Copyright 2019 by Gary L. Pullman
Several weapons that first
appeared during the days of the American Wild West are named
for famous people.
Richard Jordan Gatling
Richard
J. Gatling
(1818-1903), a medical doctor, invented the Gatling gun in 1861 and
patented it a year later. He hoped that his spring-loaded,
hand-cranked weapon
(Handbook of the Gatling Gun,
Caliber .30, Models of 1895, 1900, and 1903,
Metallic Carriage And Casement
Mount,
13),
would lead to armies of fewer troops, thereby reducing wartime deaths
and casualties (Harold A. Skaarup, Shelldrake:
Canadian Artillery Museums and Gun Monuments,
133). It was an early rapid-fire weapon, preceded only by the French
mitrailleuse
(Skaarup, 133).
French mitrailleuse
Since
the gun required the gunner to crank a handle to fire the weapon, it
is not an automatic weapon; the first automatic wouldn't be invented
until 1884, when the 7.92-millimeter Maxim machine gun, appeared.
(Skaarup, 133).
Gatling gun
The
Gatling gun, however, was superior to other weapons of its day,
because the time that it took to eject a spent cartridge and load the
next round of ammunition during “the firing/reloading sequence”
allowed the barrel to cool a bit, permitting “higher rates of fire
. . . without the barrel['s] overheating” (Skaarp, 133). (Today, the U.
S. Army's .50-caliber machine gun fires so many bullets so quickly
that the barrel must be replaced at frequent intervals.)
Bane
Messenger, the protagonist of my Western series, An Adventure of the Old West, uses a Gatling gun twice in Blood Mountain,
to even the odds against him.
1873 Winchester Rifle
The
Model 1873 Winchester rifle was sold as “The Gun that Won the
West,” although, technically, of course, a rifle is not a “gun,”
since a rifle is rifled, whereas the bore of a gun is smooth.
Originally, the rifle fired a .44-40 centerfire cartridge. The bullet
could travel at a velocity of about 1,500 feet-per-second. The rifle
also featured “a sliding breech cover . . . that [kept] dirt and
snow out of the breech,” and “an integrated safety sear . . .
prevented accidental discharge of the rifle when the hammer was
cocked” (Martin Pegler, Winchester
Lever-Action Rifles).
Buffalo Bill Cody's 1873 Winchester rifle
Various
lengths of barrels were available, as were a
number of embellishments: “silver or gold plating, engraving, set
triggers and special carrying cases” and “an all-in-one reloading
tool” (Pegler).
The
standard version of the rifle cost $27 ($439 today), the carbine $24
($390 today), but “these prices were often doubled by the time the
guns had shipped west” (Pegler).
Oliver Fisher Winchester
Oliver Winchester
and his family became fabulously wealthy. His son, William Wirt
Winchester, served as the treasurer of the Winchester Repeating Arms
Company. After his demise, William's widow Sarah became convinced that
their house was haunted.
The ghosts of Native Americans and others who'd been killed by her
family's rifle, she believed, were out for revenge.
To protect
herself, psychics told her, she had to continue to add on to the
eight-room farmhouse
she'd purchased in San Jose, California, after leaving her home in
New Haven, Connecticut. The work had to continue
non-stop, twenty-four hours a day, year after year—and it did, to
the tune of $5
million ($71 million today), until her own death in 1922.
Sarah Winchester
To
confuse the spirits, the 24,000-square-foot mansion (as it came to
be) incorporated some decidedly strange features. For example, only
one bathroom has a “working toilet”; the others were constructed
to confuse the ghosts (Gia Lui, “Take a Tour of San Jose's
Winchester Mystery House”).
Winchester Mystery House
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