Free American Gun: A History of the U.S. In Ten Firearms by Chris Kyle, William Doyle

aim, and struck the Comanche leader in the head. The Indians fled.
    The Comanches had suffered twenty-three fatalities; the Rangers lost only one man. It was a triumph for both the Colts and the Rangers. One Indian who survived the battle said later it seemed like the Rangers “had a shot for every finger on the hand.” Hays, who would head out to California and a political career a couple years after the battle, credited the pistols with the victory. “Had it not been for them,” he wrote later, “I doubt what the consequences would have been. I cannot recommend these arms too highly.”
    The legend of the Colt revolvers quickly spread. From that day forward, the Texas Rangers had a proven “equalizing” force for mounted and close-quarter combat with the once-invincible Plains Indians. The frontier was a far sight from tamed, but Walker’s Creek was a crucial turning point in the American settlement of the West. Hearty ranchers and homesteaders began establishing (in some cases, reestablishing) claims not only in the western half of Texas, but also across the great southern Plains. You could say the year 1844 marked the dawn of the Wild West, an era in which generations of Colt revolvers would play a starring role in the hands of legendary lawmen and outlaws who roamed America’s rugged, half-settled landscape.
    Now, you’d figure the company that made Colt revolvers would take off in a blaze because of all the good publicity.
    There was, however, one small problem—the manufacturer had gone bankrupt a few years earlier.
    Sam Colt, the firm’s owner and namesake, got a patent on his revolver design from the British government in 1835; two from the U.S. followed the next year. The idea of a revolving magazine wasn’t new, but Colt’s improvements and the availability of ammunition based on percussion cap technology made his gun a technological leap. And you could build a good argument that the gun’s success was due not just to its design but the ability to manufacture it using the most advanced techniques of the day. The Colt-Paterson was a mass-produced marvel.
    Or it would have been if Colt had been able to work out all the early problems. The pistols that came from Colt’s Patent Arms Manufacturing Company of Paterson, N.J., were a mixed bag. Some were excellent; some not. Standardizing production so parts could be used interchangeably was still more art than science. Hampered by the Panic of 1837, Colt had trouble both selling weapons and raising money to continue doing so. Adding to the problems, a promising debut of the company’s prototype revolving rifles in the Seminole War in Florida in 1838 didn’t pan out. The rifles were just not rugged and reliable enough for combat, let alone curious soldiers who took them apart to examine their workings. Sometimes they jammed, sometimes they blew up from “chain-fire” malfunctions. The factory closed in 1843, and its assets sold.
    Samuel Colt had a restless mind. Busy on other inventions, including a naval mine, he kept thinking of ways to improve his revolver and resurrect his manufacturing company.
    Meanwhile, the Colt Paterson revolver did so well for the Texas Rangers that one of the veterans of the fracas at Walker Creek, a young captain named Samuel Walker, set out from Texas to New York to personally suggest some improvements to Sam Colt. Together in 1847 they cooked up a design for a new, nearly five-pound behemoth trail gun called the Walker Colt, a weapon that soon became the most powerful handgun on the market. In fact, it stayed so until the introduction of the .357 Magnum in 1935. The Walker Colt fired .44-caliber rounds in a gun not with five chambers, but six. The “six-shooter” was born. It was so big and heavy you could use it as a club if you had to. And many did.

Colonel Sam Colt and his handiwork. After partnering with industrial genius Eli Whitney, Colt set up his operations in Hartford, Connecticut.
Library of Congress

Sam Colt