American Gun: A History of the U.S. In Ten Firearms

by Chris Kyle

  “Captain,” shouted the Ranger to his commander on the ground, the legendary Texas Ranger Captain John Coffee Hays, “yonder comes a thousand Indians!”

  The hour-long firefight that followed became known as the Battle of Walker Creek, or “Hays’ Big Fight.” The tussle marked a new era of American history and westward expansion, one where the balance of power shifted decisively to the white settlers moving into the western expanse. It was also part product and part symbol of a vast awakening of American industry, which would eventually see factories producing millions of guns. This boom would continue through the Civil War and beyond, reaching its peak in 1873 with a masterpiece of design and performance, the Colt Single Action Army revolver, aka Model P, M1873, Single-Action Army, SAA, Colt .45, and my favorite tag of all, Peacemaker. Just the fact that it has this many nicknames tells you it’s a hell of a gun.

  But the Colt 1873 did not spring up from dust, whole-formed as a sidearm so perfectly suited to its needs and surroundings that you can’t picture the West without it. In a way, it all began back in the summer of 1844 with those sixteen Texas Rangers, each armed with two copies of a fragile-but-revolutionary .36-caliber pistol called the Colt Paterson revolver, the grandfather of the Peacemaker.

  To that date, most successful handguns were one-shot models. Horse pistols, meant to be used by cavalry and others on horseback, were single-shot pistols too long and awkward to hang from your hip or properly strap to your leg. Often sold as a pair, a man would holster them on either side of his saddle, giving himself two shots before having to reload. When Meriwether Lewis went exploring the continent on President Jefferson’s dime, he most likely chose the military standard Model 1799 North & Cheneys. Like the muskets and rifles of the time, these guns used a flintlock mechanism and were loaded from the front of the barrel. The North & Cheneys fired the same-sized ball as the Army’s musket, which made for convenience all the way around.

  Compare that to the Colt Paterson the Rangers were carrying. These early Colts featured a nine-inch barrel and a revolving cylinder that enabled the shooter to let loose with five rounds before reloading. The design seemed to hold promise, and the weapons had done well in testing. The only problem was, they had yet to see action.

  Frederic Remington’s depiction of a mounted assault by Plains Indian warriors.

  Library of Congress

  The Indians were about to correct that. With an exclamation mark and a good bit of underlining. Some eighty warriors rode toward Hays’ Rangers. Most of the Indians were Comanche, with a few Waco Indian and Mexican allies sprinkled in. Eighty is a lot less than a thousand, but we can forgive the young lawman’s exaggeration given the reputation of the Comanche—each brave may have fought like ten ordinary men. Armed with lances, war clubs, spare horses, and bows and arrows, the Comanches were the most highly skilled light cavalry troops in the world. In 1844, the nomadic Comanche were the undisputed rulers of a vast swath of the country’s interior named the “Comancheria,” almost a quarter-billion square miles that centered on the southern Great Plains.

  Each of the sixteen Texas Rangers was armed with two copies of the Colt.

  Sketch of an early Texas Ranger. First organized by Stephen F. Austin, the Rangers protected settlers from bandits and hostile Native Americans.

  The Colt Paterson revolver, the weapon Texas Rangers used against Comanches in 1844. The publicity would make Samuel Colt famous—and launch an American icon.

  Peter Hubbard

  A typical Comanche tactic was to send scouts ahead to taunt their enemy, then fall back and lure their opponents into a trap where they would be showered by arrows. Another was simply to provoke an initial volley of fire and then rush their opponents before they had time to reload. Before this day, when the Texas Rangers were mainly stuck with single-shot, slow-reloading pistols and rifles, those tactics were deadly effective. In the time it took to reload, a Comanche could serve up a half-dozen arrows, launch a spear, or pick a prime spot of flesh to test the weight and edge of his tomahawk.

  When Captain Hays saw the Comanches trying their usual tactics, he knew exactly what was going on. Rather than taking the bait, he took his fifteen mounted men and circled around the Indians’ position, galloping up a hill behind them.

  “They are fixin’ to charge us, boys,” Hays yelled, “and we must charge them!”

  The Rangers readied their long guns. Hays told them to hold off firing until their foes were close—damn close.

