Not without a canal. The great lakes don't drain into the gulf of Mexico, but rather gulf of St. Lawrence. You would also need to be able to sail up the Niagara falls.

Of course hindsight is 20/20

Just about every western country adopted a full caliber “battle rifle” type of weapon. Like people have said there’s some advantages to having a larger round or longer barrel. They chose that over something like the stg because they thought that would be the best choice.

Then they moved to 5.56 rounds and an assault rifle design. Because it has advantages which people have mentioned already.

And now the US is trying to switch to something more similar to a battle rifle again.

There is no best weapon or doctrine. They’re all going to have trade offs and they didn’t decide they wanted to use an “assault rifle” until the War In Vietnam.

Also I think people look at the stg like it was the greatest weapon of all time. Sure it was one of the first “assault rifles” but that doesn’t make it hands down better than its contemporaries

Those rivers in Canada are all closer to the sea (Atlantic, Pacific, Hudson Bay or the Beaufort Sea) than Ft Benton is to where it reaches the sea (the Gulf).

this makes a little more sense, but in that vein, couldn't you hit the great lakes to get to canada as well?

OP, I’d love a source for the second part of your post. It’s not in what you linked.

I think they mean it's the furthest inland you can travel from the ocean/sea just by boat (and from the title, maybe specifically steamboats). You can take the Mississippi up from New Orleans to St Louis and then the Missouri goes all the way up to this part of Montana.

Desmond Sewards "100 Years War ;English in France 1337-1453

furthest navigable point" wut?

pretty sure there were people, traders, and rivers in canada in the 1880's. every reason for river traffic.

or am i misunderstanding?

edit...and btw 2473 km or 1536 miles.

They did. It's a remote rural area, so there's no money in tearing it down probably. It's been pedestrian-only since 1962 when they built the new bridge a few hundred meters further down. Ironically enough, the wiki says the "new" bridge deck is in bad shape and they're currently exploring ways to overhaul it.

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Automatic weapons weren’t new. Every squad had an automatic rifleman, and submachine-guns were used widely. The question was whether it was worth equipping every rifleman with an automatic weapon. This wasn’t obvious at the time.

The M1 and M14 had superior range and stopping power. Being able to reliably kill the enemy and not end up outranged are intuitively important. Semi-automatic weapons also mean you don’t have your entire army burning through ammunition. When you’re fighting expeditionary wars, this is a major concern because every bullet has to get shipped halfway around the world.

Some of it was replaced after the great flood

Because the US have been fighting all their battles in the middle east where a bigger bullet has certain advantages, mainly that it has a better effect against heavy bodyarmor and that it can penetrate double-brick walls (which is a really common feature in the middle-east and afghanistan.

Neither of those two were a factor back in the days when the US decided to go for 7.62 instead of a more suitable mid-weight cartridge. The only good argument for the 7.62 back then was that it was also a suitable cartridge for general purpose machineguns, so using the same caliber in all small arms simplified logistics.

God learning about the absolute shit-show that was BuOrd and the 7.62 NATO adoption at that time is infuriating.

Well, the US did develop selective-fire weapons over time, but after WW2 the focus was on demobilisation and rebuilding, not issuing new rifles. The main opponents of the US in Europe, the Soviet Union and its allies, were still using the Mosin-Nagant, and upgrading to the semi-automatic, full-powered SKS carbine, so there wasn't any need for an untested design in order to establish fire superiority. Then atom bombs, mutually assured destruction, and it wasn't until the Vietnam war that the infantry of the US Army faced strong enough opposition that their M14s (effectively upgraded Garands) were shown to be outdated.

As for why the US didn't adopt the STG44 specifically, it had a few issues that other people have mentioned. Plus, it wasn't American - it would be a fairly humiliating thing for the US military, the most powerful in the world, to take a look at their defeated enemy and say 'actually, his gun is so good we want to replace all our weapons with it'. Plus, adopting a new weapon is more or less certain to come with a whole host of teething troubles, from design problems to supply chain issues to opposition from generals to complaints from soldiers; it just wasn't worth it to the people at the top.

They haven’t replaced a steel bridge since 1888?

And yet we are back at big bullets with next gen rifle going into production.

In 1838 the London and Birmingham established an entire company town in the shape of Wolverton (now part of Milton Keynes) to support their railway.

As well as building a town, they established a school to ensure a supply of skilled staff; there are contemporary accounts by visitors who've visited and been impressed by a roomful of quiet and studious working class lads learning the maths and physics required to be an engine driver.

Did you ever use the Stg-44 in call of duty world at war? Thing had the worst iron sites known to man

From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StG_44

1. It was poorly rated: "The British were critical of the weapon, saying that the receiver could be bent and the bolt locked up by the mere act of knocking a leaning rifle onto a hard floor.[15] A late-war U.S. assessment derided the StG-44 as "mediocre", "bulky" and "unhandy", declaring it incapable of sustained automatic fire and prone to jamming, though the report accepted that its accuracy was "excellent for a weapon of its type".[16]"
2. The US already had the .30 caliber M1 carbine that they converted to the M2 carbine: "In 1944 the US added an automatic fire capability to the M1 carbine, and issued it as the M2 carbine with 30 round magazines, fulfilling much the same function. Kits were distributed to convert M1 carbines to M2s."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M1_carbine#/media/File:US_M2_Carbine.jpg

The US and most of its allies went all in on the battle rifle concept based on their experiences in WW2, especially the success of the M1 Garand. This led to the G3, FAL, and M14. The Soviet experience led them to the assault rifle concept. It’s important to note that the Eastern front was larger and had a lot more combat than any other theater of the war.

Weapons in the Korean War were primarily WW2 designs, so it’s not surprising that the US didn’t realize the superiority of assault rifles until the M14 faced the AK47 in Vietnam

I don’t think taxes are what mattered. Especially in an era where tariffs were the main tax. Rivers were used because you could actually sell them to non local markets where they were much more valuable.

Furs was one of the first mercantile to go down the missouri and mississippi. Using the river they could avoid paying taxes.

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I'm guessing it's a mix of the automatic being unreliable, automatic fire should really just be used by a machine gunner to suppress and that the M1 proved itself to be reliable already. I'm surprised it took them so long to give the M1 higher ammo capacity though.