First Freedom Page 17
In 1846, a twenty-three-year-old Harvard Law School graduate named Francis Parkman traveled west to live with the Plains Indian tribes, roaming with various parties between the Mississippi and the Rockies. In his widely read books and articles, Parkman offered eastern readers remarkably beautiful and meticulous accounts of the tribes and their relationship with the buffalo herds that blanketed North America. Over the next decades, Americans began to romanticize the Indians’ treatment of the bison and, in turn, take responsibility for their own role in decimating it. Things were, perhaps, not that simple.
What Parkman found was a bucolic lifestyle that featured plenty of guns. Before the 1840s, some historians estimate that 60,000 Plains Indians were killing about half a million bison a year for sustenance.9 The fact is that tribes killed as many as they could, but significant changes in climate and the introduction of disease were also big factors in finishing off the enormous bison herds. Indian tribes, galvanized by the introduction of the rifle, were just as inclined to overhunt and just as ready to compete for the buffalo hides as the newcomers.10
What’s more, the white men would not always have the upper hand. When tribes in the Montana Territory missed their federal deadline to move to the reservations in June 1876, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer and the 7th Cavalry were sent to compel the Indians to obey. When they showed up, a coalition of Lakota Sioux and Cheyenne warriors confronted them in the Battle of the Little Bighorn in the Montana Territory. The Americans were famously decimated. The five companies of the 7th Cavalry had been armed with their Army-issue Colt Single Action Army revolvers and their Model 1873 Springfield carbines. While these guns are said to have won the West, it was not to be on this day.
For more than a century after the battle, theories, including conspiratorial ones, swirled around the incident. The prevailing cultural depiction of Custer’s last stand includes overwhelmed American troops being slaughtered under hails of arrows. One theory had it that most of the American guns jammed, leaving the troops helpless. Later testing would confirm that the copper casings of the rounds that were lugged around by the troops in leather pouches formed a green film that sometimes fouled and jammed the guns when fired. This jamming of the rifles prevented extraction of the fired cartridge cases. The U.S. Army replaced the copper with brass moving forward.
Yet it is far more likely that Custer’s troops were simply and literally outgunned. While archaeologists who began excavating the sites of the battle in the 1980s found that the Lakota and Cheyenne used ancient weapons like lances, clubs, and arrows, they were also equipped with some of the most sophisticated firearms of the day. Forty-six models of guns were used by the warriors led by Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, and at least 415 separate guns were used by the Indians. The investigators found more than 2,000 spent cartridges. The Native Americans had an arsenal of the best American-made weaponry of the day: Colts, Henrys, Remingtons, Smith & Wessons, Sharpses, Spencers, and Winchesters, among many others.11
The first idealized version of Custer as a heroic figure falling in a hail of arrows came to Americans through one of Cody’s Wild West extravaganzas. In fact, by the time he was twenty-three, “Buffalo Bill” was already famous. Philip Sheridan, the assertive Civil War general and veteran of the Indian Wars, persuaded Cody to accompany him on a hunting trip with Russia’s Grand Duke Alexis. The event was widely reported on and Cody became nationally known. And in 1869, on a trip to New York, the hunter and soldier met Ned Buntline (whose real name was Edward Zane Carroll Judson Sr.), one of the early sensationalists of the western experience. Buntline falsely took credit for the Colt’s “Buntline Special”—a 16-inch-barreled version of the Colt Single Action Army revolver—although there is no evidence of his involvement in its creation or production. A prodigious womanizer, Buntline, who was also married at least seven times, was forced to move around the country to avoid the messy repercussions of his love life.
First Buntline wrote a completely fantastical biography of Buffalo Bill’s exploits, titled Buffalo Bill, the King of the Border Men, the first episode of which appeared in the popular New York Weekly newspaper. Later he convinced Cody to tell him his tales, which were immediately dramatized for the bestselling book The Scout of the Plains. Nearly 2,000 Buffalo Bill Westerns would be written, mostly concocted accounts written by one of his employees, Prentiss Ingraham. It was not until Owen Wister’s bestselling 1902 novel The Virginian, which depicts the rugged life of a cattle rancher in Wyoming, that Americans got their first true literary Western. By that time, the violent life of the cowboy and the gunfighter had been well established. Such images were further reinforced with the emergence of the rodeo and shooting contests adding to popular conceptions of the American West. Cody personified them in his books and shows.