  “Crowd them!” he ordered, “Powder-burn them!”

  The Rangers set off. The Comanches, confident in their superior numbers, met the charge. All hell broke loose as the rifles cracked. Then, instead of pulling off to reload, the Rangers drew their pistols and commenced to give the Comanches a whoopin’.

  In the running, three-mile battle, the highly disciplined Rangers thinned the Indian ranks with a vengeance. Fighting on horseback and hand to hand, the Texans whipped the much larger force from one end of the scrub to the other. The Colt Paterson was a cap and ball pistol, which meant that the powder, ball, and cap were loaded separately. To get this done, you had to take a fair amount of the gun apart. If you’ve ever been to a black powder meet, you know this can be a daunting task to perform under pressure, let alone on a horse. But the Rangers likely had come prepared with preloaded cylinders, and worked themselves in relays, with one group firing away while the other swapped out their empties. Even this would have been a trial in combat, but however they managed it, they kept firing away at those Comanches.

  Finally, a stunned Chief Yellow Wolf tried to rally the remaining warriors for a counterattack. With his Rangers running down on ammo, Hays called out to his troops, “Any man who has a load, kill that chief!” A Ranger named Robert Gillespie came forward, took aim, and struck the Comanche leader in the head. The Indians fled.

  The Comanches had suffered twenty-three fatalities; the Rangers lost only one man. It was a triumph for both the Colts and the Rangers. One Indian who survived the battle said later it seemed like the Rangers “had a shot for every finger on the hand.” Hays, who would head out to California and a political career a couple years after the battle, credited the pistols with the victory. “Had it not been for them,” he wrote later, “I doubt what the consequences would have been. I cannot recommend these arms too highly.”

  The legend of the Colt revolvers quickly spread. From that day forward, the Texas Rangers had a proven “equalizing” force for mounted and close-quarter combat with the once-invincible Plains Indians. The frontier was a far sight from tamed, but Walker’s Creek was a crucial turning point in the American settlement of the West. Hearty ranchers and homesteaders began establishing (in some cases, reestablishing) claims not only in the western half of Texas, but also across the great southern Plains. You could say the year 1844 marked the dawn of the Wild West, an era in which generations of Colt revolvers would play a starring role in the hands of legendary lawmen and outlaws who roamed America’s rugged, half-settled landscape.

  Now, you’d figure the company that made Colt revolvers would take off in a blaze because of all the good publicity.

  There was, however, one small problem—the manufacturer had gone bankrupt a few years earlier.

  Sam Colt, the firm’s owner and namesake, got a patent on his revolver design from the British government in 1835; two from the U.S. followed the next year. The idea of a revolving magazine wasn’t new, but Colt’s improvements and the availability of ammunition based on percussion cap technology made his gun a technological leap. And you could build a good argument that the gun’s success was due not just to its design but the ability to manufacture it using the most advanced techniques of the day. The Colt-Paterson was a mass-produced marvel.

  Or it would have been if Colt had been able to work out all the early problems. The pistols that came from Colt’s Patent Arms Manufacturing Company of Paterson, N.J., were a mixed bag. Some were excellent; some not. Standardizing production so parts could be used interc
hangeably was still more art than science. Hampered by the Panic of 1837, Colt had trouble both selling weapons and raising money to continue doing so. Adding to the problems, a promising debut of the company’s prototype revolving rifles in the Seminole War in Florida in 1838 didn’t pan out. The rifles were just not rugged and reliable enough for combat, let alone curious soldiers who took them apart to examine their workings. Sometimes they jammed, sometimes they blew up from “chain-fire” malfunctions. The factory closed in 1843, and its assets sold.

  Samuel Colt had a restless mind. Busy on other inventions, including a naval mine, he kept thinking of ways to improve his revolver and resurrect his manufacturing company.

  Meanwhile, the Colt Paterson revolver did so well for the Texas Rangers that one of the veterans of the fracas at Walker Creek, a young captain named Samuel Walker, set out from Texas to New York to personally suggest some improvements to Sam Colt. Together in 1847 they cooked up a design for a new, nearly five-pound behemoth trail gun called the Walker Colt, a weapon that soon became the most powerful handgun on the market. In fact, it stayed so until the introduction of the .357 Magnum in 1935. The Walker Colt fired .44-caliber rounds in a gun not with five chambers, but six. The “six-shooter” was born. It was so big and heavy you could use it as a club if you had to. And many did.

