American Rifle - Alexander Rose [89]
Another attraction of the single-shot rifle was the splendid array of ammunitions available, enabling shooters to fine-tune their requirements as the situation demanded. For smaller prey like wolves (or men), the shooter could buy, say, the .40-100-190—the first number denotes the caliber, the second, the powder grains in the charge, and the third, the weight of the bullet expressed in grains; this one was a small cartridge whose light bullet and large charge allowed a very high and accurate velocity at the expense of penetrating power. By way of comparison, the Sharps company’s monstrous “Big Fifty,” which first appeared in 1872, bore a bullet weighing between 335 and 550 grains powered by 90 grains of powder. Over time American ammunition manufacturers would introduce such cartridges as the .50-70, .45-550, .44-60, .44-90, .45-100, .40-50, and a dozen others, for as many market niches and specialized tasks as they could conceive.
The most famous cartridge of all would be the .45-70-405, selected by the government in 1873 as its standard-issue army ammunition for the Springfield. The .45-70—fondly known as the “ounce of lead”—was widely copied by civilian manufacturers (Winchester, Sharps, Remington, Marlin, and Hotchkiss, among others), and part of its universal appeal was that with its customary 405-grain bullet, it was effective against Indians at long range—at 700 yards, the .45-70 drilled 7.3 inches deep into white pine boards—but when customized with a 500-grainer, it killed the horses they rode on, or a buffalo.45 It was by no means a coincidence that the “furor of slaughter” (in Colonel Dodge’s words) of the buffalo reached its zenith in 1873, the exact moment when lethally accurate single-shot breech-loaders were achieving theirs.46
The most perfect single-shot breech-loader of all was undoubtedly the Remington rolling-block rifle. The Remington company had been founded in Ilion Gulph, New York, in 1816 by the rake-thin, stiff-collared Eliphalet Remington II, a man who even his enthusiastic biographer concedes had “no trace whatever of humor.”47 For fun, he repeatedly read Milton’s Paradise Lost.
In the 1840s, taking a leaf from John Hall’s Rifle Works at Harpers Ferry, the company began experimenting with the use of machine tools to increase production. Then on a business trip in 1845 Eliphalet met William Jenks, inventor of a breech-loading weapon lately sold to the navy. Remington liked him so much, he bought the company. Two years later the improved Remington-Jenks rifle was in the hands of the Marines who immortally stormed the “Halls of Montezuma” at the Battle of Chapultepec during the Mexican War. Jenks himself died soon afterward by falling off the top of a hay wagon as it entered a barn whose door was somewhat lower than he expected.48
From midway through the Civil War, Remington rifles (and pistols) found a customer in the U.S. government, which had been impressed by the sturdy single-shot weapons and negotiated contracts with Eliphalet’s three sons—Philo (the mechanic), Samuel (the salesman), and Eliphalet III (the manager)—who had inherited the growing company upon their father’s death from overwork in August 1861. Two years later one of their employees, Leonard Geiger, developed a curious “split-breech” rifle in which the hammer blocked an opening at the back of the breech. Intrigued, the post– Ripley Ordnance Department ordered twenty thousand of them at $24 each. As a present to the troops, every fifth Geiger version of the Remington was equipped with a miniature coffee-grinder embedded in the wooden stock, but more important, it formed the basis for the rolling-block breech mechanism to come.49
a) The range, evolution, and multiple forms of bullet technology in the nineteenth century. This is merely a small selection. Numbers 1 to 3 are traditional minié balls; Number 4 is a hexagonal bullet; Numbers 5, 6, and 7 are French bullets used in the Crimean War; Numbers 8 and 9 are German bullets; Number 10 is a Sardinian bullet; Numbers 11 and 12 are Swiss ones; Number 13, the