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  “You are right, Colonel Scott,” Berdan allegedly answered. “I always fire from the shoulder.”

  “What point are you going to fire at?” Scott asked.

  “The head,” Berdan said as he took aim.

  “Fire at the right eye!” Scott shouted desperately.19

  Apparently, Berdan did. When the target was brought to him, with a bullet hole in Davis’s head, Lincoln laughed. And as he climbed into his carriage, he said, “Colonel, come down tomorrow, and I will give you the order for the breechloaders.” This story, retold by nineteenth-century historians, paints an exceptionally neat picture of the emergence of the breechloader. At first the regiments were firing Colt five-shot revolving rifles, better than muzzleloaders, on the front. “It was a proud morning for us,” one of Berdan’s men wrote, “as we marched past camp after camp, and battery after battery, waiting for us to get ahead and for their places in the column.” They performed admirably, disrupting enemy lines, taking their shots at officers and artillerymen. Soon many more Union troops were equipped with superior single-shot breech-loading rifles. The simplicity and precision made these guns popular not only with Civil War snipers but, as we’ll see, civilians, hunters, and soldiers in the West.

  The South recruited their own sharpshooters to push back against the Union snipers. They would often be hampered by inferior guns, although they made great efforts to get their hands on Union arms. “Soon after we reached Yorktown, we discovered the rebels had Sharp Shooters also,” wrote one officer, “and I will give them the credit of having as good shots as I ever saw, and some better than I want to see again.” The two sides became ensnared in sniper dueling that foreshadowed future wars. But the Spencer—and other guns like it—was a mechanically complex arm whose manufacture was beyond the capability of Southern industry.

  Even if they had been able to produce the technological advances of the North, the South simply did not have the capacity to manufacture metallic cartridges used by the repeaters or make the guns themselves. The North wasn’t inhibited by a lack of industrialization—although perhaps they lacked some imagination. By the time Ripley was replaced by Lincoln in 1863, Spencer had already set up shop in a Boston piano factory and began delivering weapons. But the rise of the repeating rifle would still be slow going. To put it in perspective, the Union would purchase fewer than 100,000 repeating rifles and make 1.5 million muzzle-loading rifles during the war.20

  Even when soldiers did get their hands on the new repeaters, the armies that deployed them had not yet developed proper doctrines for their use.21 The guns’ benefits—range and speed—were often negated when commanders utilized troops equipped with the gun as if they were muzzle-loading percussion cap rifles, the prevailing weapons of the Civil War to the very end. Many battles were still being decided using tactics of mass formation and armies lining up at 100 yards, throwing lead volleys at each other.

  However, Ripley’s contention that rapid-firing rifles were wasteful did not come true. “There is no doubt that the Spencer carbine is the best fire-arm yet put into the hands of the soldier, both for economy of ammunition and maximum effect, physical and moral,” Major General James H. Wilson noted.22 “Our best officers estimate one man armed with it [is] equivalent to three with any other arm. I have never seen anything else like the confidence inspired by it in the regiments or brigades which have it.”23 Or, in somewhat starker terms, a Confederate soldier is said to have remarked that the guns could be “loaded on Sunday and fired all week.”24

  Spencers were used by American cavalry and civilians on the frontier after the Civil War, but wartime production created a surplus that undermined the company’s future. By the end of 1868 the Spencer Repeating Rifle Company was no more and Spencer himself signed a deal with the Winchester company, selling them all his future repeating rifle designs and improvements. The War Department eventually fully came around to the new breech-loading rifles. The problem was cost. The war-weary nation had taken on considerable debt and was in no mood for ratcheting up military spending.

  With this problem in mind, Erskine Allin, a self-taught gun engineer who had risen through the ranks of the Army to become master armorer at the U.S. Armory at Springfield, hatched an idea. Why not take the thousands of existing muzzleloaders—with their perfectly sound barrels and butts—and convert them to breechloaders? Allin came up with the idea of a “trapdoor” to the receiver. Basically, this entailed cutting off the back end of a Civil War musket and fitting it with a trapdoor that could fit a cartridge. The armory would convert more than 25,000 Springfield Model 1863 rifles with these trapdoor breech systems. The Model 1873, adopted by the United States War Department, became the fifth iteration of Allin’s design. These Springfields were no longer shipped to the South to quell a rebellion but rather to the West to conquer a continent.