  Colonel Sam Colt and his handiwork. After partnering with industrial genius Eli Whitney, Colt set up his operations in Hartford, Connecticut.

  Library of Congress

  Sam Colt struck a deal with industrial wizard Eli Whitney in Connecticut to crank out the new model. The U.S. Army soon picked up the Walker Colt with an initial order of 1,000 guns. It performed well in the Mexican War (1846–48). But in shades of things to come, the real boost came from publicity following a wild shootout that came to be known as the Jonathan Davis Incident.

  As the story goes, Davis, a skilled marksman and combat veteran of the Mexican War, was prospecting for gold along the river near present-day Sacramento, California, with two friends. A gang of between eleven and fourteen cutthroat killers shot down Davis’s companions and then moved in to finish him off. Armed with a pair of Colt percussion revolvers, Davis took out the thieves one by one, finishing off seven before he ran out of ammo.

  Four surviving outlaws then tried to rush him with knives and a short sword or cutlass. Unfortunately for them, Davis was an artist with a Bowie knife. He carved up all four, quite fatally. Captain Davis survived with flesh wounds and a shredded set of clothes. The early accounts of the episode were so unbelievable that Davis had to produce witness affidavits to verify his tale. That apparently satisfied the journalists of the time, and the story gained wide circulation.

  The U.S. Army ordered thousands of the Colt Model 1860 revolvers as its basic sidearm during the Civil War. Explorers John Frémont and Kit Carson carried Colt revolvers during their epic surveys of the West. Riders and guards of the Pony Express relied on them to guard the dangerous mail run from Santa Fe to Missouri. The Colt revolver, in all its many forms, helped make Samuel one of the richest men in America before dying at age forty-seven in 1862.

  But it wasn’t until a decade later that his company perfected its greatest product, the Single Action Army Revolver.

  It’s hard to find the right words to describe the Peacemaker. Somehow, there’s no way to set down on paper why this gun had such an impact without sounding a little soft in the head. You really have to hold the weapon, load it, fire it, and load it again if you want to understand it.

  Fire, load. Fire. Half-cock, then eject your spent cartridges one at a time with the ejection rod. Load one bullet, skip a chamber, go four bullets, drop the hammer on an empty chamber. Set it in the holster and draw. Single-action means the gun is not going to fire until you cock the hammer back. Pull on the trigger all you want until then, and it’s not going off.

  You will, however, be dang impressed at the gun’s balance and smooth action. The recoil is sweet, the weapon moving up easy in your hand. If you’re using black powder, you’ll be surrounded by a thick wreath of smoke after shooting your load. But that’s part of the fun.

  The Colt is one of the most powerful guns I’ve ever fired. It is quite literally a man-stopper. They used to say you can knock down a grizzly bear with one, though I’ve never tried.

  Probably just as important on the frontier and range, the weapon could take a beatin’ and still kick ass. “Sometimes a bad horse would blow up and send my Colt doing fart-knockers across the prairie,” said one old-time cowboy from Montana. “I’d just blow the dust off of it and shove it back in the holster. It was the only handgun you could trust that way.”

  A Confederate soldier wielding an 1851 Colt Navy and an equally impressive Bowie knife. Civil War vets on both sides were allowed to keep their weapons after the war, leading to a spike in civilian gun ownership.

  Library of Congress

  Push away all the legend attached to the gun, the tales of shootouts and ne’er-do-wells, sheriffs, and bandits—get all of that romantic stuff out of your head. When you pick up the gun and handle it on its own terms, you can’t help but admire it and know that the hype was well deserved. The Colts were as accurate as your hands made them; effective range depended a lot on the operator, but a decent shooter with a steady hand could expect to hit his target at twenty-five yards. A practiced, steady gunman could do it at fifty and more.

