Under the ancient régime of the musket it required the soldier's weight in lead to kill him. Its point-blank range was about sixty yards, but precision even at that short distance it by no means possessed. At the battle of Fontenoy the English and French Guards, drawn up in opposite lines, conversed with each other prior to firing, like two groups of friends across the street. "Gentlemen of the French Guards, fire!" was the courteous invitation of the British commander. "The French Guards never fire first," was the reply. And not till then did punctilio come to an end. Such a colloquy in our day would need to be carried on with forty-horse power speaking-trumpets, or with the thunderous articulation of that between the bellowing Alps and echoing Jura. Even smooth-bore field-pieces, with point-blank of three hundred and twenty yards and service range of one thousand, have to keep their distance. It is a rare thing now for cannon to be captured by a charge of cavalry or the bayonet. The rifle destroys quantum suff. of their horses, and, their support overpowered, they remain a helpless prey.
For this default of the blustering cannon in the trying of conclusions with its quiet little cousin, the natural remedy is to improve its interior in the same manner. This has been done, and with marvelous effect in some respects. But the rifled cannon, though extensively used both on sea and land, throwing shot and shell five miles, and at close range through iron plates a foot thick, cannot be yet styled a perfected weapon. It may be in a very few years, thanks to the ardent anxiety, on the part of the several peoples composing "the parliament of man, the federation of the world," to excel each other in the "brain-spattering, windpipe-slitting art." At present it is maintained by very good American authority that for use under some conditions, at short or moderate range, the smooth gun of large calibre is more effective than a rifled gun throwing a missile of the same weight. Our monitors continue to be armed with the fifteen-inch Rodman, very recent experiments being cited to prove its penetrating effect on iron plates greater than that of the European rifled guns. This, of course, at very close range.
The rifle is, in its simplest form, a more complex instrument than the smooth-bored piece, and will always require superior intelligence to manage it. The army which naturally possesses this requisite in the highest degree will best handle this decisive weapon, and be, other things equal, the strongest army. This consideration operates in favor of our people, among whom the rifle has always been in so much more constant and familiar use than with those of other countries. Our broad forests will have to be cleared and our mountain-chains, east and west, more densely settled than Switzerland, before the distinction of a nation of marksmen can be lost to us. So far, there is little evidence of this change. The deer and the wild-turkey are nearly as abundant on the Atlantic slope of the Alleghanies as they ever were. Probably there are more of both in Virginia than at the time of the settlement of Jamestown. Like the quail and the bee, they are favored by a certain advance of population and cultivation.
Another species of aborigine does not similarly thrive in the path of the rifle. The Indian of the Plains is still troublesome occasionally, but far less so than when blue-coats and blunderbusses joined forces against him. The odds then were often on his side, for many of the red men were armed with the rifle, while the troops had but the musket and carbine. The appearance of the breech-loading rifle in the hands of the United States dragoons on the frontier just fifteen years ago let in new light upon the Camanche and Apache mind. Up to that period the badgering of a detachment of "heavies" was a favorite pastime with these gentry. They got up their "spring fights" with as much coolness and regularity as the early patriarchs of Texas are related to have done, and not merely, as in the case of the latter, in utter contempt, but directly at the expense, of the constituted authorities. Tying a bag of dried mule-meat and pounded corn to the peak of his saddle, fashioning a small supply of arrows, or balls if he boasted the spectre of a gun, coloring the inferior half of his frontispiece a rich vermilion and the upper a delicate green, with ramifications of lampblack coursing tastefully along the cheek-bones and the bridge of the nose, twisting a crane's feather into the tail of his horse, and giving his affectionate squaw a farewell kick, the cavalier of the prairie was ready for a raid on the Long-knives. Making a rapid night-march or two, he would carry the "latest intelligence from the Indian country" to the border ranches of Texas or New Mexico. Stampeding all the horses and mules that stood or ranged convenient, and under favorable circumstances some cattle and sheep, and "gobbling" on occasion some incautious Cyrion or Phyllis of the Western Arcadia, the marauder made for the mountains. By the time he had well passed the last outpost the hue-and-cry was at his heels, followed, after an easy-going delay, by the lumbering dragoon. The soldier, armed with ineffectual sabre and carbine, encumbered with a variety of traps about as useful as they, usually managed, if not forced to put back by stress of provisions, to come up with him in the gates of the hills. There an idle interchange of arrow and round ball between hollow and cliff wound up the eventful history of the chase. As a rule, no marked chastisement was inflicted on the Indian: he realized in peace the proceeds of his little speculation.
