“God created men, Sam Colt made them equal.”
—Unknown
Steel engraving of Samuel Colt with a Colt 1851 Navy Revolver
Like the Kentucky rifle before it, the revolver was a distinctly American invention. Unlike the Kentucky rifle, however, the revolver’s development, production, and popularity can be largely attributed to one man, Samuel Colt. The Connecticut native was not merely a mechanical virtuoso but a promotional and manufacturing mastermind who would become a template of the nineteenth-century American industrialist, epitomizing the exuberance and possibilities of the populist era of mid-1800s American life. A self-made man, Colt was prodigious, a tireless self-promoter, innovator, autodidact, and mythmaker. His nose for opportunity made him one of the wealthiest men of his day. With this success came a leap forward in firearm technology. Colt invented the first hands-on, workable, mass-produced revolving firearm. And with his gun, he became one of the first industrialists to take advantage of mass marketing, celebrity endorsements, and corporate mythology to sell his product—a success that laid the groundwork for twentieth-century businessmen, including Henry Ford. In practical terms, his gun was more deadly, more accessible, more dynamic, and more useful than any that had ever been designed. It would play a part in carving out the West, revolutionizing war, and transforming the role of the gun in modern American life.
The Colts had been in Connecticut since the 1630s. Samuel’s maternal grandfather, John Cakhvell, had established the bank in Hartford, while his grandfather, Peter, a Yale graduate, played a role in the Revolutionary War, working on the Committee of Inspection in New Haven. Peter’s experience during the war, obtaining provisions not only for American troops but for the French army, helped secure contracts and trade deals in major power centers of the budding nation. Peter’s post-revolutionary life was the epitome of what the historian Barbara Tucker referred to as the “ethos of the new capitalism” of the early nineteenth century. It was a time that saw the egalitarian ideas about commerce that had dominated the previous century start to dissipate. Men like Peter, John, and Sam engaged in speculation, making and losing fortunes, often living restless and nomadic lives. Ambition became a Colt family trait.
Sam Colt was born in the Lord’s Hill neighborhood in Hartford—named not after the Almighty but rather one of the city’s original settlers, Captain Richard Lord—on July 19, 1814, only a few days before the Americans and British would fight one of the bloodiest battles of the War of 1812 at Niagara Falls. For all its success, the Colt family was also seized by tumultuous affairs, mental instability, and tragedy. Sam’s mother passed away when the future gunmaker was just six years of age. One of Sam’s sisters passed away in childhood. Another, Margaret, died from tuberculosis at the age of nineteen. His older brother John tried his hand at various vocations, struggling at all of them, before he was convicted of the infamous murder of a printer named Samuel Adams. The pair had argued over a bill of less than $20 before John murdered Adams with a hatchet and then allegedly stuffed the body into a packing case, which he put on a packet bound for New Orleans. John committed suicide before his execution. Colt’s sister Sarah Ann also committed suicide.1 His other brother, Christopher, who had married into a family of slave traders, lived a wayward life that included intermittently demanding money from his far more successful brother. He struggled with depression and resentment until his death.
Sam was different. Growing up, Colt worked first in his father’s dye and bleaching factory in Ware, Massachusetts, before apprenticing on a farm. From all accounts, the young Colt’s upbringing was almost entirely free of parental supervision. In this environment, the curious boy could focus on his interests, one of them being guns. In a fawning and sometimes unreliable account, his first biographer tells the story of a search party finding the missing young boy “sitting under a tree in the field, with a 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 the feat.”2 Whether this tale serves as a self-serving myth or not, it’s clear that Colt had a propensity for mechanical things and great resourcefulness. He was already experimenting with new technology in the field in his mid-teens. After a home-brewed pyrotechnic display during a Fourth of July celebration at his local high school, Colt, anticipating expulsion, took leave of formal education forever.
Prompted by his father, Sam began toying with the idea of becoming a sailor—traveling as far as England and India on a merchant ship. Although the physical hardship of seafaring life quickly cured him of any ideas of taking to the sea as a way to make a living, it’s during this time that he first carved a crude model for a wooden revolver.3 Returning to the United States, Colt borrowed money from family and took his mock-up to Anson Chase, a Hartford gunsmith, asking him to transform this skeletal idea into a gun. He did. But when the young inventor tested out his new machine in the back firing range, it blew up in his hand at the first squeeze of the trigger.
