Quote:
Originally Posted by tw
Rarely did a family have more than one rifle.
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I don't think tw has a source for this one -- and speedily enough, new hardware stores in new towns filled any lack in any event. There was not at any point a huge surplus of supply to demand on the frontier, either. Among rifles, the Spencers, Winchesters, and Henrys (really, the proto-Winchester lever-action) were available at army-surplus prices to both traders and emigrants -- but this is the overall, nationwide picture.
Quote:
Originally Posted by tw
Even after the Civil War, Custard's company only had single shot rifles at Little Big Horn.
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Spelling Custer's name that badly in that fashion
and being unaware of it reduces the entire post to a childish joke -- or else should be a datum about the perils of relying on the spellchecker in the machine instead of in the wetware. This is why tw can't claim a mighty intellect when he's up against me. The man
cannot write well, yet through some florid madness persists in writing nonetheless, with never a scintilla of improvement in either copy or commonsense.
The Army at the time of Little Big Horn (1876) did have the rather peculiar idea that breechloader cartridge conversions of the Springfield rifle musket would make logistics less trouble through being single-shot. The real reason was funding -- and tens of thousands of rifle muskets available for a conversion kit that was undeniably cheaper than buying cartridge repeaters new. Hence, the trapdoor Springfield, which stayed in at least reserve service up through the Spanish-American War. Call it thirty-five years. Perhaps the most extravant portion of the conversion was the rebarrelling to .50 and .45 calibers and the creation of two new cartridges, the .50-70 and the .45-70 Government. (And England did something equivalent with its 1853 Enfield -- it became the Snider.)