technologically unsophisticated foe. It fell a few months later to Russia, which had pushed the guns ordered by Colonel Gorloff out into soldiers’ hands, to show what could happen when machine guns were fired at men.
In 1873, Czar Alexander II was expanding his empire’s authority over the khanates of Central Asia, trying to bring the defiant hinterlands and overland trade routes under Russian control. His soldiers faced a holdout at the city of Khiva on the banks of the Amu Darya, where the ruling khan, Muhammed Rahim, refused to recognize Russian rule. The khan held a small collection of Russian slaves, which provided the court in Saint Petersburg with all the public-relations material it needed to portray its campaign as a civilizing mission. Columns of imperial troops advanced across the desert toward the city, battling snowstorms in the spring and later parching heat. The khan was defended in part by the Yomud tribe, a group of Turkmen warriors whose horsemen had earned a fierce reputation by defeating Persian troops in battle. Viewed by the Russians as Islamic fanatics, they were the local manifestation of steppe warriors that had preceded Genghis Khan: able riders, brave and bearded, and at home on terrain that taxed the Russians foot soldiers’ enthusiasm for warfighting on the enemy’s land. They were not modernized in any military sense.
One afternoon in mid-1873, a Yomud detachment found a Russian supply train trudging through the steppe near the ruins of Zmukshir, near Turkmenistan’s present border with Uzbekistan. The Russians formed a large square of wagons and braced for attack. A nervous night passed. At about 3:00 A.M. the Yomuds came at last. It was an eerie horse charge in the darkness, punctuated by the horsemen’s shrieks. Inside their square, the Russians had with them two of Colonel Gorloff’s Gatling guns, which had been shipped over the Caspian Sea and dragged across the Karakum desert by pack train. The guns were under the command of an officer, Captain Litvinoff. From the account he left behind, there can be no doubt that the captain had spent considerable time thinking about their use. The Yomuds’ shrieks, meant to be unnerving, only helped him to perfect his detachment’s response. If any one moment marked the battlefield arrival of machine guns, this might have been it.
At the first howls of the enemy, I hastened to form a cover for my guns. I put on the right wing 10 privates, on the left 15 sharpshooters and 12 men of my battery command, with whom I could dispense for the present. These men were also armed with rifles. Leaving thus with the battery guns only the most indispensable men to assist in the firing, I took myself the crank-handle of the first gun, and invited Captain Cachourin to take the handle of the other gun, and enjoined on all my group not to commence the fire before the word of command was given. The guns formed an obtuse angle with each other, as it was necessary to direct them to the precise spot where the shoutings of the enemy were heard, and whence they were approaching us. We had not long to wait. The cries of the Turcomans who had succeeded in breaking through the lines of our detachment and turning their flanks suddenly rose from all sides, and became deafening. Though it was dark we perceived in front of us the galloping masses of the enemy, with uplifted glittering swords. When they approached within about twenty paces, I shouted the command “Fire.” This was followed by a salvo of all the men forming the cover, and a continuous rattle of the two battery guns. In this roar the cries of the enemy at once became weak and then ceased altogether, vanishing as rapidly as they rose. The firing at once stopped, and, as no enemy was visible, I ventured to get a look at the surrounding ground, availing myself of the first light of dawn. At some distance to the right of our square stood the 8th Battalion of the line. Between it and us, at every step, lay prostrated the dead bodies of the Yonoods [Yomuds].24
The newest Gatling guns, meanwhile, were being put to military tests that showed they were capable of feats beyond anything Gatling had conceived for them. On the morning of October 23, 1873, at Fort Madison, Maryland, ten drums of 400 cartridges were fired through a Gatling gun in twelve minutes and twenty-eight seconds. In the afternoon of the same day, another 28,000 rounds were fired at a similar rate. Cartridges were expensive, and Gatling, who worried over costs, had never subjected his guns to such extreme use. So many rounds were fired without rest that the barrels emanated a heat “sufficient to scorch dry white pine.”25 The gun performed nearly flawlessly. The following morning, after the gun had been cleaned, 63,600 more cartridges were fired in less than four hours without so much as cleaning the barrels. Gatling was on hand, and was astounded. On the night of October 26, complaining of a severe headache from the racket of firing, he penned an excited letter to General Love. His meticulous handwriting had abandoned him; he smeared ink repeatedly on the page. The trials, he wrote, “have been a great success.” The 100,000 cartridges had been fired almost without a problem, and only a few—one out of every four of five thousand, he said—had missed fire. “I never expected the gun to be able to produce such results,” he wrote. The officers who had come to watch had departed pleased. It was a triumph. “I can say of a truth,” he wrote. “No trials ever made with the gun before, or will, be equal in value to us.”26
