The Ultimate Horse Pistol: The Revolver

^{A variety of Colt revolvers.}

For a while, the westward expansion of the United States stopped at the edge of the forest, a line that ran roughly south from central Minnesota to eastern Texas. Would‑be settlers faced a new and daunting environment: the Great Plains. There were almost no trees, making it difficult to build log cabins.

Streams and rivers were also rarer – a hardship for people who did much of their travel by canoe. And the Indians were different; they rode horses. The Plains Indians were the biggest obstacle to settling that sea of grass. The weapons pioneers had evolved for life in the forested wilderness, the long knife, the tomahawk, and the long rifle were less effective against the riders of the plains.

Plains Indians seldom closed for hand‑to‑hand fighting unless their foes were exhausted, greatly outnumbered, or otherwise severely handicapped, so the knife and the tomahawk were almost useless. The long rifle was still lethal, but it was slow to load and hard to manage on a horse. To cope with the Indians, the pioneers needed horses. The Native Americans specialized in hit‑and‑run raids, disappearing into the vast grasslands whenever they encountered serious resistance. They fought on horseback, riding around their enemies while they shot dozens of arrows from their short, powerful bows.

Horses were no problem to the newcomers to the West, but the earliest ones had no weapon to match the rapid fire of the Indians’ bows. Their rifles were slow and clumsy; their single‑shot pistols were not clumsy, but they were painfully slow if rifled and horribly inaccurate if smoothbores. A new weapon was needed.

At the right time the revolver appeared.

Among the earliest users of revolvers were the Rangers of the Republic of Texas. The Texas Rangers of the 1830s and 40s were not a mere state police force. They were a military organization primarily charged with protecting settlers on the frontier (which included most of Texas). They found that the revolver was just the weapon they needed. In one instance, a group of 15 rangers under Captain Jack Hays drove off a war party of 75 Comanches, reportedly killing 35 of them.

The revolver was not really a new weapon. Since the 16th century, inventors had been making pistols with either revolving barrels or revolving chambers that lined up with a single barrel. There were matchlock revolvers, in which the barrels or cylinder were rotated by hand to a place where the match could reach the priming pan. There were snaphaunce and flintlock revolvers, some that rotated automatically when the cock was pulled back and others that had to be rotated by hand. Inventors had been trying for centuries to build a pistol that could fire several shots without reloading. But until the 19th century, nobody had come up with a practical gun. The multi‑barrel pistols were inevitably heavy and clumsy, and all of the early revolvers had trouble keeping powder in the priming pan over each chamber. In addition, in that pre‑machine tool era, it was difficult to make the cylinder and barrel of a single‑barrel revolver fit closely enough to prevent excessive amounts of gas escaping at the juncture of the cylinder and the barrel.

In 1818, three Massachusetts men – Artemas Wheeler, Elisha Collier, and Cornelius Coolidge – patented a flintlock revolver with a number of improvements. There was no need to keep powder in each priming pan: It automatically primed a chamber when cocked. Further, when the cylinder was aligned with the barrel and the shooter pulled the trigger, a spring forced the cylinder forward so it fitted over the end of the barrel, eliminating gas escape. In 1895, Russia adopted the Nagant revolver, which was widely hailed as revolutionary, because it had a similar system of closing the cylinder‑barrel gap. In spite of its improvements, only about 300 of these so‑called Collier revolvers were made.

They were probably too complicated for reliability.

The introduction of percussion caps gave a boost to revolver manufacture.

At first, the only revolvers were multi‑barrel “pepperbox” pistols. They were too heavy and most of them had heavy, double‑action trigger pulls, which, as they had no sights, made them inaccurate. Then Samuel Colt brought out his single‑barrel, percussion‑primed revolver. Colt’s revolvers, made at a plant in Paterson, New Jersey, had a cylinder that could be easily detached. Soldiers found that they could carry separate loaded cylinders to give them a quick reload after emptying their guns. The Texas Rangers snapped up Colt’s revolvers and put them to good use. That brought the new weapon considerable publicity, and the U.S. Army ordered more for its mounted dragoons in the Seminole War. When the war with Mexico broke out, there was a big demand for Colt’s revolvers. Unfortunately, the Colt revolver business had gone out of business, and Colt could not even find one of his guns to use as a model for resuming production.

