Killer Colt (7 page)

Olivia’s admonition to Sam, urging him to abandon the “frivolous pursuits of a boy,” appears to have fallen on deaf ears. Among the cherished relics of the town of Amherst was an old Revolutionary War cannon, an iron six-pounder, that belonged to General Ebenezer Mattoon, who had brought it home from the Battle of Saratoga in 1777. At daybreak on July 4, 1830—just two weeks after receiving Olivia’s missive—Sam and two schoolmates, Alphonso Taft (who would become United States attorney
general under President Ulysses S. Grant) and Robert Purvis (later a famous abolitionist), snuck onto Mattoon’s property. Attaching ropes to the old field piece, they lugged it up to College Hill and proceeded to get a jump on the Independence Day festivities by discharging it.

Awakened from their slumbers, several faculty members, including the Reverend John Fiske, hurried up the hill and ordered the boys “not to fire again.” Ignoring the command, Sam placed himself “near … the cannon, swung his match and cried out, ‘a gun for Prof. Fiske’ and touched it off.” When the outraged teacher demanded that he identify himself, Sam jeered that “his name was Colt and he could kick like Hell.”
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Whether Sam was expelled for this escapade or left school voluntarily is unclear. What’s certain is that a few days later, he left Amherst Academy for good, his formal education having come to an end with a very literal bang.

•   •   •

Less than one month later, on the morning of August 2, 1830, the brig
Corvo
set sail from Boston Harbor. Among its passengers were Mr. and Mrs. J. T. Jones of the American Baptist Mission, on their way to Rangoon to convert the heathen Burmese.
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Also on board—not as a passenger but as a novice crewmember—was Samuel Colt.

At a cost of $91.24—slightly more than $2,000 in current funds—Samuel had been outfitted with a sailor’s necessities: seaman’s chest and slop clothes, quadrant and compass, boots and bedding, jackknife and almanac, and more. His supplies included a sheaf of stationery so that he could send an occasional letter to his family, none of whom was there to see him off.
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Standing in for his father was Samuel Lawrence, who, later that day, sent the following report to Christopher Colt:

Not long after Mr. and Mrs. Jones’s fellow missionaries completed their farewell services, the anchor was heaved up, the ship got under way, and sixteen-year-old Samuel Colt embarked on what would prove to be the most fateful trip of his life.

F
rom his days of boyhood make-believe—when he and his friends formed a troop of play soldiers, with equipment supplied by his mother—to his adolescent dream of enrolling in West Point, John Colt had always been drawn to the military. It is little wonder, then, that after Sarah Ann’s suicide, when he sought to throw off his old life and leave for other parts of the world, he decided to enlist in the marines.
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He appears to have taken this drastic step with a certain degree of naivety. Shortly after fleeing home, he made the acquaintance of a former member of the corps, who—preying on the young man’s gullibility—assured him that the duties of a new recruit were extremely light, “the most irksome of them being to stand guard daily for a prescribed number of hours.” For the grief-addled John, this seemed a small price to pay for the chance to “escape the native land which had now become so desolate to him.” Making his way to the Gosport marine station at Norfolk, Virginia, he signed up at once, expecting that “after three or four months at the most,” he would be off on a voyage that would take him around the world: “to Constantinople—thence to Alexandria—thence to Calcutta—thence to Canton—crossing the Pacific returning homeward through South America.”
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The reality turned out to be far more disagreeable than he had been led to believe. Though John had endured his share of hardships since his father went bankrupt, he had been raised in genteel circumstances and was unprepared for the rigors of life in the corps: the coarse, barely palatable fare, the even coarser behavior of his comrades, and the harsh, demeaning discipline to which he was routinely subjected. Not long after his first night of sentry
duty, he was seized with a “violent fever” and confined to the infirmary. He emerged several weeks later to find that his ship had sailed without him. By then he had awakened to the sobering truth that a military career was “not only a waste of time for him but a waste of his powers and chances.” Though John had committed himself to an extended term of service, he resolved to leave the corps.