Colt offered various accounts of how and why he had hatched the idea for a chambered rotating weapon. He maintained, for example, that as a sailor he had been transfixed by the motions of the rotating mechanism of the ship’s capstan. Other times, Colt claimed that the idea had been birthed after reading harrowing tales of Native American attacks on settlers heading to the West. Why was the settler able to shoot only once, he wondered, before being seized upon by Indians who could unleash a torrent of arrows at the same time? In 1851, Colt told the Institution of Civil Engineers in England that after years of reflection and repeated trials, “without having seen, or being aware, at that period (1829), of any arm more effective than a double-barrelled gun having ever having been constructed, and it was only during a visit to Europe, in the year 1835, that he discovered he was not the first person who had conceived the idea of repeating fire-arms with a rotating chambered-breech.”4
Although he certainly reimagined and perfected the idea, it seems unlikely that Colt was unaware that multi chambered guns already existed. Pepperbox pistols, for instance, were widely owned and used by the time Colt was carving out his wooden model. Named after the pepper grinders they resembled, these handguns had to be manually rotated, and were notoriously unreliable and difficult to aim because of the front-loaded weight of the multiple barrels. The year Colt was born, the Boston inventor Elisha Collier (along with a colleague, Artemus Wheeler) had taken out a patent on a five-shot flintlock model pistol. Collier’s development was to invent a gun that was “self-priming”: in other words, when the hammer of the weapon was cocked, a compartment automatically released a measured amount of gunpowder into the pan for another charge. Had the United States Army showed more interest in the idea, perhaps Collier would have come to worldwide renown. As it was, the British ordered 10,000 pieces, using them in colonial India. Many problems plagued Collier’s early models, however, namely the cost of creating revolving mechanisms and the excruciatingly long time it took to load the gun. This impediment made the most attractive aspect of the gun, the potential to fire it quickly in succession, almost moot. Colt and other inventors would soon fix this problem.
But before Colt undertook his most prosperous projects, he cultivated a knack for showmanship—a crucial aspect of his future success—by joining the popular Lyceum circuit. During the mid-1800s, there was an explosion of traveling shows that entertained teeming crowds on fairgrounds across the United States and Canada. Founded in 1826 by Massachusetts native Josiah Holbrook, the events featured self-styled experts, performers, salesmen, puppeteers, hucksters, polemicists, noted authors, and dozens of other varied speakers and showmen, who sold their wares, exhibited their exotic animals, performed tricks, and gave lectures on issues of the day. In towns across North America, the curious local communities, starved for access to technology, gadgetry, and entertainment, also treated these events as a form of social and intellectual enrichment. In a time before television, radio, or phonographs, this touring event was, for many people, the only way to hear, see, or learn about new ideas.
Colt, we imagine, viewed the endeavor more as a capitalistic opportunity than a societal good. Growing a beard to hide his young age, Colt toured the country as “the celebrated Dr. Coult of New York, London and Calcutta,” posing as a medicine man with a portable chemical laboratory. Sam amused crowds by administering nitrous oxide, or laughing gas. Such an act might seem cheap to our modern sensibilities, but it was not only rather harmless but exciting for men and women living in the new and sometimes isolated communities in America.
Colt’s forays into the heart of America also helped him comprehend not only the size and scope of the new land but, as he later noted, the overwhelming need of those Americans to feel safe. The excursion was also useful in that Colt learned the art of public speaking, made numerous contacts around the country, and earned enough money to provide seed capital for his planned firearm business. Colt’s instincts as a salesman rarely failed him. And throughout his time artificially inducing laughter, he continued to ponder the serious problem of a revolving gun, as letters and blueprints of prototypes from this era show.
