American Gun: A History of the U.S. In Ten Firearms (5 page)

The Texans would have had American long rifles, but also “blunderbuss” short-range muskets, carbines (a shorter version of the musket or rifle, often preferred by cavalry), bird guns, and some pistols here and there. The Texans may even have had a few guns featuring the new “caplock” or percussion-cap firing mechanism, which was a big improvement on the flintlock because it replaced the troublesome flash pan and flint with a sturdy, waterproof copper cap that triggered a spark when it was struck. Toss in some Bowie knives, tomahawks, and Belduques (a long fighting knife similar to the Bowie), and you’ve got yourself a gang that can really do some damage.

During the Battle of the Alamo, one legendary American long-rifleman was spotted on the wall by Captain Rafael Soldana of the Mexican Army. The “tall man with flowing hair” on the wall wore “a buckskin suit with a cap all of a pattern entirely different from those worn by his comrades. This man would rest his long gun and fire, and we all learned to keep a good distance when he was seen to make ready to shoot. He rarely missed his mark, and when he fired, he always rose to his feet and calmly reloaded his gun, seemingly indifferent to the shots fired at him by our men. He had a strong, resonant voice and often railed at us.”

Soldana later learned the man was known as “Kwockey”—the national celebrity frontiersman and former congressman Davy Crockett.

After almost two weeks of siege, Mexicans punched through the Alamo’s flimsy defenses and killed or massacred all but two of the Texan defenders of the Alamo, including Crockett. A month later, when General Santa Anna ordered the cold-blooded bayonet-and-bullet massacre of 353 more Texan prisoners near Goliad on Palm Sunday, March 27, terrified Texas civilians started fleeing eastward.

The panicked exodus was called the Runaway Scrape, and Texas General Sam Houston assumed the role of Skedaddler-in-Chief. Day after day, Sam led his troops eastward, away from Santa Anna, moving as fast as he could in the direction of Louisiana. Texas politicians were appalled, as were some of Sam’s own troops. They publicly wondered if he was a coward.

“The King of the Wild Frontier”: Born in Tennessee, Davy Crockett died, long rifle in hand, defending the Alamo in 1836.

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But Houston was just biding his time, looking for an opening to turn around and strike. The deeper Santa Anna marched into Texas, the more worn out his troops and equipment got. Camped near the meeting of the San Jacinto River and the Buffalo Bayou, Santa Anna decided it was time for a siesta on the afternoon of April 21, 1836. He forgot to post sentries. His men lay snoozing as a burly, mangy-looking Sam Houston and his more than eight hundred Texans and their allies snuck up through the cover of a forested hill, led by a contingent of uniformed Kentucky riflemen. “Now hold your fire, men,” Houston cautioned, “until you get the order!”

It was time for payback, Texas-style.

Screaming “Remember the Alamo!” and “Remember Goliad!” the Texans overwhelmed the Mexicans in a mere eighteen minutes, enough time for Sam Houston to lose two horses—both shot out from under him—and sustain a bad gunshot wound to the ankle.

The Texans were in no mood for mercy and unleashed a full-scale slaughter. No one was spared, not even the wounded or soldiers trying to surrender. “Take prisoners like the Meskins do!” shouted one Texan, and scores of Mexicans were shot to pieces after surrendering, or hunted down in the river and clubbed to death while pleading “Me no Alamo!” or “Me no Goliad!” A horrified Sam Houston tried to stop the massacre, shouting “Parade! Parade!” in a vain attempt to call his men back to form a dress formation and leave off killing. By the time the butchery stopped, a total of 630 Mexicans died that day, versus nine Texans.

The people of Texas were jubilant, grasping that independence was theirs. A messenger raced into one refugee camp on the Sabine River waving his hat and shouting, “San Jacinto! San Jacinto! The Mexicans are whipped and Santa Anna a prisoner!” A lady named Kate Scurry Terrell witnessed the reaction and wrote: “The scene that followed beggars description. People embraced, laughed and wept and prayed, all in one breath. As the moon rose over the vast flower-decked prairie, the soft southern wind carried peace to tired hearts and grateful slumber.”

Sam Houston—and his long rifle—accept Santa Anna’s surrender.

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When Santa Anna was captured, he asked Sam Houston to “be generous to the vanquished.”

Houston told the prisoner curtly, “You should have remembered that, sir, at the Alamo.” Santa Anna would eventually be shipped off to Washington; he later returned to Mexico and in fact would go to war twice more, against France and finally against the U.S.