The events in the field and on test ranges in 1873 secured the place of machine guns on the battlefield. The fall of that year marked a peculiar moment in the history of the distribution of rapid-fire arms. Gatling guns had earned their supporters and found their way into armies. But the company that made them continued to struggle, and the records that remain of the company’s internal unease offer insights into unflattering facts behind the Gatling legend. Even as Gatling sought the trust of the Colt Patent Fire Arms Company, his company and its officers were laboring to keep knowledge of their poor finances from reaching their partners’ ears. The company had amassed thirty-one thousand dollars in debt in Indianapolis; Gatling and his colleagues wanted to suppress knowledge of it. They sent letters to one another discussing how to keep the debt in Indiana. It was essential, they agreed, to prevent details of the company’s position from being known in Connecticut, Gatling’s new home and the center of his business. “It would have a bad effect [in Hartford] on the credit and standing of the co.,” Gatling warned.27 The company secretary, Edgar Welles, agreed. These were men with high reputations in Indiana and Connecticut, who had connections in Washington. They were not above deceit. The company would suffer a “black eye,” Welles said, if it were known that it had “a debt of that size and no cash in the treasury.”28 By late 1873, the company had managed to pay down at least four thousand dollars of the debt. But it had done so by juggling its books, receiving financing from outside Indianapolis at a better rate, while trying to collect further on its accounts receivable to cover the balance. Gatling was nervous. But he saw reason for hope. If the collections could be made, he wrote, “and we can sell the guns (or only a part of them) on hand we will be all right financially. Money matters are still tight, and I hope ere long we may have money plenty.”29
There were other pressures as well. Selling machine guns had become a business with a bright future, but the company faced competition as orders arrived. Gatling had been an innovator, and he had devoted himself to the field. Now new rapid-fire guns—not only the mitrailleuse but the Hotchkiss and the Gardner—were in development or coming to market. Moreover, Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor and arms manufacturer, had taken an interest in the Gatling guns in Russia and begun to work on them. He told L. W. Broadwell, Gatling’s main agent in Europe, who handled the Russian account, that he had improved the weapon so much that the Nobel version was a new weapon altogether. Pressured by worries over money and reputation, Gatling’s nerves overcame his customary politeness. “I am often amused at men claiming my invention,” he complained to General Love, “as their own.”30 He added that he was willing to pay “liberally for any valuable change or modification which adds to the effectiveness of the invention; but, such men have no right to take my original invention—the gun itself [and] make some changes into it and call it their gun or their system.i”31
At last good news came with the difficulties. At the end of 1873, the navy, after the results of the hundred- thousand-cartridge endurance test, placed an order for fifty guns. The Gatling Gun Company, it seemed, might survive. More promise followed. William W. Belknap, President Ulysses S. Grant’s secretary of war, sought appropriations of $292,600 from the Forty-third Congress to purchase 209 Gatling guns, principally to be used for defense of forts.32 It stood to be the company’s largest order yet, and Gatling passed many months worrying over the fate of the appropriations. As the matter stalled on Capitol Hill, his correspondence grew in irritation. Gatling was not a military man, and his mechanical skills did not extend to tactical matters. He had never served in uniform, much less in war, and knew little of how war was actually fought. He was deeply impatient, and issued instructions to General Love to lobby with all his power not to let the appropriations fail.
It is now a well established fact that the Gatling is the best military arm for certain kinds of service (fort defense etc.) in the world and the nation should have them so the men can in time of peace learn all about how to work them to the best advantage. It is a shame that a nation like Russia should have four times as many Gatling
