The Tuscarawas Valley Civil War Round Table has spent more than a quarter century as one of the quiet institutions of Tuscarawas County, a group that gathers monthly to keep a war fought more than 160 years ago alive in the public memory. On Thursday, October 8, at 6 p.m., it will turn its attention westward, to a battle that came a decade after Appomattox and to the firearms that carried the United States Cavalry into it.
The featured presenter will be Rich West, a historian, whose talk is titled "The Guns of the 7th Cavalry: Tragedy, Myths and Missing." The program, held in the Community Room of the Dover Public Library at 525 N. Walnut St., is free and open to the public, and West intends it to be interactive with his audience rather than a lecture delivered from behind a podium. Civil War collectibles and artifacts will also be on display.
West's subject is the Model 1873 Colt, the revolver and carbine that the Army adopted in the years after the Civil War and that became standard equipment on the Western frontier. His presentation will trace the early development and distribution of those firearms, how they reached the frontier, and how they figured in the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876, the engagement along the Little Bighorn River in Montana Territory in which Lakota Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors defeated the 7th Cavalry Regiment under George Armstrong Custer. The battle, fought June 25 and 26, 1876, is remembered as Custer's Last Stand and known to the Lakota and other Plains peoples as the Battle of the Greasy Grass.
The Colt Single Action Army was designed for the U.S. government's service revolver trials of 1872 by William Mason and Charles Brinckerhoff Richards of Colt's Patent Firearms Manufacturing Company, and it was adopted as the standard-issued revolver of the U.S. Army from 1873 to 1892. It became one of the most recognizable firearms in American history, produced in the hundreds of thousands across more than a century of manufacture. At Little Bighorn, Custer's troopers carried breech-loading, single-shot Springfield carbines alongside their revolvers, and the mix of weapons, their reliability under sustained fire, and the ammunition they consumed have been debated by historians and enthusiasts ever since. That debate, along with the myths that have grown around the battle, is the territory West's talk is built to explore.
West's connection to the subject is personal as well as scholarly. He is related to the last living Civil War veteran in Tuscarawas County, and he inherited several pieces of Civil War artifacts from that family connection. Those objects launched what has become a nearly fifty-year quest to understand and preserve the Civil War. Over the decades he has taken part in reenacting and living history programs, made collecting trips, and given artifact presentations, all in service of what the library describes as a personal and professional mission to preserve the past and educate those intrigued by the American Civil War.
The Round Table itself has deep roots in the community. It was founded more than 25 years ago by Dan Cooley, a former director of the Dover Public Library, and Jeff Schrock of Sugarcreek. Its stated mission is to educate the community about the American Civil War, to preserve Civil War heritage, and to remember those who struggled for their cause. Meetings are held on the second Thursday of each month at 6:30 p.m. in the library's Community Room during January through May and September through December, and new members are always welcome. The group has hosted programs on subjects ranging from Civil War espionage and enslaved informants to the hidden monuments of Gettysburg, drawing on the same conviction that has animated round tables across the country since the mid-twentieth century: that the war is best understood not only through books but through objects, music, and the people who carry its memory forward.
That impulse is what makes an evening like this one more than a curiosity. A revolver is a manufactured thing, stamped and serial-numbered and shipped west in crates, but the Model 1873 also sits at the center of one of the most contested afternoons in American history. West's presentation promises to move between those scales, from the mechanics of a sidearm to the tragedy of a battlefield, and to separate what is documented from what has been mythologized in the century and a half since.
The program is free. For more information or to register, call the Dover Public Library at 330-343-6123 or visit doverlibrary.org.