Whitehall Press – Budget Publications
Sandersville, Georgia
© Wm. Hovey Smith, 2019. Any reproduction of all or parts of this work are prohibited and punishable under U.S. and international copyright laws, except that brief sections may be quoted in reviews. This copyright includes all original images and derivative works.
ISBN: 978-0-9855965-5-2
Table of Contents
Introduction
Books in the Muzzleloading Short Shots series were developed to give black-powder gun enthusiasts information in tightly-focused packages. Each book contains candid comments about guns, powders, bullets, ignition systems and hunting techniques.
These brief treatments are based on 50 years of shooting and hunting with muzzleloading guns. I started writing for the outdoor press in the 1970s in The American Rifleman and have sold articles to many other publications. For 10 years I was the Corresponding Editor for the Gun Digest Annual covering black-powder guns, products and hunting.
Besides these, I have written four books (now also E-books) including Practical Bowfishing (Stoeger), Crossbow Hunting (Stackpole) and Backyard Deer Hunting: Converting deer to dinner for pennies per pound (Author House).
My most recent softcover muzzleloading title is X-Treme Muzzleloading: Fur fowl and dangerous game with muzzleloading rifles, smoothbores and pistols (Author House). These books are between 200-300 pages, and Backyard Deer and X-treme Muzzleloading have detailed information about individual hunts. I also have a business title Create Your Own Job Security: Plan to start your own business at midlife (Amazon.com) which promotes and gives detailed information on how to start your own business at any age in any place at any time. My current book in progress is a novel, Father of The Grooms, due for publication in 2020, which is a dark comedy about an American family of Sicilian origin who takes two brothers to Sicily to “meet some nice girls.” Their Mafia relatives take this more seriously. They are to arrive on Monday and the wedding is to be on Friday. If they do not go through with it none of the family will leave the island alive.
While the prices given in the Short Shot books were valid at the time of publication, they have been generally increasing every year and vary with international exchange rates. These should be used as general guidelines.
Constraints on economical E-book publishing prevent me from using as many photos as I would like. For these go to the soft-cover edition of X-Treme Muzzleloading, my other soft-cover books and videos.
In the rear of the book, links are provided to the web pages of almost all manufacturers, and these should be consulted for up-to-date information.
Loads listed in this book were safe and effective in my guns, but I cannot take responsibility for those assembled by others. Any loads should only be used in newly manufactured guns in good condition – be prudent, be safe and good hunting.
Chapter 1
Replica percussion revolvers. Uberti Colt Walker (top), Pietta Remington 1858 Buffalo Model, Pietta Remington Sheriff’s Model and North American Arms stainless .22-caliber Super Companion.
The desire to have rapid repeat-shot capability in battle situations quickly led to the creation of multi-barreled guns of all sorts. Two categories quickly developed. There were volley guns where all of the barrels were discharged simultaneously and sequentially guns where the barrels were fired one at the time. Examples of both types ranging in size from pocket pistols to cannon are found in antique arms collections of all nations and with all available ignition systems. I can show you multiple-barrel matchlocks in Venice that date from the 1400s and hammer fired brass three barreled pole guns from the Boxer Rebellion in China from the early part of the 20th Century.
A firearm’s weight increases very quickly with the addition of multiple full-length barrels. To make a multi-barreled pocket pistol reasonable to carry, the caliber had to be reduced as well as the length of the barrels. This resulted in the pepperbox design which saw significant use in the U.S. during the Mexican War and California Gold Rush, and if they could find or afford nothing else, even by individuals who carried them as last-ditch self-defense guns during the Civil War. The double-action pepperboxes were improvements over earlier guns where barrels were manually rotated into firing position so they could be discharged by the strike of a single hammer-lock mechanism. Still, the total weight of the multiple barrels put considerable strain on the guns’ small operating parts and resulted in horrible trigger pulls. Often, the barrels on these guns were not particularly well bored and their accuracy was terrible to the point of being used as comedic material by authors like Mark Twain.
