In the wake of the Civil War, the US Army recognized that many of its small arms were obsolete, and needed replacement. For handguns, the main user was the cavalry, for whom a handgun was still seen as a secondary weapon to a saber. While modern metallic cartridges were fairly well established by the time of the main Army handgun trial in 1869, the Rollin White patent on bored-through cylinders was still in force, and the only real option for breechloading revolvers were S&W’s .22 rimfire models. The Army tested these against the Remington rolling block single-shot pistol in .50CF (aka .50-25; 300 grain bullet over 25 grains black powder with a 600 fps muzzle velocity), found the rolling block to be the better option, and ordered 5,000 of them as the Model 1871.
The Army didn’t actually pay for the new pistols; they traded 5,000 unissued Remington New Model army revolvers that were still in storage for them. It does seem odd for the Army to be trading 6-shooters for single-shot pistols, but there you have it. The deal was great for Remington, as the market value of the revolvers was higher than the production cost of the rolling blocks, and they made a nice profit reselling the revolvers (which they had already been paid for once before) after retrofitting them for metallic cartridges after the Rollin White patent expires. The Army began issuing the pistols in 1872, but only about a quarter of them got into the field before the Army adopted the new Colt 1873 revolver and began using that instead.
The single-shot Remingtons were the result of the delusions of senior officers.
The majority of same believed that the conditions of battle encountered in the Civil War were an aberration in tactics. And that “proper” warfare, in the style of European campaigns going back to the Napoleonic wars, would return. Conditions in which the saber, the arme blanc, would once more and forever be the way cavalry would dominate the battlefield.
They didn’t understand that the breechloading rifle (even the single-shot, let a lone the repeating rifle) had begun the death knell of horse cavalry. Or that fifty years later, the machine gun would finish it off once and for all.
The then commanding general, William T. Sherman, did state that while the single-shot pistol would be standard, revolvers would be retained for “Indian warfare” on the Western frontier. (Yes, even the “hometown hero” of my hometown, Lancaster OH, could be an idiot at times. Incidentally, the other Civil War general from Lancaster, Philip Sheridan, disagreed with Sherman on several subjects, including this one.)
In the end, the majority of those Remington single shots, chambering the .50 Short rimfire round, ended up with Francis Bannerman in New York. Where the actions were used as the basis for “cadet rifles” for military schools, which were short and light enough for ten and eleven year old boys to do rifle drill with, and were soft-kicking enough for them to use in range practice.
And PS; at the start of the Civil War, General Ripley, head of Ordnance, before anything else ordered 40,000 cavalry sabers with accoutrements (scabbards, etc.) from the Ames Cutlery Co. of Chicopee MA. They were delivered in April 1862.
In 1893, all 40,000 were sold off as surplus by the army. Bannerman bought them all for roughly twenty-eight cents each and put them in his catalog, complete with scabbards and etc. for $1 each.
The Army had never issued, or even uncrated them, after delivery three decades earlier.
clear ether
eon
“(…).50CF (aka .50-25; 300 grain bullet over 25 grains black powder with a 600 fps muzzle velocity)(…)”
https://naboje.org/node/4812# does show shot version of this cartridge (see table). Was it used by U.S. Army or it was made purely for civilian, if first what was its’ intended usage?