Picked up from the Bozeman Historical Museum’s little free library on a whim, because (following my reading in Lakota history) I’m interested in the 1800s West as a space of technological change. Patents came up in the first paragraph, so in that sense not disappointing.

This very slim book is extremely focused on the gun and its technical change over time—powder weights, sights, metals used in shells, production volume, etc. Discussion of its usage is restricted to analysis of what the troops liked and disliked about it. Interest in the gun itself is assumed; that the interest stems in large part from the weird hero worship of the genocidal Custer is so far out of scope that it almost seems unfair to critique the book for it.

Suspect there’s an interesting book to be written on the gun in the West (especially one that follows Pekka Hamalainen in taking indigenous agency — and therefore gun usage — seriously) but this will only be of interest to specialists.