From a mechanical point of view it was reasonable to take this cluster of barrels, and cut them off so that they served as chambers to hold the powder and ball. The cluster of barrels now became a cylinder which discharged the balls through a single long barrel, instead of six of them. This could be cumbersomely accomplished with matchlocks and cannon, and examples of both survive. Compared with firelocks, matchlocks and wheel locks, flintlocks were a more compact design for a revolving-cylinder firearm. There was the complication that somehow priming powder had to be injected into the pan either manually for each shot or by a rather complicated mechanism. The most successful of these designs, although not the only one, was based on an 1818 design by Elisha H. Collier of Boston which was patented in in England. His surviving guns are found with 4 and 6-inch barrels and cylinders up to 1 7/8-inches long. An automatic pan priming mechanism with sufficient powder for 10 shots was mounted on top of the frizzen. Another feature of this design was that the cylinder moved forward under spring pressure to reduce gas loss from the barrel-cylinder gap. These guns are marvelous examples of mechanical design. Needless to say I have never shot one. I suppose that some industrious gunsmith might have made a replica Collier-pattern revolver, but I can find no record of it. If he could do it is 1818, it could surely be done today.
Samuel Colt was an early master of public relations, and in the spirit of Melville, Hawthorn, and Dickins, was not reluctant to embellish a few points from time to time to tell a good story. The general version is that while at sea as a young man he hand-whittled a working model of his first revolver from wood which ultimately resulted in the Colt Patterson and other designs. Being a New Englander and obviously interested in guns, he very likely knew of Collier’s design. Although flintlocks were still commonly in use, he had the advantage of being able to use copper percussion caps as his ignition source. The cumbersome frizzen and flintlock priming mechanism was replaced by a single hammer and nipple. The cock, flint and jaws to hold the flint were also no longer necessary. The necessary elements of the gun were a cylinder that was sufficiently long to hold an adequate charge of powder, a spindle to hold the cylinder in rotation, nipples to seal the rear of the cylinder’s chambers, a barrel of sufficient length to reasonably combust the powder charge and provide a platform for a front sight along with a frame and operating mechanism.
This operating mechanism had to have some means of rotating the cylinder and locking it into alignment with the barrel as well as a device for striking the percussion cap. Almost universally, but not exclusively, this percussion-striking device was as hammer with a thumbpiece for cocking it. Once that decision was made, then the other typical and usual lock parts were designed to be inserted into the frame. These now included a tumbler, mainspring, trigger and trigger spring. This left unresolved, the problem of how to rotate and lock the cylinder.
Major components of nitride finished Uberti Colt Walker revolver with modified loading lever.
Every sailing ship of the day had a capstan to raise the ship’s anchor. This instrument was equipped with a pawl, or dog, which was a wedge-shaped piece of metal, or wood, that fit into correspondingly-shaped slots on the wheel’s axis and was retained by spring pressure. With each step of the gang of men turning the windless to raise the anchor, the pawl would catch on the next slot so that if the pressure was released the anchor would not plummet to the bottom of the harbor. On larger ships it would be common practice to disengage the pawl by pinning it out of the way, allowing the anchor to free-fall to the bottom of the harbor.
Colt would have walked by that capstan numerous times a day. Although operated in a horizontal position to raise an anchor, he was mentally able to turn that mechanism 90 degrees and put the slots that had been on the axis of the windless on the rear of his cylinder. The pawl, which had been a stop mechanism to prevent the winless from free-wheeling the anchor down in the depths, was now put on an arm called “the hand” and linked to the hammer by a pin to rotate his revolver cylinder. Although the position of the pawl and its wedge shape prevented the cylinder from rotating in one direction, there was nothing, outside of inertia, to keep the cylinder from continuing to move in its direction of travel. This would make the chamber’s alignment with the barrel somewhat problematic.
Some mechanism was needed to keep the cylinder in place and aligned. A person could mill some groves into the cylinder to provide for a stop pin or block, but where did these need to be? The revolver’s fame had no top. That obviously eliminated anything coming from that direction to lock the cylinder in place. The front of the chambers might be made cone-shaped to jam into a correspondingly shaped receptor area in the barrel. That would be a possibility, but would put the full pressure of the recoiling cylinder against the relatively thin hand. Firing the gun would very quickly batter the rear of the cylinder and likely break a relatively flimsy hand.
