I like being wrong. (OK, no I don’t, but I’m not going to admit it. Wait; I just did. Nuts.) In any rate, I thought I knew that the US military adopted the .45-70 “Trapdoor” Springfield over more advanced designs because they were hidebound reactionaries; because existing muzzle-loaders left over from the Civil War could be converted; and because it was believed that if soldiers were given magazine-fed repeaters they would just shoot off all their bullets at once. Thus the US Army was stuck with a weapon with a weak action and inferior to contemporary European rifles.


Thanks to this book, I am disabused of most of those notions. I’m not fully convinced that the .45-70 was the best possibly choice for an American military rifle, but it wasn’t a bad one. No Civil War muskets were converted to .45-70; there was a single breechloader using the Allin “trapdoor” design converted from a .58 caliber percussion muzzle loader, and the .50-70 that was issued in 1866 sometimes had .58 caliber barrels linered down, but all the .Model 1873 and subsequent 45-70 rifles and carbines were new production. (Caveat: latter in production history, funding shortages required reuse of a few Civil War and earlier musket parts – mostly trigger guards and bayonets. After .45-70 production ended, remaining weapons were sold as surplus. Some of the big surplus dealers – Bannerman, for example – put together their own rifles from whatever parts would fit, which could include just about anything. The authors also note that the stock manufacturing equipment was sold to Hollywood studios, who used it to build replacements for broken movie rifles, thus possibly introducing even more variants).


The magazine rifle situation is a little more interesting; at the close of the Civil War, the US military had nearly 100000 Spencer repeating carbines and rifles – yet switched to a single shot as the standard issue. The authors contend this was due to several problems. The Spencer was considered underpowered, and the action could not easily be modified to take a more powerful round. Since the Army anticipated most of its future fighting would be on the frontier against plains natives in wide open spaces, a rapid fire capacity was considered less important than long range. Early metallic cartridges were copper or copper alloy (“gilding metal”); the Army didn’t switch to brass until 1888. That meant that even though the “Trapdoor” action wasn’t that strong, it was strong enough for the cartridge loading, and also provided a lot a primary extraction, useful for copper cartridges that had picked up some corrosion sitting around in a cartridge belt. (Interestingly enough, although it’s more or less a Biblical commandment never to load a .45-70 with smokeless powder, the Army did briefly issue smokeless powder cartridges loaded to the “equivalent” of 70 grains of black powder. The authors don’t mention what that equivalent loading is, presumably so they aren’t blamed if things go wrong with an experimenter). A final argument for single shot rifles was ammunition supply. Fort Union, New Mexico, where I bought this book, was the main supply depot for military bases in New Mexico, Arizona, and parts of Nevada, California, and Colorado; material was transshipped from Fort Union to more distant posts. Railroads didn’t reach Fort Union until 1879; before that everything came in by horse-drawn wagon. A case of 1000 .45-70 cartridges weighed 107 pounds; a standard military freight wagon could take 3000 pounds. An infantryman carried 40 cartridges with 100 rounds per soldier reserve in the unit baggage wagons; a cavalryman carried 40 rounds and 100 rounds reserve in his saddlebags. The logistics dictate that the military couldn’t supply magazine weapon ammunition unless the soldiers were really prudent with ammunition expenditure - which they weren’t.


Finally, at least until the 1880s or so, the .45-70 wasn’t inferior to European weapons. The European wars of the 1860s and 1870s (Austro-Prussian, Franco-Prussian) were fought with the muzzle-loading Austrian Lorenz rifle, the Prussian Dreyse Needle Gun, and the French Chassepot – all paper cartridge rifles, at the time the US had a metallic cartridge breechloader.


The bulk of the book, though, is for collectors, not people interested in the development of weapons. This was a little disappointing, as I can’t get too worked up over fine details in the way hammers are knurled on various versions. I was impressed by the amount of effort that went into manufacture, especially compared to modern technology. The .45-70 breechblock was dropped forged from an iron billet, then went through 11 milling operations, 6 drilling operations, and 5 profiling operations, followed by drilling and tapping the breech screw and firing pin screw holes. Then it went to final polishing and case-hardening. Even seemingly simple parts, like the trigger guard, went through multiple machine operations and heat treatment.


The authors do note that there’s a considerable market for forgeries – later replicas artificially aged to look like authentic pieces, and standard issue rifles modified to look like carbines, cadet rifles, or other rarer variations (the Army didn’t help by converting a number of standard rifles to cadet rifles itself). Several chapters discuss how to distinguish forgery based on obscure details.


There are very few details on actual service use – how the rifle was deployed and used. It is mentioned that the cleaning rod (which the Army insisted on calling a “ramrod” to the very end of production) was intended for field emergency use only, and usually used for extracting jammed cartridges rather than cleaning – it was harder steel than the barrel and therefore likely to damage it. A wooden cleaning rod was issued for barracks use. The Model 1888 rifle had a combination cleaning rod and bayonet, which was intended to make things simpler for the soldier but turned out to be heavier and more difficult to use than either the standard cleaning rod or the standard bayonet. The authors also note that the rifle was capable of putting 16 out of 20 shots in a 27” circular target at 800 yards (although not whether a randomly selected soldier was actually capable of that accuracy). It is true that .45-70 variants include a lot of changes in the sights, sometimes optimistically graduated out to 2000 yards and incorporating various features like automatic compensation for bullet drift, globe sights, sight covers, tang sights, windage adjustments, and even a bubble level on the front sight to keep the weapon from being canted.

Lots of pictures, including some color ones; a short bibliography, again mostly oriented toward collectors. No index. I was puzzled when the authors mentioned various rifle parts being “brazed”, as I didn’t think suitable brazing technology was available for most of the time the .45-70 was in production; however, their glossary shows what they mean by “brazing” is what I would call “silver soldering”.


Not of great interest unless you’re a gun collector; however, I’m intrigued enough by the brief discussion of 19th century military logistics and weapon development to investigate that further. ( )