American Rifle - Alexander Rose [66]
From his youth Colt, the son of a cloth merchant, adored guns, and by seven he had illicitly acquired a pistol; at twelve he was making his own bombs and detonated one spectacularly in the middle of a local pond. At school in 1830 his education was cut very short owing to another unfortunate pyrotechnics display, and his father sent him to sea. Aboard the Corlo, whiling away the time on a voyage to Calcutta, Colt whittled a wooden pepperbox pistol, a clumsy type of handgun with revolving barrels. Quite brilliantly, he realized that a more effective design would have a single barrel that was serviced by a revolving cylinder containing multiple loads. Returning home, Colt presented a wooden specimen to a local gunsmith, who made a cheap, and evidently shoddy, metal version—which blew up on the first shot.64
Undaunted but penniless, Colt decided he needed to make some cash before setting up a business. First he grew a beard so as to look older than his eighteen years and grandiosely styled himself “Dr. Coult of New York, London, and Calcutta.” Then he manufactured a supply of laughing gas and gave streetcorner demonstrations around the country. Having sold enough of the stuff to various practical jokers to keep himself afloat, Colt obtained a rather vague patent on his revolving-cylinder idea on February 25, 1836.65 He then set sail for London and Paris to apply for patent protection abroad (Samuel always thought ahead—and big), and on his return he established the Patent Arms Manufacturing Company in Paterson, New Jersey, with the help of several friendly investors. The firm went bust pretty soon afterward but not before producing fifty Colt revolving rifles based on his cylinder idea. Hoping to interest the military—“government patronage . . . is an advertisement, if nothing else,” Colt once said—he sold them for $125 each to Colonel William Harney, who was down in Florida fighting the Seminole War.66
The hapless Seminoles saved Colt because soon afterward, with the princely sum of $6,250 in his pocket, his vessel was shipwrecked and he lost everything. Helped by Colt’s nonstop marketing drives, however, word had spread of these strange repeating rifles among the soldiers, and they happily provided Colt with sufficient testimonials (“I honestly believe that but for these arms, the Indians would now be luxuriating in the everglades of Florida,” wrote Harney) to prompt the Ordnance Department into taking a look at them.67 The department dismissed them as too complicated and unreliable for military use, but Colt realized that while soldiers might be armed with army-issue rifle-muskets, he could sell them pistols as personal sidearms.68 So he began making handguns and rifles.
Already legends, the Texas Rangers became keen customers, as did John Frémont and Kit Carson during their surveys of the West.69 Flightly riders for the Pony Express bought Colt revolvers for their protection while each of the eight men guarding the dangerous mail-stage run between Independence, Missouri, and Santa Fe carried a Colt revolving rifle, a massive .44-caliber, six-shot “Dragoon” Colt revolver weighing nearly five pounds that pretty much stopped anything in its tracks, and a smaller “back-up” .36-caliber version. When the public expressed skepticism that their letters would get through Indian and bandit-infested territory, the Missouri government declared that “these eight men are ready in case of attack to discharge 136 shots without having to reload. We have no fears for the safety of the mail.” It went through, safely.70
The gun’s widespread use during the Mexican War finally persuaded Ordnance to adopt the revolver for service use, though it must be said that the department had been quite right in expressing doubts about the Colts’ reliability in the field. In 1848 Captain John Williamson informed Colonel George Talcott of Ordnance that of 280 revolvers issued