The front end of the cylinder is mostly holes for the chambers and cylinder pin. Likewise, there is very little metal on the front of the frame. Space at the rear of the cylinder is fully utilized by the nipples, safety notches and a milled disk containing the notches for the hand. The only place remaining for a cylinder-stop mechanism is the bottom of the frame. A round, oval or rectangular shaped piece of metal coming through the bottom of the frame and fitting into corresponding slots in the cylinder would fix it into place and allow accurate chamber-barrel alignment.
Another device, a rocker arm pinned through the bottom of the frame was devised. This had a rounded or squared-off stud to fit into a corresponding slot in the exterior of the cylinder to lock the barrel in place when the gun was at full cock. A stud on the hammer locked this arm into position when the hammer was at full cock. When the hammer fell this stud no longer supported the rear of the rocker arm and spring pressure from the split trigger-locking arm spring caused the spring to fall below the top of the frame (water table) and the cylinder block to fall, releasing the cylinder for rotation when the hammer was re-cocked. When the mechanism was at rest, the hammer’s nose fitted on a nipple or into a slot in the top rear of the cylinder to prevent the cylinder from rotating.
Colt’s first revolvers that were produced under contract in Paterson, New Jersey, had a folding trigger and no trigger guard. The folding trigger game came to be regarded as an unnecessary complication of the design and was dropped on later designs in favor of a more robust and trouble-free conventional trigger and bow guard. Col. Walker of the U.S. Mounted Rifles, worked with Colt to make the much more robust Walker revolver which had a more conventional trigger and trigger guard. The remaining operating elements were correspondingly enlarged, but the operating mechanism was retained.
Almost instantaneously, other makers began to make direct or variously modified variations of Colt’s revolvers. Some were nearly direct copies like the Manhattan. Others like the Remington 1858, LaMat, and Deane-Adams, used a top-strap to strengthen the frame and provide a stronger sight base. A century later when Bill Ruger designed his Old Army percussion revolver, the basic components remained as Colt envisioned them. Ruger replaced the leaf springs with coil springs and mounted adjustable sights on the flat-topped frames of many of his Old Army revolvers. The basic design of the Colt percussion and later single-action revolvers has withstood the tests of time.
Chapter 2
Three of Colt’s revolvers. Top .44-Caliber 1860 Army, Middle 1851 Army and Bottom .36-caliber 1862 Pocket Police.
Today you can purchase replicas of almost every model of percussion revolver produced by the Colt factory and some that Colt never made. The most technologically advanced of the Colt percussion pistols was the Root design which had a distinctive side hammer and solid top strap. Although .44-caliber models were made as prototypes, only the pocket pistol and revolving Root-designed rifles were produced in reasonable numbers. Between the experimental, special order and presentation models so beloved of collectors, a writer dare not be too dogmatic that such-and-such a barrel-frame-caliber combination was never made. With this being said and ignoring the Patterson revolvers as being too delicate, scarce and expensive as replica guns to be used with hunting pistols; I will start with the most powerful of them all, the Colt Walker.
Colt Walker
At various times I have owned three Colt Walkers and shot several that belonged to others. Like most black-powder shooters, I was enamored with owning the biggest, baddest of Colt’s percussion pistols. I was in college at the time and picked up one as a used gun from a local pawn shop. I forget what I paid, but it was less than some nice 1862 Army models with 80% bluing that were going for about $225 in 1958. I could not afford those, but I could spring maybe $90 for the used Walker. I already owned a 1851 in .36 caliber, so I was somewhat experienced with percussion revolvers.
I loaded and shot the Walker a few times, but while I was impressed with the amount of expensive powder that it used, I was not impressed with its accuracy and was sorely disappointed with its reliability. The pistol shot high and right of the point of aim. This made the heavy gun almost impossible to shoot well with the single-handed off-hand shooting that I did. I was also annoyed that the loading lever fell and jammed the cylinder once or twice during a cylinder-full of shots. As a practical gun, there was nothing I could do with it. It was too inaccurate and cumbersome for use as a target or small game gun, and at that time was illegal to use on Georgia’s deer. Having no use for the gun that I could justify, I traded it in on something else.