By 1872, Buntline convinced Cody to come to Chicago with western personalities to put on a stage production of The Scout of the Plains. The group sat down and wrote their first play in only four hours.12 Despite reviews that pointed out the atrocious acting and implausible storylines—perhaps Cody was ill prepared to enact situations that he had never actually experienced—the play was a giant hit. Cody, who had a good sense of humor and a knack for showmanship, performed the play for the next eleven years. In 1883 he took the show on the road, forming Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, which brought together all the facets of western lore and life, including buffalo hunts, duels, reenactments of famous battles against Indians (including Custer’s last stand), and early rodeos. Often the shows featured Native Americans, real gunfighters, and buffalo. For the next thirty years, Bill performed in the show, which became a massive hit not only across North America but in Europe as well. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows were, as he coined it, “the Drama of Civilization.”
The most consistent and popular aspects of these shows focused on western battles, quick-draw dueling, and sharpshooting. Bill Hickok, now the “Prince of Pistoleers,” became one of Buffalo Bill’s most famous draws. In 1884, Cody met the four-foot-eleven-inch Phoebe Ann Mosey, the fifth child of a twice-widowed mother, performing trick shots at a circus in New Orleans. Mosey, soon to be known to the world as Annie Oakley, had shown amazing prowess with guns as a child in rural Ohio. As an adolescent, she trapped and hunted for food to help sustain her mother and half-dozen siblings. As a teenager, she began showing off her prodigious talents with a rifle for money. It was during this time that she challenged a trick-shot artist named Frank Butler to a contest and beat him. Butler became immediately enchanted, married her, became her manager, and stayed with her until their deaths only a week apart in 1926.13
Word spread as the couple toured the country, soon coming to the attention of Cody, who negotiated for a three-day trial run with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. They stayed on for sixteen years. In an era when deception was accepted as part of the entertainment, Oakley—no one is sure why she took the name—was the real deal. “Miss Annie Oakley,” “Little Sure Shot,” or “Little Miss Sure Shot” had an astounding capacity for shooting that combined with an understated assuredness and flash that could rarely be matched.
There would be other sharpshooters—women as well—yet none could match Annie Oakley’s showmanship and skill. She could shoot holes in playing cards that were thrown in the air by her husband from thirty paces. At ninety paces she could hit a dime, snuff out a candle flame, and shoot the ash off a cigarette. In 1885 she participated in a nine-hour contest, hitting 4,772 glass balls out of 5,000. She once took a $5,000 bet that she could hit forty out of fifty pigeons at thirty yards. She hit forty-nine. She performed in front of Queen Victoria and King Umberto I of Italy, and supposedly shot the ashes off a cigarette held by German kaiser Wilhelm II. She became a huge draw for Wild Bill and soon an international star.
We can never know how many women in the West and rural areas mastered their rifles and revolvers. But Oakley was a champion of the sport and spoke about guns with the kind of conviction that would be familiar to any Second Amendment advocate these da
ys. She gave women lessons on shooting and advocated that they take up guns. “I want to see women rise superior to that old-fashioned terror of firearms,” she said. “I would like to see every woman know how to handle them as naturally as they know how to handle babies.”14 Oakley encouraged women not only to own guns but to use them in self-defense. “I have had an ideal for my sex,” she once wrote. “I have wanted them to be able to protect their homes.”15 Oakley liked to tuck a revolver into an umbrella when taking walks alone in case she was attacked, even demonstrating her system of self-protection in the Cincinnati Times-Star. “If I were accosted, I could easily fire,” she told the paper. “A woman cannot always rely on getting help just by calling for it.” When the New York State legislature passed a bill barring women from having guns in the home, she spoke publicly against it.
