Colt Modernizes – Cap and Ball Colts

The Walker Colt

In 1846, Sam Colt found a young man from Texas knocking at his door.  That young man, Captain Samuel Walker, was on a mission; he wanted Sam Colt to return to the business of making revolvers.

At this time Colonel Colt was engaged, as noted in Part 1, in manufacturing underwater electrical cable, tinfoil and marine mines.  Captain Walker wanted revolvers for the new-born Republic of Texas, but he didn’t want a rebirth of the .36 caliber Paterson.  He wanted a big, heavy, powerful revolver; a revolver for horsemen.  He wanted a dragoon pistol.

Sam Colt was apparently interested, because he sat down to create Captain Walker’s desires in steel.  The result of this process was the sidearm that first defined the form of the modern sixgun.  The 1847 Colt Walker held six loads rather than five, and the big cylinder, while described as a .44, was actually a .45, taking a .457 round or conical ball over as much as 60 grains of FFFG black powder.  The gun further had a hinged, attached rammer for reloading and a fixed trigger and trigger guard.  This was not only the first modern-form sixgun but also the first magnum revolver, as the big cylinder and the heavy .457 ball packed quite a wallop.

A few years back I had the pleasure of firing a replica Walker.  It was an interesting piece to handle, but sure as hell not a quick-draw piece.  The Walker Colt is long, heavy and cumbersome, but it’s important to remember what the Walker was designed for; it is a dragoon pistol.  It was designed for horsemen, to be carried my mounted riflemen (dragoons.)  Some Walkers as well as the later dragoon models were adapted to be fitted with shoulder stocks but making the revolver a carbine presents the same problem that led to the demise of revolving rifles in general; the cylinder gap has a distinct tendency to vent hot gases and, if a gun is ill-timed, to spit the occasional lead shaving.  None of this is good for the shooter’s non-firing arm.

The Colt Walker was effective but less than perfect.  Poor metallurgy in the early guns led to problems with ruptured cylinders, and the weak loading lever latch often led to the rammer dropping under recoil, jamming the gun up and preventing a fast follow-up shot.  In the end, this led to only 1,100 Walker revolvers being built.  These problems did, however, led to the next step in Colt sixgun development only a year after the advent of the Walker.

The Dragoons

A martial pistol must be powerful, reliable and tough; the Walker was powerful, but fell a bit short on the other two aspects.  So, what started with the Walker revolver led to several developments and refinements in the basic dragoon pistol.  There were four primary variants of the Dragoon revolvers:

• The First Model Dragoon, made from 1848 to 1850, with oval cylinder stops, a square-backed trigger guard, and no wheel on the hammer where it rode on the mainspring.
• The Second Model Dragoon, made from 1850 to 1851, with rectangular cylinder stops and a square-backed trigger guard. The first few hundred Second Models had the old V-type mainspring and no wheel on the hammer; later guns had the flat mainspring that would persist in Colt revolvers for many decades, along with a wheel on the hammer where it rode on the mainspring.
• The Third Model Dragoon, made from 1851 to 1860, with rectangular cylinder stops and a rounded trigger guard. Colt played around with the Third Model more than the others, producing some with folding leaf sights on the barrel, cuts for shoulder stocks, and so on.
• The 1848 Baby Dragoon, a small .31 caliber pocket revolver. This was later refined into the 1849 Pocket Revolver, which was popular among gold-seekers, gamblers and outlaws as a hideaway gun.

The various Dragoon pistols were popular but even the Third Model still weighed in at a tad over four pounds.  There was obviously a market for a lighter, handier gun, more along the weight of the old Paterson guns but more modern and reliable.  That led to the development of an icon among cap-and-ball sixguns, the Colt Navy.