Finally, at the age of twenty-one, Colt decided to patent the idea he’d been toying with for years: the repeating revolver. He did so, first in England and France, where it was cheaper and simpler, and then in the United States in October 1835. It made a singular technical advance—what may seem obvious to us now: rather than relying on five barrels, Colt’s invention had a rotating cylinder that came into alignment with a single barrel. When cocked for firing, the next chamber revolved automatically to bring the next shot into line with the barrel. The gun included a locking pawl to keep the cylinder in line with the barrel, and a percussion cap (more on this later) that made it more reliable than any other gun available. His design was a more practical adaption of Collier’s earlier ideas and created a far more balanced and lighter weapon with a sleeker design. In a short time this modernization would become the dominant mechanism of American weapons. The patent protected Colt’s fundamental ideas until 1857, by which time he was enormously wealthy and world-famous.5
First the young inventor had to figure out how to mass-produce his idea. Although Colt relied on members of his family for funding, he lived in an era when high debt and speculative investment were no longer frowned upon—and Colt wasn’t shy about participating. In 1836 he began wooing wealthy investors, demonstrating his inventions in an upscale showroom in Manhattan, raising around $300,000—a huge amount at the time—to launch his project, the Patent Arms Manufacturing Company. Based in Paterson, New Jersey, then one of the fastest-growing industrial hubs in the nation, Colt paid himself $1,000 a year, half of the profits semiannually, and another $6,000 for the patent. His ambitious plan was reflected in the ostentatious design of his new factory, a four-story armory featuring an ornate exterior. “On the spire which surmounted the bell tower was a vane very elaborately made in the design of a finished gun and in front of the mill was a fence, each picket being a wooden gun,” one contemporary commenter would note.6
The first gun manufactured in the new Paterson factory was not a pistol but a Model Ring Lever rifle. However, it was followed shortly by the first Colt Paterson, a five-shot revolver that came in a .28-caliber, although soon Colt also began producing a .36-caliber model. The original gun featured no loading lever, so a shooter had to partially disassemble the revolver every time he wanted to reload it. But by 1839 a reloading lever and a capping window were incorporated, allowing the shooter to reload without disassembly, making it the most user-friendly gun ever invented.
Colt understood that on some level he would be reliant on military contracts for his success. More than merely a fiscal benefit, such deals were a way to spread the word. “Government patronage . . . is an advertisement if nothing else,” he later noted. So when, in 1837, the Senate passed a resolution calling for testing of new weapons at West Point, Colt submitted a number of his guns for review. They would not be favorably evaluated. The most common complaint about the Colt guns was the prohibitive cost, but there were bad reviews about the quality as well. Certainly the first Patersons were unreliable when compared to later models. Among other problems, the Army noted that they were difficult to figure out because the new percussion arms were not yet being widely used. The Ordnance Department observed that the Colt was “entirely unsuited to the general purpose of the service.”7
Not for the last time in his career, Colt would feel that he had been treated unfairly by the government. He wrote a five-page letter meticulously contesting every single criticism offered by the board. Colt rapped the board for reaching the “wrong conclusion,” not only offering his own pushback but offering testimonials from military men, including one sergeant who wrote Colt that “in passing through Indian country, I have always felt safer with one of your rifles.”8
Colt’s fortunes would change soon enough. In the winter of 1838, the United States was plowing tens of millions of dollars into the Seminole Indian War, which left more than a thousand Americans and an unknown number of Indians dead. It was an ugly affair that saw the sides lobbing brutal attacks back and forth, the Indians effectively deploying guerrilla warfare and Americans ratcheting up the violence in retaliation. At the height of the conflict, Samuel traveled to Florida to demonstrate his guns to the troops. With an array of his rifles and new revolvers, the inventor made his way to Fort Jupiter and put on a demonstration that went far better than his previous endeavors. Major General Thomas Jesup had only praise for the revolving weapons, writing a superior that “I am still confident that they are the only things that will finish the infernal war.” Now there was a new technology to deal with a new kind of war. The guns were put to immediate and effective use—so much so that Colt complained in 1851, in rather blunt terms, that by the effectiveness of his gun in “exterminating the Indians, and bringing the war rapidly to an end, the market for the arms was destroyed.”9
Although never shy about lobbying government officials in Washington, Colt spent the rest of his life directly approaching military men, building relationships that helped him not only sell his gun but build its legend. Sam had a particular knack for sensing the flows of history, and during his relatively short life he befriended many of the great names of the era, including General Zachary Taylor, Franklin Pierce, and Colonel Jefferson Davis (a man who would become secretary of war before being elected president of the Confederacy), among many others. Colt kept a book in which he saved all the letters of prominent men who used his gun, including revolutionary nationalists like the Italian Giuseppe Garibaldi and the Hungarian Lajos Kossuth, King Victor Emmanuel II of Italy, and the king of Siam, among many others.
