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Old January 17, 2012, 07:23 AM   #51
MJN77
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Join Date: April 27, 2009
Location: on a hill in West Virginia
Posts: 789
Patrice,
I agree 100%. Not a lot of folks these days really know what the word traditional means Doing things the way you want to is fine. But to argue that it must've been done this way 150 years ago because that's how you learned it 25 or 30 years ago is just naive. Where is your historical evidence? I don't care how "experts" load thier guns, and it isn't any of their business how I load mine.

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MJN77,
Obviously I am not a student of the Texas Rangers/Mexican war. Thanks for educating me on those incidents. It is my understanding (although on more shakey ground) that the revolver was considered a cavalry weapon but the sword was considered the primary arm i.e. shoot the gun dry, then draw the sword for the rest of the battle, reload during a lull.
Correct, mostly. The sabre, in theory, would've been employed before the revolver. The U.S. military, even after the civil war, considered the sabre to be the primary sidearm of the cavalryman, and the revolver as a secondary weapon. In the army, just like today, handguns weren't really fired much. The great cavalry charges, where hundreds or thousands of men on horses rushed headlong at their enemies, guns a blazin' were few and far between. They did happen, but not often. Most of the fighting was done dismounted with carbines. Some union cavalry regiments weren't even issued revolvers. Also, one union officer, Major Leonidas Scranton of the 2nd Michigan cavalry, wrote "Pistols are useless. I have known regiments that have been in the field over two years that have never used their pistols in action. At a charge, the sabre is the weapon."
You see, the main users of revolvers in the battles of the nineteenth century weren't the regular military, it was the irregular soldiers. The Texans in the Mexican war, the partisan rangers in Virginia in the civil war, like the men under Col. John S. Mosby, or the "bushwhakers" of Missouri, like "Bloody" Bill Anderson, and William Quantrill, who didn't even carry sabres. Even the confederate cavalry largly discarded their sabres in favor of another revolver. Confederate General John Hunt Morgan's men, threw away their sabres, and replaced them with sawed off shotguns. The tactics of the partisan/bushwhacker, was to suddenly ambush a group of enemy soldiers on the road, rushing suddenly into the enemy flank shooting their revolvers at close range as fast as possible. In that way, they were able to beat groups of soldiers 2 or 3 times their own size. Sometimes, weather their attack worked or failed, a running gun battle developed. Sometimes these running fights would last for many miles. Like I said, it wasn't the cavalry that really used the revolver to it's full potential. The military never was great about embracing the newest technology, but everyday people were. But as far as reloading, even the military had a cartridge box specifically for revolver cartridges.
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Last edited by MJN77; January 17, 2012 at 12:19 PM.
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