A few decades later, I got the itch to own another one. By this time I was working as a Geologist in the Rocky Mountain States, and was based at various times in Montana, Texas and Arizona. There were more hunting opportunities to be had, and maybe, I thought, this might be a more favorable environment for the Walker. I was a member of the Tucson Rod and Gun Club which was at the foot of the Catalina Mountains, and for the first time since I left the Army had access to a range. This time I was able to work with the Walker and even got it shooting round balls with reasonable accuracy, but with no significant improvement in reliability. I took to the expedient of strapping the loading lever to the barrel with electrical tape. Although I could have hunted jackrabbits, coyotes and javelin with the gun, the Walker never went hunting. Ultimately, Walker No. 2 was traded in on a stainless steel Ruger Old Army which was a gun that I could shoot at National Muzzleloading Rifle Association matches, even though I was not a competitive shooter at the time.
In 2013, I did a comprehensive review of muzzleloading revolvers for the Gun Digest Annual. The guns that I covered ranged from the .22-caliber North American Arms to the Pietta Buffalo and Ruger Old Army. The Walker was noticeably missing from this coverage. I had taken deer with the Buffalo and Old Army by this time, and was receiving criticism from other shooters who claimed they had successfully been hunting with their Walkers for years. One person that I happened to sit next to on a plane trip said that he had fired well over 1,000 rounds through his gun and this use had started to pull the cylinder pin to the point where he had to have the gun repaired.
Obviously, I needed to give the Walker another opportunity to let it show me what it could do. I am more of a hunter than a traditionalist, and I decided to do exactly what Col. Walker did and use my experiences to build a better gun. In conceiving what this Super Walker might be, its needed elements were a better loading lever and adjustable sights. As it turned out, others had come to the same conclusion more than a century before me. Original Walkers have been found with Dragoon-style loading levers that were apparently installed in the 1850s-60s. Arkansas gunsmith Dykes Reber had for decades been improving the Walker by adding a spring-retained loading lever and putting a Weaver rail on top of the octagonal flat at the rear of the barrel and/or an adjustable rear and taller target-style blade front sight.
Coatings and finishes had also much improved. On one of my trips to the Shot Show, I went by the booth of H&M Coatings of Akron, Ohio, and found that they could put either a matt or bright-finished coating on all of the steel components, except springs. They require that the revolver be disassembled and sent to them. They would apply the coatings to all of the components and return the pistol to me for reassembly.
Powders and bullets had also received significant advancements. Hodgdon made first, Pyrodex P and later Triple7even black-powder substitute powders which yielded higher velocities per volume of powder. This was just what was needed because of the restricted length of the revolver’s chambers. Kadio Ojamaa and Rick Nelson had designed a new Keith-style bullet for percussion revolvers which was heavier than the round ball and would penetrate better than the hollow-based Buffalo revolver bullets which were made of soft lead.
If I made a revolver that could utilize all of these improvements, then I should have a shooting instrument with much improved game-killing potential. This was the approach I took. I ordered a Uberti kit-gun version of the Walker from Dixie Gun Works. As I was going to refinish the gun there was no need to pay the extra costs for a finished revolver. I featured building kit guns in the 2015 Gun Digest Annual and also published a series of YouTube videos in 2013-15 on building and shooting the pistol (https://youtu.be/mS333R2CrQI and for more details see Chapter 17.). On an Ossabaw Island hunt in 2015, I took a nice buck with the Super Walker, and reported that experience on another YouTube video (http://youtube/2PwgPwPkSdQ), and in the 2016 edition of Gun Digest. That deer was killed with a single shot in the neck. This buck was 4 ½-years old, and the field-dressed carcass only weighed 100 pounds. I had previously shot a 90-pound doe on my own farm with the pistol, so the Super Walker had now taken two deer with two shots. I consider this reasonable evidence that this gun, as now modified and loaded, could hunt.
Had I not received discount pricing for the Super Walker, the cost of the gun, holster, molds, etc. would likely run about $600. This could be even more if you put expensive optics on the gun and had other custom work done, such as having all the chambers reamed out to the same dimensions and the action tuned. Although a kit, the gun’s action had been finished and was already tuned when I received the gun. The action and trigger pull felt so good, that I felt no need to attempt to improve it for fear of doing more harm than good. For a more complete discussion on the Walker pistol see Chapter 17.
