George Armstrong Custer, the Spencer and the Little Big Horn

I have often heard from fellow reenactors, from various TV shows and reading material on  the internet that before the Little Big Horn campaign the 7^th was issued Trapdoor Springfields in place of their 7-shot Spencers and that this switch was one of the main reasons for the "massacre" at the Little Big Horn.  I pretty much took this at face value until I found this article on the Guns.com site.  Another great article I recently discovered is this one on HistoryNet.com.

The supposition sounds reasonable in its face - you trade a weapon that can fire 7 rounds out of a magazine with one you have to single load and you're just asking to get into trouble.

Well it ends up that while some of the 7^th had been armed with Spencer carbines before the Little Big Horn campaign, according to these articles most were armed with Sharps carbines converted to 50-70 before they received their Trapdoor Springfields.

If you get a chance give it a read and remember not everything you hear on TV and read on the internet is true!