The Colt Navy Revolvers

My first sixgun was a replica of the 1851 Navy Colt, which is widely regarded as the best-handling sixgun made.  I see little reason to doubt that assessment based on my own experience.  My Navy had the standard 7 ½” barrel and a brass frame.  Back in my youth in Allamakee County I did a fair amount of fast-draw and reflex shooting practice, drawing and firing from an old drop belt from which the cartridge loops had been removed and a Mexican loop holster.  That Colt was excellent for such things, smooth, light and slick as a snake.  I shot it with .380 round lead balls and 30 grains of FFFG in paper cartridges I made myself.  I got so I could draw and place six rounds in a regular paper plate at 15 yards very quickly, and with the paper cartridges and a brass capper could reload and recap efficiently, usually having the old gun back in action in about a minute.  I carried the capper on a string around my neck, paper cartridges in an old tobacco tin and generally toted the old Navy around with me on many of my adventures in woods and fields.

There was a down side that resulted in my eventually discarding that old sixgun, and that was the brass frame.  With every shot that steel cylinder hammered back into that soft brass frame, eventually deforming the frame to the point where I reckoned the old piece unsafe to shoot.  I had a couple of friends who were in a local theater group, so I seated some balls in the empty cylinder, hammered a few balls into the barrel and removed the nipples to render the gun useless, then gave it to them as a prop gun.  I would like to have another of these guns, but when the day comes for me to find another cap and ball gun, it will be a steel frame version.  Brass frame replicas are still common on the gun market as flies in a barn, but I can’t recommend them for the reasons described above.

Back in the day the Navy Colts were very popular.  The well-equipped cowpoke, lawman or gun twist frequently carried a brace of them in saddle holsters in addition to his belt gun; in the famous Charles Portis book True Grit, in that renowned final charge, it was with a brace of Navy Colts from saddle holsters that Marshal Cogburn engaged the four bad men, not the SAA Colt and ‘92 Winchester wielded by John Wayne in the movie.

Ten years after the first Navy Colts were made, the Colt works brought out the ultimate Navy, that being the streamlined 1861 Navy, also in .36 caliber, with an improved “creeping” loading lever and the added loading clearance introduced in the .44 Army Colt of 1860.  There was also a miniature variant, the 1861 Pocket Navy, later refined into the 1862 Pocket Police, both small-framed .31 caliber revolvers.

The Root Sidehammer

The Root Side-hammer Colt, designed by Colt engineer Elisha K. Root, was in some ways a better design than the traditional versions; its solid frame was stouter, and the rear sight was on the frame rather than on the hammer nose.  The Root revolver, introduced in 1855, was popular among officers on both sides in the Civil War, but it was a real pipsqueak, manufactured only in .28 and .32 calibers

The 1860 Army Colt

What many consider the ultimate expression of the Colt cap and ball revolver was introduced in 1860, just in time for the Civil War or, as Mrs. Animal calls it, the War of the Northern Aggression.

In many ways the 1860 Army combined the best of both worlds.  It was a much lighter and handier arm than the Dragoon pistols, and with it’s .44 caliber loads packed more punch than the Navy guns.  It was a fine, well-crafted, well-balanced piece, handicapped only by it’s open-topped frame and the odd placement of rear sight on the hammer nose.  This was perhaps the ultimate development of the Colt cap-and-ball revolver.  Its grip shape was so admirably suited to being fired accurately one-handed, even from horseback, carried over to the famous Colt Single Action Army and remains in use on the vast majority of single-action sixguns made today.  The use of a rebated cylinder allowed for the use of the same size frame as the Navy revolvers frame and kept the gun’s weight to about two and a half pounds.

As with the Walker and Navy revolvers, it has been my pleasure to handle a few Army Colts, most replicas but notably one original, although we didn’t fire the original.  The Army Colt is a pleasure to handle, heavy by modern standards but the big sixgun points naturally, barrel rise under recoil is controllable, and the rotation of the curved grip in the hand brings the hammer spur nicely under the thumb, allowing for quick follow-up shots.  The .44 round ball or conical bullet in front of 40 grains of FFFG packs a hearty punch.  A few shooting sessions with one will bring home exactly why this was probably the most desired martial sidearm of its era.