Colt Dragoons
With a shorter barrel, smaller capacity cylinder and improved loading lever, the .44-caliber Dragoon was more portable than the Walker, more efficient to use and nearly as powerful. For a time there was a replica Dragoon with a longer barrel and a flip-up sight on it to enable it to be used as a carbine when the detachable buttstock was attached. While I was not excited about the carbine option, I was interested in the long-barreled revolver. I would see it advertised, think about it, and then decide that I needed something else. I was occasionally taking a .31 revolver as a small game gun into the desert, but I did not think of any of the revolvers, even the Walker, as being accurate or powerful enough to take big game. I was later proven wrong on this point, but that was my opinion at the time. The result was that I only thought of the Dragoon as a historic novelty, of no real use and never purchased one.
Could you take a Dragoon and do the same modifications that I did on my Super Walker and have a more effective hunting pistol at less costs? Using a Dragoon as a starting platform would save money because it already has an effective loading lever. It would be somewhat less effective than the Walker because if it’s lessened chamber capacity and shorter barrel; however, I doubt if any of the smallish deer and hogs that I commonly shoot would know the difference. Properly matching the bullet with the game and proper shot placement is more significant that the maximum power differential between the two pistols. In short, if you want to build a Super Dragoon along the lines of my Super Walker, go to it. I see no reason why you would not be pleased with the result. It would be more effective than the smaller Colt revolvers, but less effective than the Walker in a slightly more portable package.
Colt 1849 Pocket Pistol
Recognizing the demand for a smaller pistol for concealed carry, Colt has produced versions of the Patterson revolver in calibers as small as .28, and did a model often called the Baby Dragoon in .31-caliber. The next pocket pistol was the 1849 which was distinguished from the Baby Dragoons in that it had an attached loading lever. As a young Geologist, I was doing a lot of field work in Montana, Arizona and West Texas at the time. This country was infested with rattlesnakes whose colors often matched the prevailing rock type. Those living on a lava plateau, for example tended towards black-toned scales, whereas those from limestone terrane were much lighter colored. On time while climbing up a rock face, I once beat a rattler off a ledge with my rock hammer.
When I worked in the field, I wore a Filson Cruiser Vest which is made of heavy canvas and has multiple pockets for pencils, notebooks, etc. I often carried a small handgun in one pocket. These included a .25–caliber rim-fire Stevens Single Shot, a S&W .22-.32 Kit Gun and the .31-caliber 1849 pocket pistol that was made by Uberti. When in season and legal, these pistols took no small number of grouse and rabbits that I came across as I worked. Most often that game provided that night’s supper. Admittedly, I took many more animals with the .22 L.R. Kit Gun than with the .31 Colt, but I did take some grouse and young jackrabbits with the percussion pistol. I thought that the round balls killed a little better than the High Speed hollow-points that I was using in the .22. The 1849 did not fit so handily in the vest’s pocket as the Kit Gun and was traded in on a percussion rifle. This was the only replica Colt revolver that I owned that in “as issued” condition shot reasonably close to the point of aim, and the only one that I ever regretted selling. I had a lot of fun with the gun, it did fill a need; but I had a more useful replacement.
1851 Colts in .36 and .44 calibers
My first percussion revolver was a replica 1851 steel-framed .36-caliber Navy revolver. I was in college, and had discovered what was to be my favorite gun shop. This was as small shop located in what once was a narrow alley. The shop’s shelves were filled with used double-hammer shotguns, and behind the counter and in the cases was an ever-changing variety of used antique, modern and replica guns. Even by then I was a gun enthusiasts whose exposure to his favorite passion had expanded from occasional hard-core gun articles in Field and Stream and Outdoor Life to becoming a new NRA member, receiving that magazine and now actually being able to see and maybe own some of the guns I had been reading about. In those days there were no problems with students at the University of Georgia keeping firearms in their dorm rooms. For many in this historic land-grant university (the nation’s first) who majored in Forestry, Agriculture, Urban Planning, Geology and the like, having a gun was considered an everyday tool.