The epic revenge-victory at the Battle of San Jacinto marked the birth of a free American Texas, and it altered the fate of three republics: Mexico, Texas, and the United States, then a country barely fifty years old. Mexico was forced to sign a withdrawal and peace treaty three weeks later that conferred legitimacy on the new Republic of Texas. Mexico never ruled Texas again, despite periodic raids in the 1840s. The United States absorbed the Republic of Texas in 1845, plus more Mexican land after the Mexican War in 1848.

If you drive about twenty-five miles southeast of downtown Houston today, you’ll come across the 570-foot-tall San Jacinto Monument, the world’s tallest memorial column. (Everything’s bigger in Texas, right?) The inscription reads, in part: “Measured by its results, San Jacinto was one of the decisive battles of the world. The freedom of Texas from Mexico won here led to annexation and to the Mexican-American War, resulting in the acquisition by the United States of the states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, California, Utah and parts of Colorado, Wyoming, Kansas and Oklahoma. Almost one-third of the present area of the American Nation, nearly a million square miles of territory, changed sovereignty.”

Not a bad day’s work for Sam Houston and his riflemen.

The battles of the Alamo and San Jacinto were crossroads battles, fought on the edges of several great eras of gun technology, when the flintlock was destined to give way to the caplock, the single-shot to revolving and repeating guns, and the muzzle-loader to the breechloader.

By the time it left the stage, the American long rifle helped give birth to a new nation. Generations of men and guns would now rise to save the United States from tearing itself apart, and raise it to a place of glory.

2

THE SPENCER REPEATER

“What kind of Hell-fired guns have your men got?”

—Anonymous Confederate prisoner, 1863

Abraham Lincoln was thinking about guns.

It was a clear, beautiful morning in the spring of 1861, and the recently elected President had two things on his mind—firearms, and the survival of the United States of America. So he left the hubbub of the White House, with its long line of petitioners and politicians, and went out to do some target shooting. Walking into a weed-and-garbage-strewn field east of the White House that served as his personal gun-testing range, he took stock of his weapons, a pair of new-fangled long guns. Both purported to let a man fire several shots before he had to stop and reload. That was a powerful promise under any circumstances, but especially on the field of battle. It was a promise that, if kept, could determine the course of the Civil War and help preserve the Union.

The weapons of war had evolved in the four score and odd years since independence had been won, but they would have still been recognizable to anyone who’d marched at Yorktown. The primary weapon of the U.S. Army and the recently formed Confederacy were smooth-bore muskets like the Springfield Model 1842. Unlike their Revolutionary War forebears, these modern muskets used percussion locks. In a flintlock, as you may recall, a piece of flint held in the hammer is struck to make a spark, creating a fire in a pan of fine priming powder, which in turn ignites the gunpowder charge and sends the bullet flying. Anyone who’s tried to light a match in the middle of a rainstorm knows the downside to that. Damp primer, wet powder, a worn flint—so many steps almost guarantee complications.

It might not have been foolproof, but the percussion cap simplified the process, making the gun less vulnerable to bad weather and random voodoo. A hammer hit a small cap, causing the material it held to explode. (That mercury fulminate your chemistry teacher warned you about was used as a primer at the time.) The explosion ignites the gunpowder charge, and off we go.

Increasing the dependability and simplicity of infantry weapons was an important step in the evolution of firearms, but other improvements were needed. The most obvious was accuracy. Bullets fired from smooth-bore muskets were notoriously fickle. To have any chance at all of striking his opponent, a soldier had to get pretty close to him. That’s not a popular activity on a battlefield.

Rifles were a solution. Loading bullets into a rifled barrel became much easier with the invention of the Minié-ball. Named after its inventor, the French gunmaker Claude-Étienne Minié, the cone-shaped projectile fit loosely enough to be easily inserted down a rifled muzzle. Its hollowed lead base expanded once the gun was fired, snugging it up against the barrel. The bullets had a side benefit—or a side horror, depending on whether you were on the receiving end of one or not. The .58-caliber projectile common at the time flattened and deformed on impact, shredding organs and bones and tearing out gaping exit wounds. Given the state of battlefield medicine at the time, the Minié-ball was truly an angel of death.

Muzzle-loading Springfield and British-made Enfield muskets were the dominant infantry weapons during the Civil War. Above: “20 Enfield Muskets” reads the writing on the crates in this Confederate arsenal. Below, Union troops pose with identical weapons. 

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