By the time the Civil War was brewing, in fact, Colt could count on enough military supporters to print a twenty-page brochure extolling the virtues and tangible upside of using the Colt. He attached a long list of “distinguished officers” who could provide testimonials. It included military heroes, future presidents, and senators known to most Americans.10
In Florida, however, fate seemed to be undermining Colt’s big breakthrough. On his voyage home, Sam’s ship capsized in St. Augustine Bay and he lost the Army check for $6,000. The Army refused to send another one, and his investors were dubious about his tale, leaving him in trouble.
At this point his first foray into production was unsuccessful not only because the demand for the new gun was slow but because of Colt’s habit of profligate spending. Shareholders in the Patent Arms Manufacturing Company had begun to push him out. By 1842 his company had shuttered and auctioned off its most valuable machinery to many rivals and one of his largest stockholders. It was during these years that Colt began to invest his time and energy in other innovations.
One of his most notable creations was a galvanic cell and underwater explosive—a “submarine” mine—meant to protect American ports from renewed threats of British naval assaults. The British had already made well-known advances in mining harbors, and Americans were concerned that they would again threaten the Eastern Seaboard over a dispute regarding the waters off New England.11 While researching his project at New York University, Colt collaborated with other inventors and scientists, including a teacher named Samuel Morse, who later invented a single-wire telegraph system. The two worked together on a partially implemented scheme to install a telegraph line from lower Manhattan to New Jersey. Morse used the battery from one of Colt’s mines to transmit a telegraph message from Manhattan to Governors Island when his own battery was too weak to send the signal. (The line was never completed.)
Colt sought to privately fund his experiment, informing the Navy that he would conduct a demonstration of his underwater mine “without any expense to the government or exposure of any secrets connected with my plans of defense.” On July 4, 1842, in front of a large crowd of politicians and military officials, Colt blew up a sixty-ton schooner in spectacular fashion on the Potomac River using underwater cables and his mine. Many of the onlookers found the show to be horrifying and unnecessary. Some in the Washington establishment thought Colt a swindler. John Quincy Adams, then a congressman, who had sponsored a popular resolution undermining the Colt project, called it an “un-Christian contraption.” Colt, always the showman, proposed blowing up another ship, this time in New York Harbor. His request was denied (although he did blow up three other ships on his own dime).
The project went nowhere. Colt, perhaps due to his Paterson experience, was disinclined to share his engineering secrets with the government. Government engineers, conversely, were apprehensive about Colt’s invention for a number of reasons. “As experiments, these, as many others have been, were very beautiful and striking, but in the practical application of this apparatus to proposed war, we have no confidence,” an assessment in the Army and Navy Chronicle, and Scientific Repository noted.12 Although, of course, Colt never stopped soliciting its business, he nursed a lifelong enmity toward government officials in Washington—“the great city of humbug,” he called it. It wasn’t until the Civil War that the United States began to seriously explore underwater mines.
It would, however, be American providence that rescued Colt from obscurity. Jacksonian democracy had manifested in expansion, which didn’t merely render territorial growth but a spectacular opening of individual economic opportunity. Colt’s revolver would play a big part in the settlement of the West, the annexation of Texas, the fighting in the Mexican-American War, the conflict with Native Americans, and the Gold Rush; all these events made him extraordinarily rich. This expansion of American life was inconvenienced by the presence of Native Americans, who weren’t especially inclined to hand over vast tracts of their ancestral lands to the newcomers. This is not a place for a moral debate on the methods of populating the West but rather a place to note that the revolver would, as Colt had imagined, afford the settler an undisputed upper hand.
“They are the only weapon which enabled the experienced frontiersman to defeat the mounted Indian in his own peculiar mode of warfare,” Daniel Boorstin writes. “[Y]our six-shooter is the arm which has rendered the name of Texas Ranger a check and terror to the bands of our frontier Indians.”13 In 1844, two dozen Rangers led by Captain Jack Hays fought off a far larger force of Comanche, a battle that was to be firmly entrenched in Western lore and Colt’s sales pitch. “They were two hundred in number, and fought well and bravely, but our revolvers, fatal as they were astounding, put them speedily to flight,” wrote Ranger Nelson Lee, who pointed out that a man with a Colt Paterson had five times the firepower of a man with a single-shot gun.14 This and other smaller victories in Texas helped bolster Colt’s reputation in military circles.
