American Gun: A History of the U.S. In Ten Firearms (9 page)

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 interchangeably 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.