In 1894, Oakley and Butler performed in a Thomas Edison Kinetoscope production and appeared in “Little Sure Shot” of the “Wild West,” an exhibition of rifle shooting at glass balls, one of the first films ever made. In April 1898, long after she was world-famous, Oakley wrote President William McKinley, offering the government the services of a company of fifty “lady sharpshooters” who would provide their own arms and ammunition should war break out with Spain.16
One imagines the Spanish were lucky that she was rebuffed.
Oakley’s rise signified the nadir of the Old West. In October 1901, a freight train would crash into another train carrying many of the performers of Buffalo Bill’s show. More than a hundred horses perished in the accident. Oakley was severely injured, although she recovered. But by then America was already moving on. Cody’s friend Wild Bill, who almost always sat facing the doorway of whatever room he was in, had made the lethal mistake of taking a chair facing away from the door of the Nuttal & Mann’s Saloon in Deadwood, Dakota Territory, in 1872. He was shot in the back of the head with a Colt Model 1873 Single Action Army at point-blank range by a man named Jack McCall. Cody, on the other hand, died peacefully in 1917, surrounded by friends a day after being baptized in the Catholic Church at the age of seventy. Annie Oakley lived until 1926, when she passed away from old age, followed by her husband eighteen days later. By this time, however, the guns that had made Western heroes famous were nothing but romantic relics of a time long past. The next evolution of firearms would be the most consequential. Its genesis went back to the mid-nineteenth century and the American Civil War, but its capabilities would truly be felt initially in Europe during the first mechanized war.
In Annie Oakley’s forty years of shooting, Americans went from firing one bullet at a time to firing hundreds per minute. They went from stuffing a lead ball down the muzzles of rifles to feeding perpetual firing machines with cartridges in high-capacity magazines. The era of rapid fire was here.
PART III
MODERNITY
Recruits, 18th Penn. N.G., Pittsburgh
14
HELLFIRE
“The discharge can be made with all desirable accuracy as rapidly as one hundred and fifty times per minute, and may be continued for hours without danger.”1
—Scientific American magazine
Battery Gun by Richard Jordan Gatling
They showed us the new battery gun on wheels—the Gatling gun, or rather, it is a cluster of six to ten savage tubes that carry great conical pellets of lead, with unerring accuracy, a distance of two and a half miles,” Mark Twain remarked in one of his 1868 columns. “It feeds itself with cartridges, and you work it with a crank like a hand organ; you can fire it faster than four men can count. When fired rapidly, the reports blend together like the clattering of a watchman’s rattle. It can be discharged four hundred times a minute! I liked it very much.”2
Dr. Richard Jordan Gatling’s hand-driven machine gun was far more reliable and faster than any other gun before it, introducing to the battlefield the prospect of continuous firing of weaponry. Twain may have found the creation to his liking, but for millions of soldiers in the upcoming century the idea of unremitting fire added a specter of violence that altered conflicts in the bloodiest way imaginable—for both the soldiers and their commanders. When a Union army of the Civil War sparingly used a hand-cranked Gatling gun for covering fire during skirmishes around Petersburg, Virginia, in 1862, it held little consequence. By the time World War I ended, the British estimated that machine guns had been responsible for somewhere around 80 percent of all casualties.3
None of this was the intention of Gatling. Born on a southern plantation to a slave-owning father in North Carolina in 1818, the inventor, who would have friends on both sides of the Civil War, lived a restless life, moving often and dabbling in an array of professions, including spending time as a county clerk, merchant, planter, and dry goods store clerk. Gatling moved to St. Louis in 1844 and became a doctor, or what passed as a doctor in those days, although he never practiced, before ending up in Indianapolis on the eve of the Civil War, where he worked in speculative real estate.
In 1861, the year war broke out, Gatling attended a lecture in Ohio where he heard a speaker expounding on the lifesaving benefits of breech-loading weapons and quicker reloading times. The speech sparked an idea that began to percolate in his mind. Spurred by the horrors of war, his notions about speedy firing began to gain traction. “It occurred to me,” he wrote a friend in 1877, recalling the daily comings and goings of the wounded, sick, and dead in the early days of the war, “that if I could invent a machine—a gun—which could by its rapidity of fire, enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred, that it would, to a great extent, supersede the necessity of large armies, and consequently, exposure to battle and disease be greatly diminished. I thought over the subject and finally this idea took practical form in the invention of the Gatling Gun.”
