The Single Action Army Colt's legendary Model P

Guns Magazine, July, 2003 by John Taffin

An inventive mind is a wonderful human attribute, however it also requires intelligence and inspiration to function. For myself, it's a waste of time to sit down to write unless I have been inspired. Inspiration might come from a piece of mail, a talk with one of my editors, a rare movie, a shooting session or some other source. For 16 year-old Samuel Colt, inspiration came in a very strange form. At this time in his life neither his ability to invent nor his intelligence had been shown to any great degree, however inspiration lay before him.

Young Sam signed on as a cabin boy on the ship Corlo bound from Boston to Calcutta. In his spare time he noticed the ship's wheel revolved and the spokes always came back into perfect alignment as it was locked by a clutch. Colt watched this operation and was inspired to carve a wooden pistol with a revolving cylinder.

The First Colt

Six years later at the mere age of 22, the first Colt, the Model 1836 Paterson arrived. Sam had shown his intelligence by searching out gunsmiths in Hartford during the years 1831-1832 to turn his wooden model and drawings into a working revolver.

The Paterson, so called because it came from a factory in Paterson, N.J., featured a rotating cylinder actuated by cocking the hammer, a locking bolt that unlocked as the hammer was cocked, and then re-locked as a cylinder rotated to the next firing position, and a trigger allowing the hammer to fall.

Every single-action revolver manufactured since 1836 which bears the name Colt, Remington, Ruger, Freedom Arms etc., owe their very existence to Colt's first revolver. We might add here that the Paterson was not the first revolver to be made but was certainly the first truly usable and successful revolver.

Colt went bankrupt with the production of the Paterson. However in 1847 another Sam, Capt. Samuel Walker of Texas convinced and inspired Colt to build another, better revolver. As he had no manufacturing facilities, Colt turned to Eli Whitney Jr. to do the actual manufacturing of the 1847 Walker. Colt was now on his way.

In 1848 the 1st Model Dragoon arrived and was rapidly followed by the 2nd and 3rd Models. All of these were huge .44 caliber sixguns weighing over four pounds. At the same time Colt also offered small .31 caliber pocket pistols such as the Baby Dragoon and Wells Fargo. Would it be possible to combine the two ideas and come up with a sixgun easier to carry than the Dragoons and yet more powerful than the diminutive pocket pistols?

Shape Of Things To Come

The result was the Model of 1851, the .36 Colt Navy. The gunfighter's weapon had arrived. For the first time it was possible for the competent pistolero to be just as dangerous with his sixgun belted on as he was with it in his hand. The era following the Civil War would produce numerous gunfighters, however Colt had already produced the sixgun. The only task left was a continual refinement over the next 20 years.

The Model 1851 went big bore in 1860 with the .44 Army. This was the number one revolver supplied to the Union troops during the Civil War as well as the United States Cavalry as we pushed westward in the late 1860s.

While Colt built the best possible percussion revolvers, a young company by the name of Smith & Wesson introduced the first cartridge-firing revolver, a seven-shot .22, in 1857. Colt ignored it. Old Sam saw no future in cartridge firing revolvers as he knew every sixgunner would always prefer to load their own powder and ball. By 1869, Sam Colt was dead, and S&W introduced the first big bore cartridge-firing sixgun, the Model No. 3 American, a six-shot, top-break, .44 caliber revolver.

Management at Colt was not only caught off guard, they found they could not produce a cartridge-firing revolver until Rollin White's patent for a bored-through cylinder expired. Ironically, Colt had turned down White when he offered them first choice on his patent.

Colt did several things to get around the patent. There was the Thuer Conversion, which allowed a tapered cartridge to be inserted from the front of the cylinder. Then came the Richards Conversions and Richards-Mason Conversions on Model 1851 Navy and Model 1860 Army revolvers, and then as the patent ran out, Colt brought forth their first cartridge-firing sixgun with the 1871-1872 OpenTop. This was not a conversion but actually built from the factory to fire cartridges.

Genesis Of The Peacemaker

It was at about this same time the Army conducted tests to adopt a new revolver. Colt submitted their Open-Top. The Army sent Colt back to the drawing board with two suggestions. They wanted a solid-frame revolver and a caliber larger than the .44 Colt of the Open-Top.

The same Mason who lent his name to the RichardsMason Conversion now went to work. Inspiration comes from many sources and I have to believe, or at least I choose to believe, that the result of William Mason's work came supernaturally. The Colt Single Action Army that came from Mason's drawing board is such a beautiful design and sodifferent from anything Colt had produced up to that time that Mason surely needed extra inspiration to come up with it.