The Secret Artillery

Denied a role at the Battle of the Little Big Horn, this Gatling gun crew gives Custerphiles another view of the ill-fated fight.

- C. Lee Noyes

On May 17, 1876, Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer and the 7th U.S. Cavalry marched from Fort Abraham Lincoln, Dakota Territory, to destiny at Little Big Horn. Not so well-known is the fact that a battery of three .50 caliber Gatling guns accompanied the expedition, mobilized to subjugate the non-reservation, “hostile” Lakota Sioux bands led by Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse in Montana Territory. Second Lt. William H. Low and a detachment of the 20th Infantry had been assigned to the fort to organize this “artillery” component of Brig. Gen. Alfred H. Terry’s “Dakota Column.”

Low’s unit, however, would be denied a role at the Battle of the Little Big Horn, fought that June, when his guns were assigned to Col. John Gibbon’s less mobile “Montana Column” because of a legitimate concern that the Gatlings would impede Custer’s “pursuit of the Indians,” as Custer’s orders of June 22 stated. During a previous cavalry reconnaissance “over very rough ground,” one of Low’s guns had overturned, injuring three men, and was temporarily abandoned, several participants recalled. The four unfit condemned cavalry horses that pulled each gun further justified concerns about the mobility of this precursor to the modern machine gun. Informed that his battery would not march with the 7th Cavalry, Low “wept, almost cried,” remembered Winfield S. Edgerly, a second lieutenant with the 7th Cavalry.