fifty times.”37
By 1886, said Captain John Bourke, who attended a meeting between General Crook and his old foe Geronimo, any hope of controlling either firearms or ammunition had disappeared: “Twenty-four warriors listened to the conference or loitered within earshot; they were loaded down with metallic ammunition; some of it reloading and some not. Every man and boy in the band wore two cartridge belts.”38 Nevertheless Dodge’s claim that their recycled shells were “nearly as good” as virgin ones is unlikely, especially after the first ten or twenty times, when their rims would have been battered out of shape.
The ballistical quality of recycled cartridges was, at bottom, tangential, since the new Indian way of warfare was based not on accuracy but on mass firepower. With reused cartridges, homemade bullets, and crushed percussion caps, no man could hope to hit a barn door at two hundred yards. So long as the cartridges