  12

  FASTEST GUN IN THE WEST

  “When the war closed, I buried the hatchet, and I won’t fight now unless I’m put upon.”

  —Wild Bill Hickok

  Wild Bill Hickok

  At around six p.m. on July 21, 1865, “Wild” Bill Hickok, sometime gunman, lawman, gambler, and former Union spy, spotted Davis Tutt, a former Confederate soldier, emerging from the Springfield, Missouri, courthouse on the north end of the town square. “Dave, don’t cross that square with my watch,” he instructed Tutt.1

  What happened next was the violent culmination of a dispute that had spilled over from the day before at the Lyon House Hotel gambling hall. There, Hickok had reportedly refused to play cards with Tutt due to a long-standing dispute over a gambling debt—although others claimed the two were quarreling over a woman. Whatever the cause, and there would be countless versions of the story, Tutt was holding one of Hickok’s favorite possessions, his gold pocket watch.

  The tension was immediately palpable as both parties understood what would happen next. Hickok and Tutt squared up in the sensible sideways stance of the gunfighter, not in the open stance so often depicted in old Hollywood Westerns, which would have been suicidal. For a few apprehensive seconds the two stared at each other. Then Tutt, considered a good shot by most who knew him, made the catastrophic decision of reaching for his six-shot revolver. According to witnesses, two shots were fired, although they sounded as one. In a flash, Tutt clutched his chest, stumbled toward the courthouse, spun around a column, and uttered the words “Boys, I am killed” before falling to the ground.

  Hickok was arrested, charged, and speedily acquitted, in what can only be termed a blatant case of jury nullification. Not that this sort of frontier justice was rare. The men who sat on juries in the Old West regularly ignored the letter of the law and leaned on conceptions of fairness that comported with the realities of their environment and place. Tutt had embarrassed Hickok, after all. And it had been a fair fight.

  Because of the duel, Hickok’s fortunes soon turned forever and a new mythology was born. In September of that year, a writer for Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, George Ward Nichols, interviewed the gunfighter and, with great specificity, detailed his exploits for a story that appeared in the February 1867 issue, turning the then-unknown gunfighter into one of the great legends of the Old West. In the piece, Nichols described Hickok as “6'2", long flowing hair, chest like a barrel, thin waist adorned by twin Colts, graceful, dignified bearing . . .” From then on, gunfighters, criminals, gamblers, and lawmen—sometimes the very same person over a long and wayward career—would be immortalized in magazine articles and dime-store Westerns that were sold across the United States. The folklores created by these writers would in due time be picked up by novelists, painters, musicians, and Hollywood studios, and persist to this day. Many men portrayed in these books did indeed lead hardscrabble existences tinged with genuine violence and danger. But these grizzled showmen learned to dramatize their stories for money, adorning them with exciting and romantic flourishes. Few were as good at it as Wild Bill.

  James Butler Hickok’s family had ventured from M
assachusetts—one great-grandfather had grabbed a musket and met the British on their march to Concord—to Vermont before ending up in Illinois. “Bill,” who would take his grandfather’s name, was born in 1837. By the time he hit his late teens, Hickok was on his way to Kansas, where a civil war was playing out over the question of slavery. Bleeding Kansas saw violent political confrontations and terrorism between anti-slavery Free-Staters and pro-slavery “Border Ruffians.” Hickok joined the former, becoming a skilled gunman, soldier, and spy. After the war, the young man used those skills to work—at least according to his own telling of his life—as a wagoner, a scout, a lawman, a gambler, and what can rightly be described as a performance artist.

