The Colt revolver takes its name from both its inventor, Samuel Colt, as well as its firing method. Featuring a revolving cylinder, which contained a separate chamber for each bullet, the revolver was one of the first handguns capable of firing multiple rounds without reloading.
Colt patented his first model in 1836. By all accounts, his early revolver was flawed in many aspects: difficult to load, prone to accidental discharge, and in danger of exploding if dropped. Regardless of his pistol’s imperfections, Colt was a master salesman; he conducted a relentless marketing and public-relations campaign aimed at the military, government officials, the press, and potential investors.
Initially based in Paterson, New Jersey, Colt’s first factory manufactured approximately 3,000 pistols and 1,500 other guns during its six years in operation. But high manufacturing costs and an inherently flawed design led to the failure of Colt’s early venture. In 1849, however, his fortunes began to turn. After being granted a renewal of his patent, he developed a much-improved.31-caliber revolver. Until the legendary Colt.45 came along in 1872, the 1849 revolver sold 325,000 and stood as the best-selling handgun of its time.
While this gun marked a definite improvement over the initial revolver, its success was not due to quality alone. Gun culture exploded during the 1840s and 1850s. ManifEST Destiny—the ideology that posited Americans as a kind of chosen people with an inalienable right of conquest—proved the best marketing tool possible. The Cali-lornia gold RUSH, the Mexican-American War, and other westward-expansion movements played a significant role in the Colt explosion. But Colt’s greatest advocates, the men who would embody the spirit of the American West, were the Texas Rangers.
Captain Samuel H. Walker, a commander during an 1844 clash between 15 Texas Rangers and nearly 80 Comanches known as Hays’s Big Fight, recounted the battle in a letter to Samuel Colt and credited his revolver with the Texan victory. Walker and Colt began working together, resulting in design improvements and government contracts that proved highly lucrative for Colt.
What distinguished the revolver was, of course, its rapid-fire capacity. In earlier skirmishes, the Rangers were armed with single-shot guns. Riding on horseback, they found the guns easy to shoot but awkward to reload. Comanche and Apache warriors developed a fighting strategy based on the limitations of the Rangers’ weaponry. They would mount an initial assault, using just a few fighters, during which the Rangers would discharge their weapons. Then, as the Rangers dismounted in order to reload, the Indians would converge in much greater numbers and overwhelm the Rangers before they were able to fire again.
Walker credited the Colt revolver with intimidating the Indians enough to halt their attacks on Texas settlements and negotiate a treaty. He also brought the revolver into widespread military use during the Mexican-American War, giving the Colt revolver its reputation for being the “Gun that Won the West.” Sam Houston, the first U. S. senator from Texas, lobbied President James K. Polk and his secretary of war to arm every soldier on the American frontier with Colt’s pistols.
Colt harnessed the power of the Texas publicity, incorporating engravings of scenes from Hays’s Big Fight and other Texan tableaux into the design of his pistols. He used his success in Texas as a springboard from which to generate military sales both within the United States and abroad. By the time of the Civil War, Colt had become the weapon of choice for the U. S. military.
Further reading: Jervis Anderson, Guns in American Life (New York: Random House, 1984); William N. Hos-ley, Colt: The Making of an American Legend (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996).
—Eva Pendleton
World History