And the demand for martial sidearms was about to explode.

And Then This Happened

Colt revolvers, especially the 1860 Army but also the Dragoon and Navy types, were soon in great demand as the War Between the States broke out.  Sam Colt, having foreseen the great increase in demand, had expanded the factory and, when the southern states began to secede, sold at least 2,000 revolvers to Confederate military buyers, an act which nearly killed the company when the war was over.  But what remains inarguable is the reason that the Colt revolvers were in demand by both Union and Confederate armies; they were tough, powerful, reliable sidearms, the state of the art for their day.

Sam Colt passed away in January of 1862, killed of all things by complications of gout.  The appellation of Colonel was real, Sam Colt having received a commission from the state of Connecticut as commander of the 1st Regiment Colts Revolving Rifles of Connecticut.  But that unit never took the field, and Colonel Colt was soon released from service.  But the erstwhile Colonel Colt’s company was building thousands and thousands of Army revolvers and a variety of guns for the civilian market, they didn’t lack for competition.  Plenty of people were getting in on the sixgun action, including America’s oldest surviving gunmaker, Remington, as well as plenty of others.  We’ll talk about them in Part 3.  Meanwhile, bigger things were afoot; about this time two men were set to change the world of sixguns forever.  Those two men were Horace Smith and Daniel B. Wesson, and they had an idea and a patent.  But that’s a story for Part 4!

Revolvers B.C.

In the history of sixguns, there are two periods of time to be considered:  Before Sam Colt, and after Sam Colt.  The Before Colt (B.C.) era was the time of the flintlock, and a surprising number of innovative repeating guns were made during this time, mostly custom jobs and one-offs.  But there is one B.C. revolver that stands out, and that is the Collier.

Elisha Collier was a Boston inventor, and his revolver was unique in one respect among flintlock repeating guns; it used a cylinder separate from the barrel to carry the arm’s multiple charges, rather than the pepperbox-styled arrangements that were found prior to his time.  Collier’s first flintlock revolvers around 1814 and production continued up to about 1824, all guns being made by John Evans & Sons of London.  Estimates of numbers produced vary but are almost certainly under 500, in both handgun and long gun versions.

The Collier revolver was a fine piece for its day.  It was innovative, well-made, well appointed and, given the shortcomings of its flintlock ignition system, reliable.  One of Collier’s innovations was an automated priming mechanism in the flintlock’s frizzen, that made possible repeated shots without re-priming the pan.  But the limitations of the flintlock remained; the guns, like all flintlocks, were vulnerable to wet and wind.  The advent of the percussion cap would change all that, but while Collier’s London manufacturer produced a few models using the newfangled percussion ignition system, for the most part Elisha Collier missed that boat.

The real impact of the Collier revolver was not to come from Britain.  It came instead from a young cabin boy aboard the brig Corvo, who saw a Collier revolver on board ship and set to thinking about revolving repeaters.  That cabin boy’s name was Samuel Colt.

The Advent of Colonel Colt

There’s a reason that the saying “God created men, Colonel Colt made them equal” was a truism in the old West.  The form of the modern wheelgun was in large part designed and defined by Sam Colt, and with the Colt revolver came the advent of the modern personal sidearm.

The young Samuel Colt was an interesting character.  As a youth he was intrigued by gunpowder, electricity – he made one of, if not the first underwater electrically-fired explosive device – and manufacturing.  He’s known for pioneering revolver designs but also pioneered mass production and the use of interchangeable parts along with his contemporary Eli Whitney.  He also was among the first to dabble in such modern marketing techniques as celebrity endorsements, soliciting Italy’s King Victor Emmanuel II among others to make prominent use of his revolvers.  He used art liberally in advertising, paying substantial sums to have artists produce heroic scenes of the West featuring use of his revolvers in fighting outlaws and Indians.  A Renaissance Man he may not have been, but he was a brilliant inventor and marketer, and he changed the nature of sidearms forever.

