Innovation was possible but stymied by dogma.
Walker and Colt lived in what now looks to us like a prehistoric ballistic world. General James Wolfe Ripley, the Union Army’s chief of ordnance during the Civil War, saw repeating weapons as a “great evil” that wasted ammunition, and preferred rifles that a shooter could carefully and accurately aim. But the generals who awarded firearms contracts weren’t impressed-they tended to focus on the accuracy of guns while undervaluing their speed. A report from 1756 on the military preparedness of the colonies found that no more than half of militia members were armed, often with broken, ungainly, outdated, badly designed, or poorly maintained weapons in 1776, the governor of Rhode Island told George Washington that the colonists had almost entirely “disposed of their arms,” because they believed themselves to be in “a perfect state of security.” When the Revolutionary War began, the scarcity of gunsmiths and guns forced the colonies to purchase tens of thousands of muskets from France.Ĭolt’s fast-firing revolvers were a significant innovation in gun design. In fact, since before the country was founded, its appetite for guns had been so low as to be considered a security liability. (“The thing was so good it ruined itself,” his lawyer complained.) As the historian Pamela Haag writes, in “ The Gunning of America: Business and the Making of American Gun Culture,” there was no mass market for firearms in nineteenth-century America. Colt had been making money by supplying his “repeating rifles” to soldiers during the so-called second Seminole War, but “by exterminating the Indians, and bringing the war rapidly to an end, the market for the arms was destroyed,” he later wrote. But he discovered that Colt’s Patent Fire-Arms Manufacturing Company had gone out of business. “The result of this engagement was such as to intimidate them and enable us to treat with them.” This seemed to promise the decline of the Comanche empire and the security of Texas as a burgeoning slave state.Īfter the battle, Walker wrote to Samuel Colt, the inventor of the revolver, to inquire about buying more guns. “These daring Indians had always supposed themselves superior to us, man to man, on horse,” Walker later wrote. The Native Americans fled, and the Rangers followed by the end of the day, sixteen Rangers had killed twenty Comanches and wounded thirty more, dealing most of the damage with their Colts. The Rangers “had a shot for every finger on the hand,” a surviving Comanche recalled. The men fired a volley-and then, without pause, another and another. As the riders rushed across the prairie, the Rangers drew their pistols. As the Rangers used up their ammunition, more Comanches emerged-sixty or seventy all told.Įventually, the Rangers ran out of bullets, and the Comanches closed in. The Comanches rode back and forth, goading them into taking shots.
Still, the guns were small and inaccurate, and so the Texans reached for their rifles first. Intellectually, the Rangers understood the value of these weapons: there’d be no need to reload until all five rounds had been expended. The guns used rotating cylinders by drawing back a hammer, a shooter turned the cylinder, putting one of five chambers in position to fire. But each man also wore a pair of Colt Paterson revolvers, new and mostly untested. That day, the Rangers carried rifles-their usual weapons. More were almost certainly hidden nearby. The Lords of the South Plains, as the Comanches were known, had ruled the American Southwest for a century by displacing other Native American nations, raiding colonial outposts, enslaving people, and extracting tribute, they enacted what the historian Pekka Hämäläinen, in his book “ The Comanche Empire,” called a story of role reversal, “in which Indians expand, dictate, and prosper, and European colonists resist, retreat, and struggle to survive.” About a week into Walker’s expedition, dozens of Comanche horsemen appeared behind the Rangers, armed and shouting taunts in Spanish. Samuel Walker and fifteen other Texas Rangers rode into the countryside to hunt for Comanches in June of 1844.
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