When his formal request for a discharge was denied, he briefly considered desertion before resorting to a more cunning expedient: a forged letter addressed to the commanding officer of the marine station. Written (presumably) by a Massachusetts farmer named Hamilton, the letter declared that the young recruit who had enlisted under the name John C. Colt was actually the sender’s underage son, who had run away from home in his boyish eagerness to see the world. The letter begged that the lad be discharged so that he might be reunited with his aged and ailing parents who had been “rendered wretched” by his absence. John mailed this letter to his brother James, asking him to post it from Ware.

The hoax (as John later described it) succeeded. Shortly after its arrival, he was granted his discharge. Altogether, he had done “three months’ service—eleven days and two nights of which he had been on duty, and more than half the rest of the time upon the sick list in the hospital.”
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•   •   •

John’s aborted experience with the marines marked the end of his nautical ambitions. His life would remain strictly landlocked—though in later years, at the height of his notoriety, a rumor circulated that he had spent some time as a riverboat gambler on the Ohio and Mississippi during the early 1830s. It was even said that, during this interlude, he fought a gun duel with a wealthy planter over an octoroon mistress.
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There is good reason to doubt this sensational tale. One thing seems certain, however. If a duel
did
take place, it would have been conducted with the kind of handgun standard for such encounters in those days: the kind that required a painstaking process of reloading after discharging a single shot.

I
n pursuit of what one anthropologist describes as humanity’s most characteristic goal—creating ever more efficient weapons with which to dispatch other members of the species—gunsmiths had been attempting to devise a workable repeating firearm for several centuries before Samuel Colt’s birth.
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Various approaches were tried, among the least sensible of which was to load two bullets into the barrel of a gun and fire them successively with dual triggers. More practical (and far less apt to explode in the shooter’s hand) was the multibarrel design. Matchlock pistols with several barrels that could be rotated by hand were invented as early as the 1540s. By the eighteenth century, the “pepperbox” pistol—a percussion-cap firearm equipped with up to eight barrels that revolved with each pull of the trigger—represented the state of the art in rapid-fire technology. Unfortunately, while they didn’t require constant reloading, they were cumbersome, poorly balanced, and virtually impossible to aim with any accuracy.

The solution to the problem, as gunsmiths recognized from early on, was a pistol with a single barrel and a revolving cylinder that could be loaded with several balls. Though a few specimens of such weapons have been traced to the time of Charles I, it wasn’t until 1813 that a Boston mechanic named Elisha H. Collier produced a reasonably effective model: a flintlock pistol with a cylindrical breech that, when turned by hand, allowed a “succession of discharges from one loading” (as he described it). Unable to interest American investors in his invention, Collier moved to London, where he secured a patent and set up shop in the Strand. Though his weapons were expensive to manufacture and somewhat clumsy to operate,
they could fire up to eight shots without reloading and were purchased in bulk by the British army. They were in wide use by His Majesty’s troops in India when Sam Colt’s ship arrived in Calcutta in the winter of 1831.
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•   •   •

“When truth becomes legend, print the legend.” The line is from John Ford’s 1962 Western
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
, one of the classics of a genre whose iconic figures—from Owen Wister’s
Virginian
to Jesse James and John Wayne—are impossible to picture without Samuel Colt’s invention strapped to their hips. The truth of how he came up with that invention has long been a matter of controversy. One story claims that the idea sprang directly from his sympathy for Southern slave owners. At some point during his early adolescence, according to this tale, young Colt

Dismissing this account as a racist fabrication, various firearm historians insist that Colt conceived his idea after seeing some of Elisha Collier’s flintlock revolvers in India. Alternatively, these scholars suggest, he may
have viewed some ancient specimens of repeating handguns on display in the Tower of London “when the
Corvo
docked in the Thames” on its return trip to the United States.
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Colt himself steadfastly denied that he had been inspired by Collier’s weapons. Indeed (so he claimed), he did not become aware of their existence until years later, during a subsequent voyage to England. His idea, he insisted, was wholly original to himself, an epiphany that came to him on board the
Corvo
, when—so the story goes—he was “watching the action of the ship’s wheel” and suddenly “realized that the same method of locking the wheel in a fixed position could be applied to a revolving firearm.”
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