General Zachary Taylor on the Mexican border requested a thousand Colt revolvers and sent one of his officers, Captain Samuel Walker – a former Texas Ranger – to Whitneyville, Connecticut, where Colt had borrowed factory space to make new guns. Colt worked from memory in designing a new gun, incorporating many suggestions from Captain Walker, who had used the older model in combat. The huge, powerful “Walker Colt” was received enthusiastically, and the Colt business, which moved to a new factory in Hartford, Connecticut, was assured permanent prosperity. Improved revolvers were churned out by Colt and its competitors. Metallic cartridges made loading easier and greatly increased reliability. Double‑action trigger mechanisms increased the speed of fire and improved metallurgy made guns stronger and more reliable.

The American Civil War not only established the revolver as a standard military weapon, it changed cavalry tactics. The traditional cavalryman was armed with a saber and a smoothbore carbine or a pair of smoothbore pistols. And the traditional cavalryman disdained his firearms.

“The fire of cavalry is at best innocent,” said “Light Horse Harry” Lee, the Revolutionary father of Robert E. Lee. For Lee, the saber was the only effective weapon for the horseman. Epaphras Hoyt, another Revolutionary cavalryman, wrote, “It is generally agreed by experienced officers that fire arms are seldom of any great utility in a cavalry engagement.”

The revolver was rifled – making it far more accurate than the smoothbore horse pistol – and it could get off six shots before the older gun could fire two.

Moreover, the revolver could be quickly reloaded with spare cylinders. Still, most regular cavalry officers had much the same view of cavalry pistols as “Light Horse Harry.” In 1870, the U.S. Army’s Small Arms and Accoutrements Board declared that the single‑shot Remington pistol was “an excellent weapon.” The British lancers did not replace their single‑shot muzzle‑loading pistol until 1872.

And in the 20th century, right before World War I, Erskine Childers, an Irish veteran of the Second Boer War, gained a reputation as a revolutionary military thinker by writing two books deploring the British cavalry’s dependence on the saber and the lance.

In the American Civil War, many of the senior officers were catapulted to high command from civilian life or from the ranks of very junior officers. One of the latter was Philip H. Sheridan, a captain at the beginning of the war, who rose to command all of the cavalry of the army of the Potomac. Sheridan, no physical giant, recruited cavalrymen who weighed 125 pounds or less, so they wouldn’t tire the horses. They were light but heavily armed. In addition to their sabers (de rigueur in the Union Army), they had repeating carbines and two revolvers each. They relied on their carbines when they fought dismounted (which was frequently) and their revolvers when they fought on horseback.

John Singleton Mosby, a lawyer in civilian life, went from being a private in the Confederate Army to a guerrilla leader who controlled a wide expanse of northern Virginia, including much of what is now suburban Washington, D.C. Mosby’s men always fought mounted, and, for them, the revolver was almost the only weapon. Many carried as many as four or six revolvers.

On April 1, 1863, Mosby and 69 of his troopers were surprised by 150 Union cavalrymen led by Captain Henry C. Flint of the First Vermont Cavalry. Mosby’s men barely had time to get on their horses.

“As Capt. Flint dashed forward at the head of his squadron, their sabers flashing in the rays of the morning sun, I felt like my final hour had come,”

Mosby later recalled. He and his men met the sabers with their revolvers. Flint was killed and his men routed. Mosby was promoted to major. Two weeks before that promotion, he had been promoted to captain.

The revolver had changed cavalry tactics, but the day of the horseman was rapidly fading, thanks to the rifle and the machine gun. And, as Childers pointed out in his two books, War and the Arme Blanche and The German Influence on British Cavalry, European cavalry officers had still not learned to take advantage of the revolver.

The revolver had a profound, but very short‑lived effect on warfare. It and its successor, the semiautomatic pistol, are still important weapons. In the United States, until well into the 20th century, the prime criterion for selection of a handgun was its stopping power on horses. One American officer, evaluating the .38 caliber service revolver in 1900, complained of its lack of power: “Time after time I have seen it necessary to fire several shots in a horse’s head in order to bring him down, when the man was very close. The Cavalry Pistol should be of such caliber and power, that either horse or man hit will be out of the fight.”

In 1911, the United States adopted the .45 caliber Colt semiautomtic as the M1911 pistol, because the military authorities believed it had enough power to stop man or horse. The cavalry pistol was still to see some action, as in the mounted pistol charge at the Ojos Azules Ranch during the army’s pursuit of Pancho Villa, but, after that, the pistol’s main purpose was as a last‑ditch self‑defense weapon for officers and NCOs. One notable instance of that was in World War I when Corporal Alvin York used his M1911 to kill six Germans who charged him with bayonets during his celebrated skirmish in the Argonne Forest when he captured 132 Germans almost single‑handed.