Weaponry

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WEAPONRY

Weapon development was fast and furious in the nineteenth century, resulting in technological innovations that would profoundly shape the cultural, social, and political growth of the rapidly expanding nation. In nineteenth-century American literature, weapons were often mirrors of the subject and could be seen as a badge of both an individual's character and social status. In his ambitious The Winning of the West (1894), Teddy Roosevelt credits firearms with part of the formation of the national character. The Colt revolver and bowie knife became almost synonymous with American ingenuity, rugged individualism, and masculine power, while military innovations such as the Gatling gun set the stage for even greater social and political upheaval in the coming century as weapons began to outstrip their users' ability to imagine warfare.

FIREARMS

Samuel Colt designed the first repeater that used a rotating cylinder with a fixed barrel; it was immediately popular, especially among the Texas Rangers on the western frontier. Although powerful, it was unwieldy, and a smaller version was designed and issued to dragoon regiments. It was this type of revolver that Hank Morgan, himself a Colt employee, carries in Mark Twain's (1835–1910) A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889). It is through the combined effects of Yankee ingenuity and gumption that five hundred knights are bested by only one man with two revolvers, and Twain's commentary on the value of firepower to civilization is obvious, if not also a little ambivalent. In a later chapter titled "The Battle of the Sand-Belt," his protagonist uses gunpowder and electricity to ward off the entirety of English nobility and assume control of the entire nation, once again illustrating the power of Yankee ingenuity and technology to win battles. The macabre scene in the aftermath of this battle almost prefigures the coming devastation of the First World War.

But weapons represent more than the technological advantage of civilization and often symbolize regional or individualistic identifiers within a text. In Roughing It (1872), Twain comments on the ubiquity of weapons on the frontier to offer his readers a sense of moving into a different world, one in which virtually everyone, including women, carries arms. As he prepares for his journey from the frontier of Missouri into the wilds of Nevada Territory, he and all his fellows aboard the stage are dressed for a rough journey into a wild land. The "heavy suit of clothing" necessarily includes armament, and Twain chronicles the firearms of each in turn. He carries "a pitiful little Smith and Wesson's seven-shooter, which carried a ball like a homoeopathic pill, and it took the whole seven to make a dose for an adult" (p. 543). His brother has a "small-sized Colt's revolver" to use against the Indians, and "to guard against accidents he carried it uncapped" (pp. 543–544). This is particularly ironic when one considers that such pieces were not quickly capped, and such carry, while safe, would be almost as useless as if it were entirely unloaded. This small detail hints at his brother's social position as a frontiersman; he is savvy enough to own a sufficiently powerful gun but remains relatively unschooled in its tactical use. Another fellow traveler carries an "old original 'Allen' revolver, such as irreverent people called a 'pepper-box'" (p. 544).

In these pages Twain spends much time detailing the armament of the travelers as a mode of dress, signaling one's firearm as not simply a necessary tool in a wild land but also as a mark of social status. His brother carries the best and most expensive pistol of the bunch, whereas Mr. Bemis carries an old and outdated model.

Another important function of guns in literature, especially the literature of the West, is as a symbol of masculine authority and power. As many critics have remarked, the genre western is particularly masculine, and in it a man's weapons operate as his ethos and are explicitly gendered—in a genre western one would not frequently encounter a woman firing a gun for sport, as Twain does in Roughing It. Owen Wister's The Virginian (1902) set the benchmark for the genre, conflating violence, particularly gun violence, with masculine authority and privilege and setting it in contrast to feminine domesticity and civilized behavior. Critics such as Peter French, Richard Slotkin, and Jane Tompkins have noted the gender conflict in westerns. In Cowboy Metaphysics (1997), French suggests that women see "the gun as a phallic symbol, a powerful and deadly icon of the masculine" (p. 16). This gendered understanding of weapons and the conflict it creates is perhaps best exemplified in Zane Grey's Riders of the Purple Sage (1912), in which the main female protagonist, Jane Withersteen, spends much of the novel trying to persuade Lassiter to surrender his guns and seek a peaceful solution to the conflict in the valley. When he finally does offer them to her, she has recognized the impotence of civilized negotiations and refuses to allow him to disarm. In the frontier world Grey (1872–1939) creates, a man simply is not a man if he cannot fight.

The roles of firearms as both protectors and predators are given a different twist in "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky" (1898) by Stephen Crane (1871–1900). In this story, a small town is beset with the drunken raging of Scratchy Wilson, who is "a perfect wonder" with his six-guns (p. 388). Scratchy goes on regular binges, and when he is in his cups he is the terror of the town. Those in the local watering hole can only bar the door and wait for Sheriff Jack Potter to intercept Scratchy, but in this instance Potter is gone. The saloon customers have no one to rely upon except the bartender, who carries a Winchester as added insurance against Wilson's entry. When Sheriff Jack Potter returns from his wedding in San Antonio with a wife in tow, Scratchy is eager for a fight. But Sheriff Potter is unarmed and unprepared to return fire, so the entire scenario is defused when Scratchy simply calls it off.

A man of the gun receives justice from unexpected quarters in Frank Norris's "The Passing of Cock-Eye Blacklock" (1902). Cock-Eye Blacklock is a rogue gambler and shooter who seems to have a habit of getting into shootings that place him just on the right side of the law, such as a dispute with a young tenderfoot who draws a meager .22 on him. The boy's "parlour ornament" explodes in his hand, leaving Blacklock to fire his pistols and leisurely kill the boy, then claim self defense in the eyes of the law. Blacklock finally gets his comeuppance while "shooting" fish with dynamite in the company of a stray dog named Sloppy Weather, whose habit of fetching sticks thrown into the creeks proves to be the downfall of them both.