  It was Hickok’s gunfight with Tutt that dominated cultural depictions of the Western duel. Americans had taken to dueling rather quickly over the years. Unlike Europe, where these deadly contests were based on aristocratic honor codes and restricted to men of certain classes, in egalitarian America men of all backgrounds could and did participate. “In France, one hardly ever fights a duel except in order to be able to say that one has done so,” Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in 1831, noting the more violent tinge of dueling. “In America one only fights to kill; one fights because one sees no hope of getting one’s adversary condemned to death.”2 The “Code Duello,” written by an Irishman in 1777, contained more than two dozen rules for aspiring duelists (for example, the number of shots or wounds that would satisfy honor) that were often followed by Americans. In 1838, South Carolina governor and dueling enthusiast John Lyde Wilson wrote an American version of the dueling etiquette called The Code of Honor; or Rules for the Government of Principals and Seconds in Duelling. The book offers not only a fascinating look into the honor codes of the pre–Civil War South but also the rationalizations for it. “If a man be smote on one cheek in public, and he turns the other which is also smitten, and he offers no resistance, but blesses him that so despitefully used him,” explained the theatrical Wilson, “I am aware that he is in the exercise of great christian forbearance, highly recommended and enjoined by many very good men, but utterly repugnant to those feelings which nature and education have implanted in the human character.”3

  These wouldn’t be the only American figures to engage in the practice. The populist president Andrew Jackson allegedly participated in six duels over his lifetime. These sometimes deadly run-ins were typically prompted by some untoward talk about Jackson’s wife, Rachel, who, it was said, had married the future president without properly divorcing her previous husband. Jackson, shot in the chest in one of these confrontations, staunched his wound and proceeded to gun down his antagonist. Jackson, in fact, was wounded three times total while dueling. Most often, however, men would do a lot of talking about dueling but little shooting. No less an American hero than the young Abraham Lincoln was nearly involved in a duel before honor was restored. In the Wild West, there was less time for seconds to work out the differences between men.

  With the flood of men seeking adventure and riches came brutality, and new guns were easier to use in rapidity and thus far more deadly. It’s one thing for an aggrieved man to shoot a flintlock pistol in the general direction of his rival, and quite another thing to engage in spontaneous acts of violence with six-shot revolvers and repeating rifles. Many authors and editors made a good living romanticizing the Old West for audiences back home, bringing them the graceful heroics of gunslingers and adventurers. Yet in truth many of the men they wrote about were cruel and immoral, with little real gallantry or heroism to speak of. Many of the most famous Western duels were really nothing more than cold-blooded murder.

  In the West, duels rarely featured protracted negotiations to recover honor. In male-dominated frontier towns that sprung up at the intersections of cattle trails and railroad stops, where ranchers, prospectors, gamblers, and merchants would carouse, drink, and compete, violence was often the only way to preserve one’s dignity—and vengeance was often taken spontaneously. Few of these encounters ended in a Hollywood-like showdown. Most often combatants opened fire during drunken brawls or engaged in small-scale warfare that pitted feuding clans and interests against each other. “Where this is the common custom, brawls or personal difficulties are seldom if ever settled by blows,” wrote Bill Hickok’s friend General George Armstrong Custer. “The quarrel is not from a word to a blow, but from a word to the revolver, and he who can draw and fire first is the best man. No civil law reaches him; none is applied for. In fact there is no law recognized beyond the frontier but that of ‘might makes right.’ ”4

  Many of these men were legendary for being “the fastest gun in the West.” Yet, while speed was important—men like Wild Bill Longley, another probable psychopath, was reputed to be able to outdraw anyone, and often did—most gunmen didn’t rely on the quick draw to survive. For one thing, though some holstered their guns, many did not. Western gunmen, as we can plainly see in the majority of surviving pictures from that era, preferred carrying their pistols in their pockets or in their belts. “Whenever you get into a row be sure and not shoot too quick,” Hickok explained. “Take time. I’ve known many a feller to slip up for shootin’ in a hurry.”5

  In the fantastic and also largely fictitious 1880 book, The Life and Marvelous Adventures of Wild Bill, the Scout, Being a True and Exact History of All the Sanguinary Combats and Hair-breadth Escapes of the Most Famous Scout and Spy America Ever Produced, James W. Buel claimed that one of Bill’s favorite activities was charging onlookers a dollar to see him shoot a silver dime from fifty paces. “He would place the dime in a position that the sun’s rays would concentrate on it, thus affording him a good sight” before sending a bullet through the dime “nine times out of ten,” writes the author. In another trick, Hickok drove a cork through the neck of a bottle from thirty paces, knocking the bottom out without breaking the neck. He could shoot a chicken’s head off “at thirty or forty paces nineteen times out of twenty.” Some of these were plausible, as many Western heroes entertained crowds with their incredible proficiency with guns. This was an American tradition, after all.