Gatling had already witnessed wounded Union infantrymen returning to Indianapolis. Although the men he saw slogging back from the bloody battlefields of the Civil War were lucky to have escaped with their lives, many had done so with catastrophic injuries. With the great technological advances of weaponry in the mid-1800s came a wave of shattered bones and lead amputations. The sheer numbers of casualties were shocking. For many years Civil War casualties were thought to be around 620,000, but now some historians put the estimates much higher. “The number of men dying in the Civil War is more than in all other American wars from the American Revolution through the Korean War combined,” J. David Hacker, a demographic historian from Binghamton University in New York, has written. “And consider that the American population in 1860 was about 31 million people, about one-tenth the size it is today. If the war were fought today, the number of deaths would total 6.2 million.” Using digitized census records from the 1800s, Hacker has recalculated the number of casualties to be closer to 750,000, and many scholars are increasingly coming around to this view.
Whatever the actual number was, it was unprecedented. It is true that most Americans who died during the war did so from disease and factors that did not include being shot at by the enemy. Still, at least 100,000 from each side perished in battle. The Civil War featured soldiers with increasingly advanced weapons and ammunition, and yet most of the military leaders didn’t grasp the consequences, using antiquated methods to deploy their troops and weapons.
It is unsurprising, then, that doctors were initially unprepared to deal with the overwhelming number of wounds and injuries. In the mid-nineteenth century, medical school was often no more than two years—if that. Many Army doctors at the outset of the Civil War were nothing more than political appointments or, worse, quacks. There was not only a dearth of doctors, but of the doctors who did deal with bullet wounds, only a fraction had ever performed surgery before the war. Of the 11,000 Union doctors, only 500 had any surgical experience before the war. In the Confederacy, only 27 of the 3,000 doctors had prewar surgical experience.4
Yet the truth about how Americans wrestled with the repercussions of new gun technology is complicated. The common perception is that physicians
during the Civil War knew precious little about sterilization or infections, and permitted unsanitary conditions that cost many lives. As the war progressed and family members saw the results of these amputations and wounds for the first time, the reputation of the doctors diminished and a distorted view of their work began to first coalesce.
It is true that surgeons did not even wash their hands before sticking and prodding wounds to determine if they should amputate. They often used blood-splattered sponges and dipped them into dirty water to clean the wounds. Most of this was due not to negligence but rather a lack of knowledge. In many ways, the Civil War saw great advancements in medicine. Doctors were not the hapless butchers often depicted in movies and novels. One of the grisly benefits of the war, in fact, was the ability of doctors to study outcomes. As war pushed man toward innovative new ways of killing, it also pushed others toward advances in lifesaving techniques.
Compiled by the government, The Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion was a massive six-volume work detailing medical care during the war. It found that of the 174,000 wounds inflicted during the conflict, around 4,600 were treated with surgical extraction and nearly 30,000 ended up as amputations. The mortality rate among the latter was 26 percent. To put this number in context, during the Franco-Prussian War fought in 1870, the mortality rate for amputations was 76 percent.5 Moreover, by 1846, anesthesia using ether had been developed. The next year saw the use of chloroform. Anesthesia was used by war doctors in approximately 80,000 cases for the Union and 54,000 for the Confederates, saving thousands of soldiers horrifying pain, most often brought on by amputation. Civil War doctors soon discovered that amputation performed within twenty-four to forty-eight hours after being wounded—“primary amputation”—saved lives. These procedures were performed quickly by sawing off limbs in a circular motion. The amputations were most often left to heal by granulation, in which thick tissue was allowed to naturally form around the wound. If not, surgeons used the “fish-mouth” method, cutting flaps of skin that were sewn into a rounded stump. These amputations were many, and they would be a constant reminder of the war.