While the Collier revolver may have been the inspiration for Colonel Colt, he had the advantage of the new percussion cap ignition system.  After making several prototypes, including the famous hand-carved wooden model he produced while on board the Corvo, he arrived on the configuration that defines the sixgun to this day:  A solid frame and a revolving cylinder with stops to align each chamber in turn with the single barrel.

European and American patents in hand, Colt obtained financing and set up shop in Paterson, New Jersey, calling his operation the Patent Arms Manufacturing company.

The Paterson Colts

Colt’s first revolver venture only ran for six years, from 1836 to 1842.  In that time the company produced 2,350 sidearms, 1,450 revolving rifles and carbines, and 460 revolving shotguns.

The early Paterson revolvers were iconic, innovative and popular, but in hindsight weren’t terribly effective.  The lack of a trigger guard is noticeable, the guns having a fragile folding trigger that extended when the hammer was cocked.  The first models had to be partially disassembled to be reloaded.  But Colt finally achieved a measure of success with the .36 caliber Belt Model #5,

commonly known as the Texas Paterson.

By modern standards the ergonomics of the Paterson revolvers are pretty bad.  The odd-shaped grip doesn’t suit people with large hands.  The guns were a little light on the barrel end unless you had one of the 9” versions, making them feel whippy in handling; but the long-barreled guns were not as quick to clear leather, putting the horse soldier or gunfighter at a disadvantage.  Even so, the gun pointed naturally and shot reasonably well.

The Paterson was imperfect in other ways.  Guns made before 1839 were, as noted, difficult to reload, and all the Paterson guns only held five shots.

Being a five-shooter rather than a six-shooter was a problem for one more reason than the one missing shot.  All Colt revolvers up to and including the famed Single Action Army had the same issue, namely that the only safe way to carry one was with the hammer down on an empty chamber.  This reduced the Paterson to a four-shot gun, and (at least, before 1839) one that couldn’t be quickly or easily recharged.

Bear in mind that this was an era in which most sidearms were still front-stuffing single-shots, so the handicap wasn’t seen as being as dire as we might consider it today, in a time where many semi-auto sidearms carry enough ammo in a single magazine to lay low a small army of attackers.  Even so, the limitation often led to the conscientious pistolero carrying two or three revolvers on belt or saddle.

The Patent Arms Manufacturing Company sold a number of sidearms to the US Army who issued them to troops fighting in the Second Seminole Wars.  Those troops favored the Paterson Colt’s capacity, but Army evaluators found the guns too finicky and unreliable in combat and so disallowed any further purchases.  Sam Colt did sell a couple hundred sidearms and a like number of revolving rifles to the Republic of Texas, who issued them to their new-found Navy, but when that Navy disbanded in 1843, the Paterson guns were issued to the Texas Rangers.  The Rangers liked the revolving guns, which gave them a much-needed firepower advantage over the Comanche Indians, with whom the Republic of Texas was then engaged in hostilities.

It was in fact the use of Paterson revolvers by the Texans and their increasing popularity with the new waves of settlers crossing the prairies that set the stage for the next step in the development of Colonel Colt’s revolvers.  While the Paterson Colt was arguably a failure both in martial and commercial sales, and while the Patent Arms Manufacturing Company went under after only six years, a seed had been planted.

That seed sprang forth in 1846, when General Zachary Taylor send a young Army Captain, Samuel Walker, to Connecticut, where Sam Colt was engaged in manufacturing underwater electrical cable, tinfoil and marine mines.  Captain Walker had one mission:  To convince Colonel Colt of the need for a revised revolver, one that would be more reliable, more rugged and more powerful than the .28 and .36 caliber Patersons.  That mission by Captain Walker would bear significant fruit…

…But that’s a tale for Part 2.