When James Polk became president in 1845, he would facilitate Texas joining the Union as the twenty-eighth state and conclude negotiations with Great Britain for the annexation of the Oregon Territory south of the 49th parallel. The Mexican government, however, was less pliable about the disputed lands between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande. So Polk sent General Zachary Taylor to secure Texas. With war on the horizon, Captain Samuel Walker of the Texas Rangers, a Western celebrity who had become familiar with Colt and his gun doing battle with Indians, came east looking for recruits and weaponry. Walker convinced the U.S. government to place an order of 1,000 guns, launching Colt’s revolver for good.
Walker would, however, ask the gunmaker to make a number of upgrades to the existing Paterson model. Could Colt, for example, create a gun that could hold six bullets instead of five? Could he create one that was even easier to reload than the Paterson? Could he build a gun that was effective enough to kill the enemy with one shot? He could. The 1847 “Walker,” christened after its sponsor, was a weighty four pounds and shot a .44-caliber black powder cap and ball through a barrel that was nine inches long. It was the most powerful handgun produced anywhere in the world until the .357 Magnum came along in 1935.
With a $25,000 government order in hand, Sam persuaded Eli Whitney Jr., the Connecticut contractor for Army muskets, to help him produce the revolvers. They were ready six months later. (A pair of guns for Walker, who had hounded Colt for delivery, arrived in Mexico only four days before he was killed in action.) With money coming from the Mexican-American War, Colt could build his own factory and finally put his entire production assembly-line production into motion at Colt’s Patent Fire-Arms Manufacturing Company.
After what must have felt like a lifetime of false starts, the determined Colt was finally poised to become one of America’s preeminent industrialists. After more than a decade of refining his ideas, Colt was making an elegant weapon that distinguished him from his competitors. Certainly there would no longer be a shortage of wars or interest in his revolver. Nor, where his business was concerned, would he ever have to answer to others. “I am working on my own hook and have sole control and management of my business and intend to keep it as long as I live without being subject to the whims of a pack of dam fools and knaves styling themselves a board of directors . . . ,” he wrote after securing loans for his new factory.
For his factory, the Patent Fire Arms Manufacturing Company, Colt picked his hometown of Hartford. The armory, according to his first biographer, Henry Barnard, was located “within a short walk of the State House, railroads, and the business centre of Hartford. It has at hand all the water required for its manifold necessities; it is close to a navigable stream, so that coal, iron, and all the stock, can be landed at its doors, and its products, whenever it may be desirable, can be shopped by the Connecticut [River].”15 Although he would find a dedicated workforce, most of the technical work was to be done by machines, while hand-fitting was needed to finish the product.
A number of great engineers of the age, like Elisha K. Root, Christopher Spencer, George Fairfield, and Charles Billings, would work for Colt during the early years. By pushing manufacturing efficiency, Colt could ensure that his gun’s price was consistently competitive—from $50 for the first Paterson to $20 for his later models. As the chairman of the Committee of Patents noted, Colt was intent to “perfect his armory by the increase and subdivision of machinery, so that he will be able to furnish . . . a perfect arm at a price which will defy . . . spurious imitators.”16 And there would be many.
Hartford, already one of America’s leading industrial hubs in the 1850s, was transformed by the Patent Fire-Arms Manufacturing Company. It became not only the city’s leading employer but a place that featured a utopian village that served as the social, religious, political, and labor center of his workers. Colt was intent on building a modern industrial community to surround what was to become the largest gun armory in the world.
