The Peacemaker
"The
good people in this world are very far from being satisfied with each other and
my arms are the best peacemaker."
Samuel Colt.
Samuel Colt.
Of all the guns that appeared
in Western movies and novels, the Colt revolver was the most common and the
most emblematic. If you’re in a showdown shoot-out on Main Street at sundown,
there’s only one pistol for you: the Colt six-gun, preferably a Peacemaker.
Colt .45
In fact, of course, all kinds
of handguns, in many different calibers, were used in the West, from American
Smith & Wessons and Remingtons to British Webleys and Tranters and French Lefaucheux. The
Civil War resulted in huge numbers of firearms from every source flooding in
and these were still in use years afterwards.
But no one made a movie named Remington Model 1858 or Smith & Wesson Model 3. They made
one called Colt .45, though (Warner
Bros, 1950).
Samuel Colt (1814 - 62)
patented the first practical multiple-shot handgun in 1837 but it wasn’t till
the Mexican War at the end of the 1840s that Colt’s introduced the Walker Colt
.44. It was fifteen inches long and weighed four and a half pounds. It was
barely a handgun at all. You’d certainly need big hands, and a lightning draw
from a side holster was out of the question. The Walker and the later Dragoon
Colts were horse pistols. As Sam Colt remarked, “It would take a Texan to shoot it.” This is the gun Mattie Ross has in her gunny-sack in True Grit (1969).
The Colt manufactory
The first real handgun was the
1851 Colt Navy .36. It was the pistol favored by Wild Bill Hickok and Jesse James. This revolver used cartridges
made of nitrated paper, a pre-measured black powder charge, and either a round
lead ball or conical bullet.
The Colt Peacemaker was
introduced in 1873. It had many other names: the Model P, the Single Action
Army, M1873, SAA and Colt .45. It was a single action revolver (in other words
you had to cock the hammer before each shot) with a revolving cylinder taking
six metallic cartridges. It was the standard military sidearm until 1892.
Reliable, easy to clean and maintain (guns firing black powder cartridges
required a lot of cleaning), not too heavy (just over two pounds), it was a
practical and almost ubiquitous weapon. Above all, it took store-bought,
ready-made cartridges.
Buy a box and feed 'em in
Civil War revolvers had been cap-and-ball weapons. They were revolving, and thus repeating pistols but each
round had to be prepared with powder and ball, and a percussion cap fitted
before the gun was ready to fire. They took an age to load, which was why
cavalrymen (on both sides) often carried many pistols. A shell belt with a
holster on each hip and a shoulder harness with two more guns under the arms
was quite common. Think of Josey Wales.
From 1873 on, however, you
could buy a box of shells and just feed them in the gate. And the round-nosed 255-grain
lead bullet with 40 grains of black powder packed a real kick.
This system of rear-loading
metallic cartridges had been an idea of Rollin White, who had worked for Samuel
Colt in the early 1850s, but, when Colt rejected the project out of hand, White did a deal with Smith
& Wesson and kept the patent. It was not until 1871 that Colt’s could
produce a similar weapon.
You could buy the Peacemaker in
4¾", 5½" as well as the Cavalry standard,
original 7½" barrels. A longer-barreled version might be slightly more
accurate while a shorter one was quicker to pull. A standard Peacemaker would cost
you $17 by mail order.
Classic short-barreled forty-five
Wyatt
Earp had (so legend says) a long-barreled version known as the Buntline Special. The Colt .45 is what Gary Cooper uses in High Noon and countless cowboys fire in Western after Western. Even
in movies set before 1873…
In fact, despite the fame of
the Colt .45, much more convenient if you owned a pistol and a Winchester ’73 rifle,
or later an 1892 Winchester, which many did, was the Colt Frontier or ‘Frontier
Six-Shooter’, which was a Colt’s 1873 model chambered for a .44-40 round, a
cartridge which was accepted by both handgun and rifle. The Frontier was manufactured
from 1877 on and this Colt .44 was very widely used.
John Wayne's .44-40
These guns were, of course,
hopelessly inaccurate at anything beyond a few paces’ range. While there were
marksmen (and women) who could hit targets consistently, most people were very
unlikely even to hit a man they shot at, never mind kill him. Death might
result from later blood poisoning or other complications if a person were hit,
the standards of medicine and surgery being what they were, but it was rare for
someone to be shot and killed outright by a handgun. Of course, despite what
Western movies show, it was rare for these weapons to be fired at all. Drovers
carried pistols on their hips against rattlers or other dangers but stand-up
gunfights in the street were almost unknown. Sorry to disappoint you.
Good fun (though inaccurate) B-Western
In 1950 Warner Brothers brought
out Colt .45 in which Randolph Scott
was the Colt Firearms Company’s agent. He has two new forty-fives stolen by
evil Zachary Scott and used for nefarious purposes, so Randy has to get them
back at all costs. It’s actually a lot of fun as a B-Western, though it's nonsense as far as the Colt .45 is concerned: it is set just after the Mexican War and there was no Peacemaker then. When ABC aired a
TV series of the same name, Colt .45,
the movie was rebranded Thundercloud.
Christopher sold them (and then Sam Jr.)
In the TV show, which ran from
1957 to 1960, Christopher Colt (Wayde Preston) was a government agent under
cover of his arms sales activities. Later, Preston left the series and we had
Sam Colt Jr., his cousin (Donald May). The ratings sagged and the series was
eventually dropped. There’s an episode of Maverick
in which Bart Maverick comes upon Christopher Colt's sales satchel, abandoned
in a room and covered with dust since the series had been cancelled the
previous season. Quite a good joke.
A matched pair
There are also any number of
movies about the Colt in some way or other. Spaghetti westerns in particular loved
the name. La Colt era il suo Dio,
Reverendo Colt, Una Colt in mano del Diavolo, that kind of thing. All
junk, of course.
Spaghettis loved Colts
Still, the Colt .45 is the gun of the West. Even when you see a
modern one you think of cowboys.
The law of the Remington? I don't think so.
The fanciest Colt ever is the so called Buntline with its 16-inch barrel and removable skeleton stock, famously but probably erroneously associated to Wyatt Earp.
ReplyDeleteColt is probably the first brand that becomes a common name in the history long before Frigidaire...!
JM
See https://jeffarnoldblog.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-colt-buntline-special.html
DeleteYes, of course...! Thank you, I saw it just after...
ReplyDeleteBeside of the famous Colt and Winchester heavily used in classic westerns (even the US Cavalry is using winchesters a lot, an historic nonsense), there are many films with other guns, more or less fancy or strange, from the S&W Schofield in Unforgiven to the Joe Kidd's Mauser C96 "broomhandle", lots of shotguns and scarcer pump action onew, Colt .45 automatic pistol, revolving rifles seen in some spaghettis, and not talking of bladed weapons, the most western one being the Bowie knife which is a quasi common word too (event if most of the knives were imported from Sheffield...).
People can say what they want, but the cap and ball revolvers went back into the saddle thanks to the spaghettis. Hollywood has almost never paid any attention to authenticity, strange for a country so much in love with its guns and their history inst'it !?
JM