Killer Colt (4 page)

By the time this letter was sent, its recipient had already turned to a new trade: yarn and cloth manufacturing. Equipped with newfangled technology—water-powered spindles and looms—the nascent New England textile industry was spared the worst effects of the depression of 1819.
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True to his family motto—“He Conquers Who Endures”—Christopher Colt took the loss of his fortune as a mere setback. A fresh opportunity awaited in the mills. To persist in the face of adversity was, as the proverb assured him, the key to success.

As it happened, his capacity to endure suffering was about to be sorely tested. Fate had another, even more devastating blow in store for him.

In May 1821, his wife delivered her eighth child, a boy christened Norman Upton Colt. By then, however, she had already suffered the first bouts of bloody coughing that signified the onset of pulmonary tuberculosis—consumption, the “white plague.” She died on June 6 at the age of forty.

The infant, sickly from the day of his delivery, survived for only a year. His burial took place on May 5, 1822—the anniversary of his birth. His passing was—predictably—commemorated in verse by Lydia Sigourney, who rarely squandered a chance to rhapsodize on the death of a newborn:

The Grim Reaper, in this typically tear-jerking piece, may have been humbled by the holiness of the infant’s “cherub brow.” But neither Death nor his favorite female poet was done yet with the offspring of Christopher and Sarah Colt.

N
ot long before she succumbed to the white plague, Sarah Colt bestowed on her little son Samuel a cherished keepsake: a military horse pistol that her father had wielded in the Revolutionary War. That, at any rate, is one version of the story. Another is that she bought him the old firearm as a reward for learning to read. According to a third, Sam found it among the discards in a “gunsmith’s junk pile.” And some biographers claim that he got it in a trade from his younger brother Christopher, Jr., reputedly a sharp dealer even in early boyhood.
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Though these tales differ in detail, all agree that the gun was inoperative when Sam acquired it and that—in a precocious display of mechanical genius—he tinkered it back into working order with spare parts from “some generous gunmaker’s scrapbox.” One famous anecdote portrays the seven-year-old seated “under a tree in a field with the pistol taken entirely to pieces, the different parts carefully arranged around him, and which he was beginning to reconstruct. He soon, to his great delight, accomplished this feat.” Like the stories of Newton and the apple and Washington and the cherry tree, there is a hagiographic quality to this tale of little Sam Colt and his broken-down flintlock—appropriately enough for a figure who would one day be compared to the Deity Himself.
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Whether it corresponds in any way to actuality is another matter. In any event, the truth is impossible to verify.

There
are
some documented facts about this period in the Colt family history. Following Sarah’s death, the running of the household fell to Christopher’s widowed sister, Lucretia Colt Price, who had lived with the
family for a number of years. In March 1823, she was relieved of her domestic duties when Christopher took a second wife, Olivia Sargeant, daughter of a prosperous Hartford mechanic.

Two years after this happy event, another tragedy befell the Colt family, at least as devastating as the loss of Sarah. In July 1825, Margaret, the oldest child, fell victim to the scourge that had claimed her mother. She was only nineteen at the time and just months shy of her long-planned marriage—“snatched,” as Lydia Sigourney put it, “in her bloom and in her bridal hour.”

In her inevitable tribute, Mrs. Sigourney lavishes her usual maudlin attention on the presumably poetic details of Margaret’s slow decay: her struggles “for that slight breath that held her from the tomb,” her “wasting form” like “a snow-wreath which the sun marks for his own,” her “emaciate hand” raised “in trembling prayer.” Describing the young woman’s funeral, Sigourney pictures the mourners gathered at the gravesite. There are the grieving companions of Margaret’s youth—“a train of young fair females with brows of bloom / And shining tresses.” There is her stricken fiancé, E. B. Stedman—the “pale lover,” who, “ ’ere the fading of the summer rose,” had “hoped to greet her as a bride.” And finally there are the young woman’s surviving siblings: “those who at her side were nursed / By the same mother.”
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Though precise dates are impossible to ascertain, it would appear that their sister’s funeral was one of the last times, for years to come, that the children of Christopher and Sarah Colt would all be gathered in one place. Their lives were about to undergo a major upheaval.

•   •   •

If Freudian theorists are to be believed, the figure of the evil stepmother, so familiar from the Brothers Grimm, is rooted in unconscious childhood fears of maternal rejection. Less psychoanalytically inclined scholars, on the other hand, see the prevalence of wicked stepmothers as a reflection not of infantile fantasy but of historical reality. Two hundred years ago, women of procreative age died at an alarmingly high rate. Husbands frequently remarried and sired children with their new wives, who, in the natural way of things, treated the offspring of their predecessors less tenderly than their own.
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Christopher’s new wife, Olivia, was no fairy-tale ogress. But with her husband struggling to reestablish his finances, she was obliged to impose a strict new regime on the household, beginning with the discharge of the servants. Within five years of her marriage, moreover, she had given birth to three babies of her own.
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Having been raised as pampered members of the local gentry, the children of Christopher’s first marriage suddenly found themselves in radically reduced circumstances, expelled from the ranks of the social elite. Apart from the youngest, nine-year-old James, they were now expected to earn their own keep. Christopher, Jr.—who had worked up a small business running errands for the neighbors—was permitted to remain at home, adding his earnings to the household funds.
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The others were sent into the world.