By 1856, Colt’s company could produce 150 weapons per day using interchangeable parts, efficient production lines, and specially designed precision machinery decades before Henry Ford. Visiting the plant in the late 1860s, Mark Twain, then living in Hartford, described it as “a dense wilderness of strange iron machines . . . a tangled forest of rods, bars, pulleys, wheels and all the imaginable and unimaginable forms of mechanism . . . It must have required more brains to invent all these things than would serve to stock fifty Senates like ours.”17
A Russian-style bright blue onion-shaped dome emblazoned with golden stars topped by a statue of a horse could be seen on the grounds. The factory was augmented by a self-contained town, something comparable in many ways to a modern “campus” built by a Silicon Valley company. H.S. Pomeroy and Elihu Root designed a complex for about 145 families that sprawled out around the brickwork of the factory. Ignoring more nativist trends of the time, Colt hired from all ethnicities and backgrounds and nations, but especially from Germany. The gunmaker even sent one of his top assistants, Fredrick Kunkle, to Prussia to find artisans, building Swiss chalets and a beer hall to lure them. The neighborhood was referred to as “little Potsdam.”
Colt had somewhat of a schizophrenic relationship with his workers. He appreciated that manufacturing was monotonous, grinding work, and took pains to ensure his workforce was taken care of. He made certain there was proper lighting—big windows and skylights—and good ventilation. He installed a modern heating system and a state-of-the-art fire prevention system. He paid his workers (including the unskilled sector) well-above-average wages. Colt introduced a ten-hour day and mandated one-hour lunch breaks.
More than that, those who lived in Coltsville had all the conveniences that a modern American middle-class nineteenth-century family could desire. There was a church and a concert and dance hall that could seat up to 1,000 people. The Colt Brass Band became celebrated throughout the region, playing at many of the huge parties organized for the community by Colt, especially the fireworks extravaganzas on the Fourth of July. Colt encouraged workers to engage in social leisure activities. A Colt employee could go to the newspaper reading room and peruse periodicals from around the country, or sign up for one of the many social clubs or educational programs (which created a number of future notable gun engineers). Or he could go on a picnic with his family near orchards, greenhouses, sculpted lawns, man-made lakes, and botanical gardens in the huge Coltsville park—all of it stocked with an array of exotic animals and flowers.
It is here, in June 1856, that Colt married Elizabeth Hart Jarvis, the daughter of a prominent Hartford Episcopal clergyman. A steamboat and a fleet of liveried carriages chauffeured the entire wedding party to the nearby town of Middletown for the ceremony. The couple honeymooned in Europe, attending the coronation of Czar Alexander II. When they came back to the complex they moved into the Armsmear, an opulent Italian villa replete with towers and domes and surrounded by large reflecting pools decorated with fountains. It stood high on the hill overlooking the grounds running down to the factory. “Beyond all this luxury,” wrote Martha J. Lamb in The Homes of America in 1879, were the “towers of the great armory . . . also the outline of the pretty Swiss village, which grew out of the planting of willows by the dike . . .”18 The jewel of the estate is still there, a pink-hued mansion.
It must be remembered that the beautiful environs and societal advantages of Coltsville had been thought up, shaped, and constructed to serve only one purpose: Colt’s guns. In the heart of the complex was the H-shaped brickwork armory. Colt was a demanding boss who laid out tough quotas and gave no quarter to those who failed to meet his demands. A sign hung prominently on the factory floor stated: EVERY MAN EMPLOYED IN OR ABOUT MY ARMOURY WHETHER BY PIECEWIRK OR BY DAYS WIRK IS EXPECTED TO WIRK TEN HOURS DURING THE RUNING OF THE ENGINE, & NO ONE WHO DOSE NOT CHEARFULLY CONCENT TO DU THIS NEED EXPECT TO BE EMPLOYED BY ME. This was no idle threat.19
Colt was not above social engineering and did not shy away from politics. He was no free market fan, using lawyers and government contacts to undermine competition. He could, by today’s standard, rightly be accused of embracing crony capitalism and rent seeking. A Democrat, Colt pushed his workforce to vote accordingly, going so far as firing apostate Republicans. The elite of Hartford were Republican, and one paper accused Colt of “a most oppressive and tyrannical exertion of the money-power, against which it is the duty of every freeman solemnly and earnestly to protest.”20 When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Colt began making weapons exclusively for the Union. During the first year of the war he was producing 27,000 guns. By 1863, the company’s output dramatically increased to 137,000 and to nearly 300,000 the following year, making it the largest private armory in the United States.21 By the time the war ended, more than 1,000 people worked at the company’s factory.
