At the Battle of the Rosebud, for instance, over 40,000 rounds were fired by the soldiers and their Crow and Shoshoni allies. It received its first real combat test during the 1876 summer campaign against the alliance of Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho. 45 caliber cartridge filled with 70 grains of black powder (the. But in 1873, a new model of the Springfield firing a powerful, and longer-ranged. 50-caliber “needle guns” as the Springfields were then known (because of the long firing pin required by the long “trapdoor” action) were also used in the campaigns of 1868-69 and the Red River War. 50-70 cartridge enabled massively outnumbered soldiers to stand off successive attacks like those at the Hayfield and Wagon Box Fights in 1866. The new Model 1866 Springfields firing the.
58-65 cartridge the Models of 1866, 18 which fired the .50-70 cartridge, and the Models of 1873, 18 chambered for the revered. The Springfield Rifle of the mid-1860s through the 1890s came in seven distinct models: The Model 1865 which fired a. Assuming the soldiers began firing volleys at extreme range and it took two or three minutes for the recipients to realize they were under fire and organize to charge, and two to four minutes to ride close enough for their shorter-range weapons to have an effect, the soldiers would have fired a minimum of fifteen to thirty-five volleys at the charging foe that would have emptied enough saddles of the tribe’s most precious commodity, manpower. Native American troops often gathered within sight, but at distances of a half a mile or so, to harass their intended victims before attacking. A Springfield rifle or carbine could be reloaded and fired twelve times a minute by a trained soldier, but probably only eight to ten times under the stress of combat. A well-trained Indian horse carrying a rider could cover up to one mile in four minutes or so.
The favored method of attack on armed settlers and soldiers was from a distance. Springfield “Trapdoor” breech, open and closed.