Within months of Margaret’s death, her younger sister, Sarah Ann, was farmed out to relatives who, by all accounts, treated her little better than a menial.
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John, who had begun to entertain dreams of a military career, hoped to enter West Point. His new stepmother, however, made it clear that such an ambition was beyond the family’s means. Instead he was sent to work at the Union Manufacturing Company in Marlborough, Connecticut, a textile mill that produced the blue cotton stripe fabric used to clothe slaves in the Southern plantations. John so excelled at his work that, within a year, he was promoted to assistant bookkeeper, familiarizing himself with the so-called double entry system of accounting favored by New England merchants.
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As for Sam, he was indentured to a farmer in Glastonbury, Connecticut. History records few details of his departure from the family home. Most of his biographers, however, agree on one point. When he left, he took his gun.
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H
owever deep the bonds of affection between them, whatever traits of character and temperament they shared, Samuel Colt and his big brother, John, differed radically in at least one crucial regard. By the time he reached adolescence, Sam had already conceived his life’s purpose and pursued it with a fierce determination for the rest of his days. Nothing would deflect him from his goal. Though he would travel widely, his wanderings were always in the service of a single ambition. His aim (to use the obvious metaphor) was as narrowly focused as the view through a marksman’s sight.

By contrast, to chronicle John Colt’s career is to chart a distinctly meandering course. Though possessed, like his younger brother, of seemingly boundless energies and a bold enterprising spirit, there was a haphazard quality to his pursuits. In search of success, he would lead a nomad’s existence, trying his hand at assorted moneymaking schemes around the country. In the original meaning of the term—“following a winding or erratic course, rambling, roving”—John Colt’s life was distinctly devious. Whether the word also applied to him in its more common sense—cunning, crooked, untrustworthy—would, in later years, be a subject of heated debate.
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John Colt saw Manhattan for the first time in 1826, when he accompanied his father there on a business trip. The previous fall, at a ceremony to mark the opening of the Erie Canal, Governor De Witt Clinton had prophesied that the 350-mile waterway would transform New York City into the country’s
“emporium of commerce.” Less than a year later, that prediction was already coming true, as barges laden with the bounty of America’s heartland made their way to the great, booming port.
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The burgeoning metropolis—“with its domes and spires, its towers, its cupolas and steepled chimneys”—impressed the sixteen-year-old boy as a wonderland. He was particularly struck by the hum and bustle of the South Street docks, lined with merchants’ shops and warehouses and bristling with the masts, spars, and rigging of countless sailing ships and packets.
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A month and a half after he returned to his job at the Union Manufacturing Company, John vanished, only to turn up three weeks later in Albany, New York. Though the facts are sketchy, he appears to have run off to New York City before making his way northward by steamer, evidently in the vague hope of realizing his dream of entering West Point. A chance encounter with a family acquaintance at a hotel in Albany alerted his father to John’s whereabouts.

By then, Christopher Colt had moved his wife and family to a cottage in Ware, Massachusetts, where he had become the sales agent for the Hampshire Manufacturing Company, makers of cotton and woolen yarn and cloth, as well as “machinery, castings and gearings” used in the production of textiles.
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Writing to his son in Albany, Christopher urged the sixteen-year-old to return home and come work at the mill. Though John’s supply of cash was, by then, running perilously low, he refused, informing his father that he was determined to further his education.

To lure his prodigal son back home, Christopher acceded to his wishes, offering to pay for his tuition at an academy near Hartford. John promptly enrolled, pursuing his studies with a diligence that “astonished everyone.” After just one quarter, however, Christopher—apparently under pressure from his parsimonious new wife—withdrew his financial support and demanded that John “return home in the next mail stage.”

•   •   •

John’s sister, Sarah Ann, was living at home again, earning her keep by teaching at a female seminary.
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The two were now the oldest children in the Colt household—the ones with the clearest recollections of their privileged past. The memories of their indulgent mother—and of the luxuries
they took for granted while she was alive—only heightened their resentment of Olivia.

Still bent on completing his studies, John seethed when his stepmother urged him to abandon his academic ambitions and return to his job in Marlborough. Under the family’s current straitened circumstances, she informed him, John must “dismiss his extravagant expectations” and reconcile himself to a life of “privation.” The most he could expect from his parents was a meager allowance—a “mere pittance.”