It was the Single Action Army—more famously known as the “Peacemaker”—that would embody Colt’s legacy. An elegant gun with a practical and streamlined design, it took on near-mythological status not merely because of its easy use but because of the legendary men who claimed to use it. The first model gun had a solid frame that weighed around three pounds, a .45-caliber with a 7.5-inch barrel, blued steel, and an oil-stained walnut grip. It was soon one of the most popular guns ever made. Mechanically, it still incorporated much of the technology that Colt propagated during his lifetime. In 1872, the Army’s Ordnance Board would adopt the new gun for service and ordered 40,000 between 1873 and 1891, when it was the standard military service revolver.
Colt Model 1860 Army Percussion Revolver
It was likely Colt himself who came up with the moniker “Peacemaker” for his gun. It was not merely a stab at irony or an adman’s clever copy. Colt often, and vigorously, argued that this gun could empower the average American. The weapon could be brandished for self-protection, of course, but it was a firearm so formidable that war was to become too destructive to be worth engaging in. The gun was, to him, an imperative tool in fulfilling the American dream on both a personal and providential scale. “Living in a country of most extensive frontier, still inhabited by hordes of aborigines, and knowing of the insulated position of the enterprising pioneer, and his dependence, sometimes alone, on his personal liability to protect himself and his family, [I] had often meditated upon the inefficiency of the ordinary double-barreled gun and pistol,” he said in an 1851 speech to British engineers.22 A Colt made one man six. “Place a revolver in the hands of a dwarf . . . and he is equal to a giant,” noted the industrialist.23
Even more significantly, the average man could order one through the mail for the somewhat affordable price of $17 and have a light but powerful weapon within weeks.24 And selling his guns to civilians—every civilian, if possible—would be Colt’s principal goal. In a nation coming to terms with growing wealth, power, and size, Colt capitalized on Americans’ romanticized view of the rugged frontier to sell pistols. With all the complex mechanical modernizations of the gun, Colt’s success was also wrapped up in aesthetics and storytelling. Embedded in his guns were the adventurous attitudes of the era, the Western impulse and individualistic notions, patriotic fervor, and American life. These were weapons, elegant and utilitarian, but they told stories. Literally.
Colt built a relationship with the artist George Catlin, who had made numerous forays into the West during the 1830s to paint scenes of Indian life. Catlin not only produced many of the first artistic renditions of the Wild West, but he was a meticulous collector of artifacts and stories. In 1838 he began delivering a series of popular lectures about his time on the Plains, publishing two volumes of engravings detailing his adventures. His sense of drama caught the eye of Colt, who commissioned the artist to produce a series of oil paintings portraying his adventures in the West—with one stipulation. All ten, known as the Firearm Series, depicted Colt revolvers and rifles either being used in hunting or impressing the local Native Americans. Colt used these images as a promotion to bolster the legend of Colt as the premier weapon of the frontier.
Colt had also heard about Waterman Ormsby, a man who later created intricate and beautiful etchings used by the United States on its banknotes to repel counterfeiters. His invention, the “grammagraph,” could roll-die artistic engravings onto steel, allowing Colt to create numerous cylinder scenes that made his guns more visually attractive and further evoked visions of the West. These beautiful images—created by the noted engraver Gustave Young, who worked for the Colt company from the 1850s to the 1870s and would be poached by Smith & Wesson from the 1870s to the 1890s—depicted scenes of legendary battles and individual bravery. They were featured on the Dragoon Revolver, the Model 1849 Pocket Revolver, the Navy 1851 Revolver, and other models.
Colt Second Model Dragoon Revolver
Colt did what he could to personalize guns in several other ways, often playing on his own celebrity by sending his gun “compliments of the inventor” and running ads signed by Colt in which he spoke directly to his consumers. He would, if possible, whet the consumer’s appetite by offering slightly modified models with customizable elements at additional cost. Colt included quirky add-ons that created a more unique experience, like a gun case that looked like a reference book with a serious-sounding title like Colt on the Constitution: Higher Law & Irrepressible Conflict. One was inscribed Law for Self Defense.
Colt embraced a modern notion that is recognizable to anyone who owns an iPhone, constantly churning out “new and improved” models—an expression he may have coined—to keep people clamoring for the latest iteration of his products.
