The 7th armed with the Henry/Spencer/Winchester at Little Bighorn

How much different would the outcome have been if Custer's men had been armed with decent rifles instead of the crappy single shot Springfields that they had? True, they were breechloaders, but the black powder tended to collect in the barrels during a battle, causing problems if enogh shots were fired.
I realise that the Henry was a very expensive [$300?] weapon, but it fired 16 shots; the Spencer would discharge 7 without reloading, not sure how many the Winchester '73 model held in its magazine. Surely the generals had gotten over 'the soldiers will waste too many bullets' foolishness by then; after all, it was 11 years after the civil war ended. I presume they were just being cheap, making the men fight with an inferior weapon. Many of Crazy Horse's warriors did have Winchesters, unlike a movie I saw when I was a kid [The Great Sioux Massacre] I don't believe many of these braves had to face the &th Cavalry with just bows and aarrows. [In the movie, Custer got an arrow in his back, in real life bullets killed him]

So for the sake of arguement, say they are all armed with Spencers; can that change the outcome of the battle? For sure, Crazy Horse will lose a lot more men. I read somewhere that only 43 Indians were killed, then I also heard that the true number was 169, which seems more realistic, considering they not only had to deal with Custer's 5 companies, but those with Reno and Benteen as well. And if Custer is successful, do they just drive the warriors off, or do they surrender en masse? The latter, I suspect, since the women and children can't easily flee. What happens then, probably something similar to what happened in OTL, except it begins 5 years earlier. In OTL, Sitting Bull took most of the Lakota up into Canada, and returned in 1881, to go onto the reservation and a miserable life. I don't know it this butterflies away Wounded Knee or not, come to think of it, probably not, that crazy Paiute will likely do his ghost dance in TTL also.
 
It's been endlessly puzzled on since 1872 when the cavalry began giving up it's Spencer 7-shot carbines (with a 96 round cartridge box accessory for extremely fast reloading) and Sharps single shot .50-70 carbines for the 1873 Springfield trapdoor carbine.

Officers often carried Winchesters as did civilian scouts, both provided their own long guns and short guns...Custer had a Remington Rolling Block with him and given the officers,family, scouts, and Crow/Arikara scouts that's probably 40-60 non-Springfield trapdoors among them. For that matter there's the Evans Carbine available for 6 years by this time that fires 24 rounds from an Archimedes Screw-operated set of tubular magazines in the wooden buttstock...Kit Carson and Buffalo Bill Cody both endorsed the rifle as handy for frontier use.

Just as Colt 1873 Army revolvers are intermingled with Smith & Wesson 1872 Americans and 1875 Schofields, Remington 1875's, maybe Webleys or Merwin Hulbert Army's, and others since there'd been a mix issued to the soldiers and the officers bought whatever they wanted.

The 1980's physical archaeological survery of the battlefield, the first and only, with help from the Nebraska Crime Lab in tracking the ballistics (albeit after a century of people picking up cartridge cases and bullets as souvenirs from the site) by matching spent cartridge cases to individual weapons and where they were used is detailed in Dr. Richard Fox's book on the battle.

There were considerably more Oglala or Northern Cheyenne in snipers' nests shooting Sharps, Remington Rolling Blocks, Springfield Trapdoors, etc. for long-range work and considerably more short-range, high rate of firepower (14 round magazine) Winchester 1866/1873/1876/1860 models, Spencers, etc.. enough to give those charging Last Stand Hill (mostly Northern Cheyenne as the closest camp, Reno had attacked the Huncapapa Lakota/Sioux camp of Sitting Bull in the 10 mile string of camps of the gathered tribes so he and Benteen mostly fought Huncapapa and Oglala Lakota) a 66:1 firepower advantage over Custer's men. That's akin to someone spraying a submachine gun at you while you work a bolt-action rifle in combat impact. While only a small portion, maybe 20-30% of the Indians had repeaters, an equal share had Army carbines captured from Crook's troopers at the Battle of the Rosebud 3 days before, many had revolvers, and the balance, perhaps half had a mixture of flintlock trade musket carbines and relatively short-range bows that didn't emit smoke, flash, or noise when fired but had the limitation of how many suitable arrows one carried for shooting men...typically 6-12 arrows in a quiver had the right heads for this, the others for smaller game...but nobody asks arrowmakers so the assumption each warrior had 50-100-200 arrows in their infinite quiver is common. )

The 3 Gatling Guns and several pieces of field artillery Custer left with Terry would have meant several thousand infantry also left behind would have come with them with General Alfred Terry. The slower pace could have missed the massive village headed North to Canada anyway or certainly would have reversed the odds. Although then the other column under Colonel John Gibbon coming from the West would have found the villages and according to one of their scouts, Thomas LeForge, would have repeated Custer's attack and likely met the same fate...Crook having just been beaten with a larger command.

It's about 65 miles from where I'm sitting right now, been there many times.
 
There's been something like 70 feature films made about the battle, most of them filmed on California terrain which is also confusing (hey, why doesn't the cavalry take a stand on that big ridge full of trees for cover?). All of them get bits and pieces of the story, take a lot of poetic license, and how accurate the propmasters and costumers are varies enormously. The most accurate was an ABC miniseries "Son of the Morning Star" based on Evan S. O'Connell's superb book and they really worked hard on everything to make it accurate. Most entertaining is probably "They Died With Their Boots On" with Errol Flynn as Custer, he captures Custer's charisma and presence more than any other but it's poor history like most entertaining movies.

Winchester 1892 rifles were still being made up until 1931 unlike any other old west period long guns so they were cheap and reliable for movie props while Colt Single Action Army's were made up until 1941 so again, readily advailable for filming while everything else was in shorter supply, had 40-100 year old flat leaf springs that break and are a nasty replacement challenge, and often in calibers no longer available commercially (most Old West cartridges got bumped out of production by World War One ammunition demand from the same factories and never made it back into the production mix.) So you'll see much more uniformity in filmed shows than really existed and usually models that wouldn't be invented for 10-50 years...like watching Eliot Ness escape Al Capone in a 1962 Corvette or World War II paratroopers jumping out of a Boeing 747 (tourist class seats.)
 
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