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

struck a deal with industrial wizard Eli Whitney in Connecticut to crank out the new model. The U.S. Army soon picked up the Walker Colt with an initial order of 1,000 guns. It performed well in the Mexican War (1846–48). But in shades of things to come, the real boost came from publicity following a wild shootout that came to be known as the Jonathan Davis Incident.
    As the story goes, Davis, a skilled marksman and combat veteran of the Mexican War, was prospecting for gold along the river near present-day Sacramento, California, with two friends. A gang of between eleven and fourteen cutthroat killers shot down Davis’s companions and then moved in to finish him off. Armed with a pair of Colt percussion revolvers, Davis took out the thieves one by one, finishing off seven before he ran out of ammo.
    Four surviving outlaws then tried to rush him with knives and a short sword or cutlass. Unfortunately for them, Davis was an artist with a Bowie knife. He carved up all four, quite fatally. Captain Davis survived with flesh wounds and a shredded set of clothes. The early accounts of the episode were so unbelievable that Davis had to produce witness affidavits to verify his tale. That apparently satisfied the journalists of the time, and the story gained wide circulation.
    The U.S. Army ordered thousands of the Colt Model 1860 revolvers as its basic sidearm during the Civil War. Explorers John Frémont and Kit Carson carried Colt revolvers during their epic surveys of the West. Riders and guards of the Pony Express relied on them to guard the dangerous mail run from Santa Fe to Missouri. The Colt revolver, in all its many forms, helped make Samuel one of the richest men in America before dying at age forty-seven in 1862.
    But it wasn’t until a decade later that his company perfected its greatest product, the Single Action Army Revolver.
    It’s hard to find the right words to describe the Peacemaker. Somehow, there’s no way to set down on paper why this gun had such an impact without sounding a little soft in the head. You really have to hold the weapon, load it, fire it, and load it again if you want to understand it.
    Fire, load. Fire. Half-cock, then eject your spent cartridges one at a time with the ejection rod. Load one bullet, skip a chamber, go four bullets, drop the hammer on an empty chamber. Set it in the holster and draw. Single-action means the gun is not going to fire until you cock the hammer back. Pull on the trigger all you want until then, and it’s not going off.
    You will, however, be dang impressed at the gun’s balance and smooth action. The recoil is sweet, the weapon moving up easy in your hand. If you’re using black powder, you’ll be surrounded by a thick wreath of smoke after shooting your load. But that’s part of the fun.
    The Colt is one of the most powerful guns I’ve ever fired. It is quite literally a man-stopper. They used to say you can knock down a grizzly bear with one, though I’ve never tried.
    Probably just as important on the frontier and range, the weapon could take a beatin’ and still kick ass. “Sometimes a bad horse would blow up and send my Colt doing fart-knockers across the prairie,” said one old-time cowboy from Montana. “I’d just blow the dust off of it and shove it back in the holster. It was the only handgun you could trust that way.”

A Confederate soldier wielding an 1851 Colt Navy and an equally impressive Bowie knife. Civil War vets on both sides were allowed to keep their weapons after the war, leading to a spike in civilian gun ownership.
Library of Congress

Push away all the legend attached to the gun, the tales of shootouts and ne’er-do-wells, sheriffs, and bandits—get all of that romantic stuff out of your head. When you pick up the gun and handle it on its own terms, you can’t help but admire it and know that the hype was well deserved. The Colts were as accurate as your hands made them; effective range depended a lot on the operator,