An American first: the birth of the sporterized military rifle

Guns Magazine, July, 2009 by Jeff John

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A new era was born at the close of the American Civil War. For the first time in history, the American gunsmith, long accustomed to building rifles from scratch using few store-bought parts, was presented with a huge cornucopia of widely different arms using technologies forged for war he could shape into arms more suitable for harvesting game as well as defense. The sporterized military rifle was born.

Unlike previous wars, the great variety of small arms were not turned into government arsenals for rehabilitation and re-issue. There were just too dad-blamed many different models shooting exotic ammo alongside the conventional muzzleloaders. The various ammunition systems tried all proved wanting save one--the metallic cartridge.

The firearms thriving in this new era were ones easily adaptable to the new metallic cartridge with the pendulum eventually swinging to the centerfire reloadable cartridge, which quickly overshadowed the rimfire. The Civil War's Sharps, Henry, Remington and Ballard all grew in form and wrote their own chapters in the expansion of the West as centerfires. The war's most spectacular rimfire repeating rifle--the Spencer--wrote a brief, but memorable chapter before fading into history.

The Spencer acquired a well-deserved reputation for strength, reliability, accuracy, dependability and rate of fire during the Civil War. Newspapers carried stirring accounts of Confederate soldiers retreating in a hail of Spencer gunfire believing they were up against a force seven times larger than it really was. The Union soldier could fire his seven shots and reload from cover while Johnny Reb had to stand and load his musket using tactics developed before the birth of this country and the battlefield evolved forever. Now, the fight could be taken to the enemy in all conditions. The Spencer didn't misfire in rain nor did its ammunition decay in the cartridge box during a long march or spoil in a river crossing as did paper ammunition.

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The Spencer proved its worth again in the Indian Wars, most notably against Roman Nose and the Cheyenne Dog Soldiers at Beecher's Island where 51 US Cavalry held off 600 Cheyenne, Sioux and Arapaho Indians in 1868. Despite such success, the Army surplused off the Spencer in favor of a single-shot rifle.

Because of this legacy, the Spencer repeater became one of the first--and I believe the first--military rifle to see extensive customization at the hands of gunsmiths. From here on, every nation's service rifles were fair game for civilian improvement. You can argue the vast surplus of arms captured from Napoleon after Waterloo were the first sporterized military rifles, but such "Trade Muskets" involved little more than sawing off the barrel. Plenty of Civil War Springfields were customized by boring the barrel smooth for shot, and this was "sporterizing" in the most basic sense.

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Most Spencer conversions, though, often called "Buffalo Spencers" by collectors, centered around re-barreling Spencers (selling for about $20 surplus in 1869) with a heavy octagon barrel for the 56-50 or the flatter shooting 56-46 round.

New Spencer Sporting Rifles cost $45 at this time (as did new Winchesters), while a Remington-made cast steel barrel "made to order" could be purchased for $5 from the Great Western Gun Works 1871 catalog. A "good iron barrel, all regular sizes" cost $1.85. Gunsmiths definitely had an incentive and while the barrels cataloged are ostensibly for muzzleloaders, it's not inconceivable a barrel for a Spencer could be ordered.

Shackles

Few shops tackled making a new buttstock because of the complexities of getting everything to fit together right--namely the lock, sling bar, triggerplate, magazine tube and buttplate all have to line up exactly. One shop was undaunted--the Hawken Shop, purchased from Sam Hawken by John Philip Gemmer in the 1860s. J.P. Gemmer, an able gunsmith in his own right, knew the frontloader's days were numbered and began to produce full-blown custom Spencers with the styling of the famed Hawken muzzleloader. (Gemmer soon added conversions of the more powerful Sharps and Trapdoor Springfield rifles, too, as the Spencer fell from favor.)

The basic Spencer action was heavy and adding a heavy octagon barrel increased the weight enormously. Some tip the scales at 14 or 15 pounds and are grossly underpowered monstrosities. Alas, the limited power parameters of the rimfire cartridge, its expense (it wasn't reloadable) and the inflexibility of the action to handle longer, more powerful cartridges along with the sudden glut of surplus arms as the military chose the single-shot doomed the Spencer Repeating Arms Co. to history and, after an initial burst of enthusiasm for the sporterized models, due I believe mostly to stories of the Spencer in the war, they too, became history as fighter, equally effective arms such as the Winchester 1866 arrived and the power shortage corrected by the versatile single-shot rifle.