A gun is used suicidally in Edwin Arlington Robinson's poem "Richard Cory" (1919). Cory represents "a gentleman from sole to crown" (p. 1106) and is the person everyone else in this fictional community aspires to be until "one calm summer night / [he] went home and put a bullet through his head" (p. 1107).

Frederic Remington (1861–1909) traveled widely throughout the West and Southwest. He not only submitted his drawings for publication but also wrote articles about his exploits that appeared in periodicals such as Harper's Weekly and Collier's. Guns quite naturally appear frequently among the accoutrements of his subjects and are periodically the subject of considerable interest. In "Sioux Outbreak in South Dakota" (1891), Remington interviews soldiers after the massacre at Wounded Knee and details the injuries, attitudes, and exposition of the events. An unnamed officer reports with evident admiration that "the way those Sioux worked those Winchesters was beautiful" (p. 67). Another concedes the valiance of their foes while tapping his own Winchester appreciatively. An armed encounter with the Sioux also plays a role in Remington's novel John Ermine of the Yellowstone (1902). In "Squadron A's Games" (1896), he shares with readers the competitive drills the cavalry uses to hone its combative skills. The most challenging is "tent pegging," in which a tent peg is placed in the dirt and troopers ride at it full tilt, attempting to dislodge it was their sabers. A shotgun plays a central role in "A Shotgun Episode" (1900). A Captain Jack recalls an incident in which he used a sporting arm to secure the arrest of Chief Winnemucca. But Remington did not spend all his time with the military, and in "Winter Shooting on the Gulf Coast of Florida" (1895), he recommends the sporting use of the twelve bore for quail and jack-snipe.

In The Six-Gun Mystique (1984), John Cawelti remarks that "knives and clubs suggest a more aggressive uncontrolled kind of violence which seems instinctively wrong for the character of the cowboy hero" (p. 88). The knife was not nearly as widely favored in literature as the pistol, but it has made regular appearances.

THE BOWIE KNIFE

The bowie knife is closely allied to the character of Injun Joe in Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), which maintains the integrity of Cawelti's thesis. The big knife represents Injun Joe's threat to Tom and Huck, and in the final scene, in which Injun Joe has died of starvation in the cave, his broken bowie stands in mute testimony to his desperate, violent attempts to free himself of his captivity and finally even to survive. The bowie for Twain represents the savagism of the mixed-breed character and his unsuitability in a modern, civilized society.

The knife was one of the stereotypical weapons of the professional gambler, as seen in Stephen Crane's "The Blue Hotel" (1898). In this story, the strange Swede begins the tale inexcusably paranoid of those around him and only becomes more and more volatile and caustic to his fellows as the story progresses. It is a tale of violent escalation that ends finally with the Swede accosting and being stabbed to death by the gambler.

MILITARY INNOVATIONS

Richard Jordan Gatling designed the first machine gun in 1862 but could not generate wide interest in his "army in six feet square" until well after the Civil War (Ellis, p. 25). In the following century, the machine gun was to become one of the quintessential symbols of the modern era; its inventors and owners advertised the gun's potential to stop conflicts early and decisively and advised armies and legislatures about the gun's cost-effectiveness as an economical method of warfare. But both angles focus on the machine gun's unique ability to replace people with a machine. This common denominator, it was hoped, would allow men to rise above their former limitations, yet it frequently only exacerbated the horrors of war by increasing, and further dehumanizing, the scale on which warfare became possible.

With the advent of the mechanized battlefield, the terrible machines of killing appear to have usurped the daring masculinity of the soldiers who wield them. Friedman notes that "military gear . . . often did the opposite of the expected: it unmanned and emasculated" (p. 166). It would not be until World War I that all the implications of this type of warfare would be fully realized, but even before then authors such as Stephen Crane, who was a war correspondent in the Spanish-American War and most famously wrote The Red Badge of Courage (1895), were already formulating a commentary on the effects of mass warfare in the individual soul. Mark Twain joined the commentary in his The Mysterious Stranger (1916). This novella is set in Austria during 1590 and features Satan, who calls himself the nephew of the famed fallen angel. He foretells a future in which "all the competent killers are Christians" (p. 371), and he shows Theodor Fischer and his friend Seppi the "mighty procession" of armies through the centuries, the "raging, struggling, wallowing through seas of blood, smothered in battle-smoke through which the flags glinted and the red jets from the cannon darted; and always [there was] the thunder of the guns and the cries of the dying" (p. 371). In this, one of the last works of Twain, which was published posthumously, he seems to fully anticipate the horrors of the world wars that were just around the corner.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Crane, Stephen. The Complete Short Stories and Sketches of Stephen Crane. Edited by Thomas A. Gullason. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1963.

Norris, Frank. A Deal in Wheat: And Other Stories of the New and Old West. New York: Doubleday, 1903.

Remington, Frederic. "John Ermine of the Yellowstone." In The Collected Writings of Frederic Remington, edited by Harold Samuels and Peggy Samuels. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1979.

Remington, Frederic. "A Shotgun Episode." In The Collected Writings of Frederic Remington, edited by Harold Samuels and Peggy Samuels. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1979.

Remington, Frederic. "Sioux Outbreak in South Dakota." In The Collected Writings of Frederic Remington, edited by Harold Samuels and Peggy Samuels. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1979.

Remington, Frederic. "Squadron A's Games." In The Collected Writings of Frederic Remington, edited by Harold Samuels and Peggy Samuels. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1979.

Robinson, Edwin Arlington. "Richard Cory." In The Norton Anthology of American Literature, vol. D, 6th ed., edited by Nina Baym. New York: Norton, 2003.

Twain, Mark. The Mysterious Stranger. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970.

Twain, Mark. "Roughing It" and "The Innocents Abroad." New York: Library of America, 1984.