Now, Minié, like the Harpagon of his countryman, has "changed all that." The retreating heathen flies to his hills in vain. They do not cover him, but the rifle does. Cantering to the summit of a knoll, he waves his compliments to the distant dragoon with a gesture of derision, more expressive than elegant, he has acquired from the white. Turning calmly to depart, as he sinks below the crest of the hill a sagittiform bullet, fired at five hundred yards' distance with all the science and talent purchasable with thirteen dollars a month and rations, plumps into the rump of his unhappy pony, and the Stoic of the woods is unhorsed. Reared on horseback, and weak in the legs from long addiction to that mode of locomotion, this is a casus omissus in Lo's tactics. Scant time, however, has he for reflection. He gathers up himself and his drapery as well as circumstances will allow, and scuttles hurriedly off, a fluttering chaos of rags and feathers. It is too late. Heaven is on the side of the best artillery. A few minutes and the Philistines are upon him. Burnside's or Remington's last patent again lifts up its voice, and the triumph of civilization is complete.
The prairie Indian, unlike his congener of the woods, has as yet been but partially able to substitute gunpowder for the bow. The advantage he has in the protection afforded him by the desolation of his waterless mesas and sage-covered hills is thus in great measure neutralized. What, when he does possess the modern firearm, he is capable of doing with it, the achievements of the Modocs in their volcanic stronghold will attest. But these were few, and soon went down. The extinction of the tribes west and south of the Rio Grande and the Humboldt cannot be many years postponed. The red rover of that region will disappear as a combatant in the same way, and before the same weapon, as his brother nomad of Algeria, the earliest victim of the conoidal bullet. The spherical ball has done its appointed part in disposing of the aborigines east of the Mississippi, where forests covered the land and trees generally intercepted the sight at a hundred or a hundred and fifty yards. With the extension of Caucasian empire to the Plains came an extension of the range of vision, which necessitated an advance in the range of the rifle. The weapon of Sharpe figured for the first time in the van when the woods of Missouri were passed and the open plains of Kansas reached. There its office was, unfortunately, the strife of white against white. The largest possible range, the greatest possible number of shots in a given time, were demanded in a war wherein the opposing armies were seldom within five miles of each other, or more than one man hurt to five hundred charges of powder burned. How the Lenni Lenape must have opened their eyes at this reproduction of the drama of a century ago when the whites, English and French, were fighting each other for the possession of the Delawares' lands in Pennsylvania! The feeble remnant of the compatriots of Logan had "moved on," under pressure of a very urgent police, a thousand miles westward to a reservation not a great deal larger, when portioned out, than that last reservation allotted to all men; and the pale-faces who had hung upon his track he now saw fighting for that.
From its warlike aspect it is pleasant to turn to the contributions of the rifle to peaceful amusement, if not peaceful industry. Contemptuously giving the go-by to its minutest phase in this field—the "parlor rifle," with a target against the chimney-piece or meandering, in feline form, along our neighbor's roof-tree—we go forth, with Snider and sunrise, to the forest fastness. Our companions throng, tall, bronzed, close-knit and sinewy, true children of the four-grooved, from frosty Caucasus, the Hartz, the Alps, the Dovrafjeld, the Grampians, the Himmalaya, the Adirondack, the Alleghany, the Nevada. The chamois, the ibex, the red deer, the Virginia deer, the wapiti, the gour, or the royal tiger may be the game in hand. The tiger we are accustomed to associate exclusively with the dank jungles of Lower India, but he climbs, each summer, the great passes of Central Asia, "the roof of the world," and makes his way to the frontier of Siberia, beyond 50° north.
The equipment of the mountain-rifleman is characterized by simplicity and a strict attention to business. The nature of the ground over which he works inexorably prescribes this. The superfluities of the fox-hunter or the partridge-shooter with his dog-cart cannot be his. Hatchet, pouch, knife and knapsack, with alpenstock on occasion, about comprise his kit. He may be attended by a hound or two, but not a pack. He wants no yelling. He hears but
the Spirit of the Mist,