  The Colt Single-Action Army Revolver was the first Colt pistol to accept center-fire cartridges. To this point, most Colt revolvers used percussion caps; powder and ball would be loaded down the front of the cylinder, with the percussion cap set on the other end. But the Smith & Wesson Model 3 started a revolution when it was introduced in 1869. The S & W revolver fired .44-caliber metal cartridges, greatly simplifying loading. All three parts of the ammunition—bullet, powder, primer—were married together in a container that could be easily carried and inserted into the weapon under even the worst conditions. Smith & Wesson wasn’t the first to use metal cartridges, and paper cartridges had been around since the beginning of time, or at least the early days of guns. But their system was reliable and efficient. It worked better than many of their predecessors. Just as important, it came at a time when people needed weapons that could fire multiple shots and be quickly reloaded. The U.S. Army put in an order, and the future of handguns was set.

  The Russians had actually gotten their hands on the S & W Model 1 first, and in fact the Russian Imperial Government made several suggestions that improved the weapon. Their involvement almost ended up being a financial disaster for Smith & Wesson when disputes rose over payments due. The company persevered, and its handguns remained the chief American alternative to Colts for going on one hundred years. Times have changed, but in a lot of ways they’re still the Ford and Chevy of handheld armament.

  There’s nothing like a little competition to spur the creative juices. Colt’s weapon was a definite improvement on its own earlier designs, and the new ammo made it easier to use. The pistol was an immediate best-seller. As you can tell from the name, the weapon was designed for the Army, which was holding trials for a new sidearm contract. The government put in a large order, and the gun continued to be a military standard for two decades. Civilian models and a host of variations quickly followed. While the Army’s Colts were chambered for .45 caliber, the Colt Frontier used .44–40.

  Lawmen loved the Single-Action Army. Cowboys and ranchers did, too. But it was the heroes and desperadoes who made the gun not just a legend, but part of the American identity. Buffalo Bill Cody, John Wesley Hardin, Judge Roy Bean, Wild Bill Hickok, Doc Holliday, Wyatt Earp, Pat Garrett, Billy the Kid, the Dalton Boys . . . you can’t hardly mention one of those names and not see a Colt in their hand.

  And I don’t suppose you can talk about the Peacemaker without throwing at least one story of ne’er-do-wells and bank robbers into the mix.

  I’ve always been partial to the tales surrounding Butch and Sundance myself. The outlaws Butch Cass
idy (legal name: Robert LeRoy Parker) and the Sundance Kid (legal name: Harry Longbaugh) were big fans of the Colt Single-Action Army. Though they were both highly skilled shooters, they claimed to take great pains not to kill people during their legendary bank and train heists in the 1890s with their Wild Bunch Gang, also known as the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang.

  An American icon: the 1873 Colt Army .45 revolver.

  Library of Congress

  According to one account, during their final exile in Bolivia, they put on an exhibition of fast drawing and fast shooting for a friend visiting from the States.

  “Let’s show him, Kid,” said Butch.

  “Let’s go, Butch,” said the Sundance Kid, who spun the cylinder of his six-shooter and jumped up.

  The pair grabbed some empty bottles, went outside, and started throwing them high in the air, firing from a crouch.

  “I never saw anything like it,” said their friend. “I never saw two guns drawn faster and I was with men skilled in firearms all my life. Before I knew it the Colts were in their hands and they were shooting. The four bottles crashed in splinters. They repeated this trick several times. Sometimes Butch missed but the Kid always hit the falling targets.”

  Another time, Butch explained his preference for the Colt Single-Action Army: “It has a long and heavy barrel and can be used as a weapon. I’d rather crack a messenger across the nose than kill him. All the messenger has is a bump on the head. Hell, it isn’t his money anyway.”

  In the second half of the nineteenth century, the Western frontier began filling up with a motley cast of characters: miners, trappers, buffalo hunters, cattle rustlers, gamblers, outlaws, opportunists. In the midst of such company—and with the law still an irregular presence—you were well served to know your way around a gun. Clint Eastwood–style, one-on-one, fast-draw gun duels weren’t that common in the Old West, though you wouldn’t know it from Hollywood movies and TV shows. There were plenty of drunken shoot-outs, lots of which occurred in saloons, plus many ambush killings and cowardly shots in the back, but the number of classic “High Noon” gun showdowns was surprisingly few.