Ruger's 50th Anniversary .44 Blackhawk: Taffin's favorite-est handgun returns

Guns Magazine, Nov, 2006 by John Taffin

The human body has so many wonderful elements, not the least of which is a mechanism in our soul which makes it very easy to recall the good things in our past and forget the bad.

There's also a folder marked "Firsts," which when opened once again reveals the notable firsts in our life: first day at grade school, first love, first date, first kiss, first job, first car ('49 Ford V-8 Club Coupe), first sixgun (Ruger Single-Six Flat-Gate .22), first rifle (Marlin 39A Mountie), first day in college and on and on. Some firsts are both painful and pleasurable as we call them up.

When the .44 Magnum first arrived in the wonderful sixgun from S&W, Major Hatcher of the NRA said shooting it was like getting hit in the palm of the hand with a baseball bat, while Elmer Keith said it was not as bad as shooting a .38 Chief's Special. When I first fired a .44 Magnum S&W 4" with full-house Remington loads I found the truth, for me at least, was in between Hatcher and Keith with strong leanings towards Hatcher. Writer Lucian Cary surmised the Colt SAA-sized grip of the Ruger .44 Blackhawk would make felt recoil less.

Cary was wrong and it was very obvious he had never fired a full-house .44 Magnum. The Ruger Blackhawk arrived in 1955 in the Colt-sized but thoroughly modern .357 Magnum now lovingly known as the Flattop. Bill Ruger took the basic Single Action Army, thoroughly modernized it with virtually unbreakable coil springs, main, hand, and bolt, flattopped the frame, added an adjustable rear sight, a ramp front sight, chambered it in the most powerful cartridge available in 1955--the .357 Magnum--and the result with the first Blackhawk was just about the finest outdoorsman's single action sixgun ever produced.

Ruger had just barely begun to build the .357 Blackhawk when the .44 Magnum surfaced. Three of the original .357 Blackhawks were built in 4 5/8", 5 1/2", and 7 1/2" barrel lengths and chambered in the new .44 Magnum. They were displayed at the NRA Convention in 1956 and Elmer Keith warned them the cylinder and frame were too small for the bigger Magnum, but they would make great .44 Specials. Ruger decided to do more testings and blew up one of the prototypes. The frame and cylinder were enlarged and the result in 1956 was the first .44 Magnum from Ruger.

The first .44 Magnum I ever saw for sale was a brand-new Ruger Blackhawk and remembering the pain of firing the first Smith & Wesson and the soothing words of Lucian Cary, I bought that .44 Blackhawk. It was sitting in the gun case at Shell's Gun and Archery Farm in Uniontown, Ohio. Right next to it was a beautiful engraved Colt Single Action Army fitted with adjustable sights. The Blackhawk was $96 and the Colt was $150. At the time I was 17 and making $40 per week so the Blackhawk looked much more attractive pricewise. I bought the Blackhawk and left the Colt, however, I did learn from the experience and my advice today to anyone facing the same situation is always, "Buy 'em both!"

That first .44 Ruger has been my companion for 50 years and has gone through the original barrel length of 6 1/2", then shortened to 4 5/8", and logged many miles through Idaho's sagebrush, foothills, forests, and mountains. When I needed the 4 5/8" barrel to convert a .357 Magnum Old Model to a .44 Special, the Blackhawk was returned to Ruger to have a 7 1/2" barrel installed. When Roy Huntington of our sister publication American Handgunner pinned me to the wall and virtually forced me to pick my favorite sixgun, it was this Ruger Flattop .44 Blackhawk with its 7 1/2" barrel. I've shot hundreds upon hundreds of sixguns over the past 50 years many of them much prettier and even more accurate than the old .44 Blackhawk, however, none hold as many memories.

The first time I fired the .44 Blackhawk was not a pleasant memory. Cary was definitely wrong! When I pulled the trigger on that first full-house Remington 240-grain .44 Magnum round, the Blackhawk rotated in my hand all fight and it didn't stop until the hammer dug a hole in the back of my hand between thumb and trigger finger. My first thought was why in the world didn't I buy the .45 Colt? I hung the Ruger on the wall and left it there for awhile. I finally retrieved it, fitted it with custom stocks, shot it a lot with .44 Specials loaded with 250-grain bullets at 1,200 fps, and worked my way back up to .44 Magnum loads.

The Super

The Ruger .44 Magnum Blackhawk did not last long. Three years after the original .44 Blackhawk appeared, and probably with many shooters having the same experience as my first firing of it, Ruger decided to upgrade the Blackhawk. Standard length on the .44 Blackhawk was 6 1/2" with the 7 1/2" and 10" versions being quite rare. In 1959, Ruger redesigned the .44 Magnum Blackhawk into the Super Blackhawk. Both versions ran side-by-side until 1963 when the .44 Blackhawk was dropped.

The Super Blackhawk incorporated an all-steel grip frame to replace the aluminum alloy grip frame of the Blackhawk. While the original was the same size and shape as the Colt Single Action Army, the Super Blackhawk grip frame was larger, and the triggerguard was changed to the square-back style found on the Colt 1st Model Dragoon. In addition to the change of the grip frame and the standardization of the barrel length at 7 1/2", the Super Blackhawk received protective "ears" around the rear sight, thus altering the Flattop profile, along with a wider trigger and hammer.