History Tidbit
On this Day in history June 25, 1876.
A collection of Indian tribes led by Chiefs Crazy Horse and
Sitting Bull defeated the U.S. Army troops of Lt. Colonel George Armstrong
Custer near Montana’s Little Bighorn River in what is more rightly called a
bloody massacre.
Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull and the leaders of the Sioux
Tribes had been resisting the U.S. Governments efforts to confine their people
to reservations. By June of 1876, more
than ten thousand Indians had gathered along the banks of the Little Bighorn
River in defiance of the U.S. War Department order to return to the
reservations.
But let’s back up a bit and put things in better perspective. In 1875, after Gold was discovered in the
Black Hills region of South Dakota the U.S. Army ignored any previous treaty
agreements and invaded the region. This
betrayal led many Sioux and Cheyenne tribes to join Chief Crazy and Chief
Sitting Bull in their defiance of the U.S. orders to return to their reservations.
In 1861, Doctor Richard Gatling invented and patented what
became known as the Gatling Gun. It was
the first true machine gun capable of a sustained firing rate of bullets. When it came out in 1861 it used caps and
paper powder packages and could fire a whopping 200 rounds per minute. By 1867 it had been modified to use metallic
cartridges and increased its effectiveness and rate of fire to 1,200 rounds per
minute. This version was purchased by
the United States Army. The gun was designed
and built by Mr. Gatling with the idea in mind that such awesome firepower
would end the U.S. Civil War which ended by itself in 1865 before the gun was
modified to the point the Army actually purchased it.
Gatling did manage to sell quite of few of these weapons to
other industrializing counties who used them against countries with under
developed militaries with devastating effects.
At the point that part of the 7th Cavalry
attacked the Indian encampment without waiting for reinforcements, and not the
entire force present at once, only 210 men including Custer they were severely
outnumbered. The irony of the situation
was that with more prudence for waiting for the rest of the entire group to
show up, using better intelligence, heeding the warning signs that they may
have been up against a highly superior number of combatants, and the fact that
this particular group had at its disposal four Gatling Guns!
Custer was reportedly ordered to take the new weapons with
them on this mission but he refused because he felt if would slow his troop
down. The guns had to be pulled by horse
and the weapons ammo had to be loaded into special loading apparatus to load
the weapon while the other was being replaced or reloaded in order to provide
sustained firing. With enough rounds
loaded in the proper “clips” the gun had proved to have a sustained firing rate
of over 700 rounds per minute by this date.
Even though Custer may have still been defeated on this date
opposing such a large force of determined combatants, if all four guns could
have been effectively set-up on suitable firing positions and the enemy drawn
into their effective field of fire the shock effect of such a devastating weapon
may have caused the Indians to retreat.
Once the rest of the troops had arrived and word of the new gun spread
the results could have been drastically different.
As a student of warfare from the dawn of time to modern
military state of the art weapons I have read about many instances where a new
tactic, weapon or both have made victory possible for a very small group over a
vastly superior number of troops. As a
writer of military science fiction I like to play what if this happened in
history and how might that have changed the outcome. Examining the butterfly effect of small
changes in history and how those might manifest themselves later down the road. That is partly why I didn’t want to just say
today in history Custer got his butt kicked by a hell of a lot of Indians. Had a few changes occurred or he had done
what he was ordered to do, the outcome may have been completely different.
Posted in: 
0 comments:
Post a Comment