The gunmaker also created a national network of sales reps, running ads in newspapers that featured professional artwork. Colt had been aware of the emergence of the “penny newspapers” since his days on the Lyceum circuit. These papers were mass-produced in the United States from the 1830s by means of steam-powered printing. Colt would be one of the first to use them as marketing tools, publishing ads that explained his guns, defended them from critics, offered specifics on technical changes to the design, and, perhaps for the first time, running celebrity endorsements to vouch for his product. In 1857, Colt paid the popular United States Magazine to publish a fawning twenty-nine-page illustrated feature in its March issue titled “Repeating Fire-Arms: A Day at the Armory of Colt’s Patent Fire-Arms Manufacturing Company.” Colt pursued and compensated publications for this sort of coverage his entire career.
Colt may also have been the first internationally renowned American businessman. His European patents put him in the position to sell new weapons to perpetually warring continental powers, making him a global player in the arms market. Back in 1851, Colt had operated an exhibit at the United States section of the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, an international demonstration of the newest and most brilliant innovations from around the world that took place in Hyde Park, London. It was the first of many world’s fairs that would become popular in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Colt’s exhibit was a big draw and was enthusiastically received by the British. At his stand he displayed more than four hundred of his revolvers, including the prototypes of the Colt Navy and also his older Walker and Dragoon models. All were hung on the wall in the shape of a giant shield. The guns were also open to public handling. One contemporary writer noted that “the gentlemen, who handle the revolvers, are principally officers, but we noticed one individual pressing to be instructed in the use and mystery of the instrument, who evidently intended to carry out the theory into practice at the very earliest opportunity.”25 Colt used this time to glad-hand officials, sending ornate revolvers to a number of British royalty and military commanders.
Colt also became the first American manufacturer to open a plant in England, a building that would take its place in the smoke-spewing pillars that dotted the landscape of the industrial age. In 1853 an impressed Charles Dickens toured the state-of-the-art factory, with “the complete manufacture of a pistol, from dirty pieces of timber and rough bars of steel, till it is fit for the gunsmith’s case.”26 The great writer’s escort gave him one of the finished revolvers for testing, and “after a little practice,” Dickens wrote, “I find that a mere novice may, with one hand, discharge the six rounds as rapidly as the eye can wink.”27
In the end, however, the British factory would be the only one built outside the United States. And it did not last long. According to early twentieth-century historian Charles Winthrop Sawyer, American workers, unaccustomed to British society and soggy English weather, were constantly abandoning the factory and heading home. The Englishmen who replaced them, both the engineers and workers, did not carry out Colt’s wishes and, at least according to the boss, did not share the American work ethic.
At home Colt experienced no such difficulties. Legendary names of the Old West and American life were to become users of “Judge Colt and His Jury of Six,” from self-declared lawman Judge Roy Bean, who once fined a dead man $40 for carrying a concealed weapon, to Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp. (Not long ago, a Colt revolver that may—or may not—have been used by the lawman and gambler at the OK Corral sold for $225,000.) As did Teddy Roosevelt and George Patton, who special-ordered an ivory-stocked, custom-engraved single-action in 1916 that he would carry through World War II. The Colt .45 Peacemaker became so popular, it would have second- and third-generation models.
Alas, for all of his success, Colt’s life was marred by personal tragedy. Of his four children, three died in childbirth or soon thereafter. (His son Caldwell drowned on a sailing trip off the coast of Florida in 1894.) Colt died on January 10, 1862, at the age of forty-seven. “The funeral of Samuel Colt, America’s first great munitions maker, was spectacular—certainly the most spectacular ever seen in Hartford, Connecticut,” the historian Ellsworth Grant wrote.28 All of Colt’s 1,500 workmen filed in pairs past the metallic casket in the parlor of Armsmear. He had died one of the richest men in America, leaving his estate to his wife and Elisha Root, who would run the company. In 1901 the Colt family sold the company to a group of investors.
By the end of his life, Colt had likely personally overseen the production of some 400,000 guns, changing both the technology of firearm production and the role of the gun designer. Before him, gunmaking was largely a regional affair. Colt was known worldwide. Most importantly, he had modernized and industrialized the gun. Sam Colt’s success had ignited an era of modernization. From now on things moved quickly.