  And shoot they did. “The fear of the law is not half so great as the fear of the bullet with characters we have to deal with,” a ranch foreman in Texas would say in 1879.6 Tutt, for example, had not been the first person Hickok gunned down. In 1861, a man named Dave McCanles mocked Wild Bill, insulting his courage and manhood. So naturally, as a measure of revenge, the twenty-four-year-old began an affair with his tormentor’s mistress. When McCanles learned of the relationship, he tracked Hickok down inside a train station and threatened to whip him. “There will be one less son-of-a-bitch when you try that,” Hickok claimed to have replied. When McCanles ignored this threat, Hickok shot him in the chest.

  He wasn’t alone. Clay Allison’s tombstone may read “Gentleman, Gun Fighter,” but in truth the man was probably a homicidal maniac, the kind of person who allegedly cut off another gunman’s head and carried it thirty miles in a sack before placing it on a bar and having a drink. The infamous gunfighter John King Fisher gunned down unarmed men as a matter of habit, including members of his own gang. James “Killer” Miller, a teetotaling Methodist, also moonlighted as a paid assassin who began a decades-long killing spree by offing his own brother-in-law. To call him a “gunfighter” might be a generous concession, considering most often he would use his double-barreled shotgun to finish off the unsuspecting victims. After evading conviction for years, Miller was finally lynched by a Texas mob in 1909, reportedly yelling “Let ’er rip” before stepping off the crate he was on to finish the hanging himself.7

  As with many other figures of the West who concocted stories about their own lives, it’s difficult to know how many were assassinated by the infamous gunman John Wesley Hardin, who maintained he shot down forty-two men, although he was indicted on a still-impressive twenty-seven bodies. At fourteen Hardin stuck a knife into another boy who insulted him. At fifteen he emptied his revolver into another boy to whom he had lost
a wrestling match. When a group of Union soldiers caught up with him, Hardin claimed: “I waylaid them, as I had no mercy on men whom I knew only wanted to get my body to torture and kill.”8

  Henry “Billy the Kid” McCarty, perhaps the most famous of the gunfighters, was a marauding thief and murderer who purportedly pulled his gun, a .44-caliber Colt Peacemaker, at the slightest provocation. There were others, of course: Sam Bass, “Curly Bill” Brocius, Doc Holliday, Jesse James, Butch Cassidy and Henry Longabaugh (the “Sundance Kid”), and noted lawmen like Dallas Stoudenmire (most famous for the “Four Dead in Five Seconds Gunfight”), Wyatt Earp, and many others. Many of these men had careers as lawmen and criminals. Some of them were honorable. Some of them were frauds. Few of them cared much about the ancient code of gentlemen. Most died violently at the wrong end of a gun.

  Virtually every man on the frontier owned a gun. Many had been brought back from the battlefields of the Civil War, but the eastern manufacturers were making serviceable weapons at affordable prices. The new revolvers, owing to the ease with which they could be used and carried, were both widespread and dangerous. Once Smith & Wesson’s patent ran out, the all-in-one cartridge came to dominate the guns of the West made by nearly every manufacturer.9 “In the streets one constantly meets hardy, sun-tanned men with long hair and beards who carry unconcealed in their belts the hunting knife and revolver, inseparable companions of the plainsman,” wrote the French émigré Philippe Régis de Trobriand on a visit to Omaha.10 The Colt was the most popular of these revolvers. “Wild Bill always carried two handsome ivory-handled revolvers of the large size; he was never seen without them,” wrote Hickok’s friend George Custer. Hickok’s waist, George Ward Nichols noted, was “girthed by a belt which held two Colt’s Navy revolvers.” Hickok had pulled his favorite .36-caliber, six-shot, 1851-built revolver on Davis Tutt.