American Rifle - Alexander Rose [93]
Hardened hunters regarded the traditional Indian method of riding among stampeding buffalo and killing at close range as crude, haphazard, and worse, unprofitable. To them, the whole point was to kill individually and with pinpoint accuracy while not startling a grazing herd. They devoted days to stalking the creatures and spent hours selecting a camouflaged position and patiently watching the quarry from a distance too far away for a gun’s report to be heard. Then, after affixing a newfangled telescopic sight to their weapon, one shot, one kill, always to the neck or heart.66 A single laggardly buffalo would fall unnoticed by the rest, and so mercilessly on and on until none were left. By such means the legendary buff runner Bob McRae, carrying a Remington .44-90-400 mounted with a Malcolm telescopic sight, once demolished a fifty-four-buffalo herd—in fifty-four shots.67 Another frontiersman, shooting with regular sights, used a .45 Sharps to kill 121 buffalo in a little over three hundred shots.68 And the aptly named Buffalo Bill, probably using his favorite Springfield, single-handedly bagged forty-eight in half an hour in a competition against a team of Pawnee scouts (who scored twenty-three).69
Makers of single-shot rifles adored the publicity such exploits garnered, but from a commercial standpoint, the professional market was insignificant compared to the wider, growing civilian demand for repeaters. The leading single-shot companies consequently fell into serious financial distress. The hallowed Sharps firm ended production sometime in 1881 or 1882 and disappeared.70 By the time of Samuel’s death in 1882 Remington was again deeply submerged in debt and went into receivership, whence it was bought out by Marcellus Hartley’s UMC in 1888 for the knockdown price of $200,000.71
The general shift toward repeaters had multiple causes. Many users discovered that single-shots were too powerful and weighty for their needs and plumped instead for a nice light repeater at the local store; these switchers were often settlers or fortune-hunters, and over time they numbered in the scores of thousands. It also helped that used repeaters were cheap (the government auctioned off its surplus Henrys and Spencers for around $12 and $6 respectively, or about 20 percent of their cost price), while a customized, specialized single-shot cost significantly more.72 Frank Collinson, a naïve seventeen-year-old Yorkshireman traveling out west for the first time, purchased a “ten-pound, forty-caliber, muzzle-loading rifle” from a wily outfitter but quickly discovered it was “too long and too heavy for a saddle gun.” So when he reached Arkansas, he sold it to a wagon-maker and bought a repeater.73
Annie Oakley, who owned hundreds of shotguns, rifles, and pistols and could justly claim to be the finest exhibition shooter in the world, proved to all that switching to a repeater did not automatically mark one as an amateur. She began her career in the early 1870s using Stevens .22-caliber single-shot sporting rifles, but by the 1890s even she had converted to a .32-caliber Winchester Model 1895 lever-action and a Marlin .22 repeater.74
Much to honest Annie’s disappointment, outlaws too were quick to adopt the repeater for professional business reasons. The troublemaking cowboys who would meet the Earps and Doc Holliday for that fatal gun-fight at the O.K. Corral were all known to be armed with products of the Winchester company.75 James Hobbs, a notorious scalp-hunter in Arizona and Nevada, never failed to carry two Henrys for his bloody occupation. In 1868, when he and his men chased one hundred Paiutes into Owens Lake (Nevada), his Henrys’ combined thirty-two-shot reserve proved useful. More than half the Indians were killed thrashing in the water.76
Inevitably, in order to keep pace, Texas Rangers and other lawmen also started using repeaters.77 In May 1866 Steve Venard, Nevada