Colt's Dragoon
With great power comes great reliability. Finally.
Colt Dragoon, 1848
Howdy, folks. Welcome back for another Tale of a Gun. Last week we looked at the iconic Walker Colt of 1847, the 4.5 lb monstrosity that its namesake, Captain Samuel Walker of the Texas Rangers and his men carried into the US War with Mexico as US Mounted Rifles.
Captain Walker was killed in action, merely thirty years of age. His namesake revolvers didn’t fare a lot better. When they worked, they were a fantastic concentration of firepower, but they showed a distressing tendency to explode when (possibly due to poor metallurgy, revolvers were still in their infancy. Possibly due to improper loading. The troops issued the new weapons had never seen them before.) Possibly most famously the loading levers tended to fall under recoil, which would jam up the gun, almost by definition in the middle of combat
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At about the same time, Sam Colt was shifting his production facilities. He had contracted with Eli Whitney Jr, son of cotton gin Whitney, to produce the Walker pistols at his Whitneyville armory, but he really wanted his own factory again. Part of the deal with Whitney stated that Colt would keep the tooling made to build the Walkers. This he took to a new factory in Hartford, Connecticut, and there began making pistols in earnest.
By this time, feedback was starting to come in from the Mexican War. Beta testers, if you will. Thus some changes were made.
The new guns were still very similar to the Walkers, but scaled down slightly. They sported a 7 ½” barrel, to the Walker’s 9” tube. Where the Walker’s mammoth cylinder held 60 grains of FFg black powder, the new Dragoon’s was slightly shorter, and only held 50 at full charge. The loading lever got a new latch system at the muzzle end. It was still a massive and powerful pistol, weighing around four lbs even. The reduction in powder charge and barrel cost about a hundred fifty feet per second, for 1,000-1,100, compared to the Walker’s 1,200.
It may have somewhat less romantic appeal than the Walker with all its claims to fame, but it was a far more satisfactory weapon. It stayed in production from 1848 until the eve of the Civil War, 1860, with Colt eventually making nearly 20,000 of them, far more than the Walkers. Only a few minor changes affected that dozen-year run. The First Model had carried over the oval bolt locking notches from the Walker. With the Second Model, these were changed to rectangular notches, with a runway leading to them for more positive engagement. A fast spinning cylinder could skip right past the ovals. There was also an internal change from a breakage-prone v-shaped spring to a stronger flat spring, as well as a roller on the hammer to reduce friction and resulting wear. The Third Model did away with the iconic square-backed trigger guard, in favor of a round one, as would be seen on all subsequent Colt revolvers.
In the beginning, they saw service with the US First and Second Regiments of Mounted Dragoons in the period of intense conflict with the Native Americans following the Mexican War. They guarded the Oregon Trail trhough the heart of Pawnee country, fought the Jicarilla Apache at the Battle of Cieneguilla, and many other incidents. They were even found in the holsters of Captain Smith and his men at Fort Lane, when they took Indian women and children into the fort, to protect them from white settlers during the Rogue River War in Oregon.
The tiny pre-Civil War US military represented a very small market for an ambitious marketer like Sam Colt. Soon the Dragoon was much prized among civilian settlers, California Gold Rushers, anyone who needed a robust, powerful sidearm, and was willing to tote four pounds of ironmongery to get it. Characters as diverse as Charley Parkhurst, the legendary stage coach driver and Indian fighter who was discovered to be a woman only after death, and General George McClellan were known to favor a Colt’s Dragoon.
In fiction, Rooster Cogburn “I taken my reins in my teeth, my two Colt’s Dragoons in my hands…” and Mattie Ross, young heroine of True Grit toted a Colt’s Dragoon all over the west in her gunny sack. The John Wayne version gets it wrong, (or creatively right?) making the line “my two Navy sixes,” though the Duke actually carried his yellow handled SAA. The Gus MacRae of the novel Lonesome Dove also favored the Dragoon, though both Mattie and MacRae’s were played by Walkers in their respective films. The 2010 remake of True Grit actually got it right, giving both Rooster and Mattie their rightful guns.
Such a large pistol was not everyone’s cup of tea, however. Next week, we’ll look at the Dragoon’s Baby.
Another interesting post. By the way I think you meant Charley Darkey Parkhurst (born Charlotte Darkey Parkhurst; January 17, 1812 – December 28, 1879) not Parker.
Those things were a handful. I knew a guy into that era of stuff, and he had allegedly legit ones in his safe alongside LeMats and whatnot. But if you have big hands, they were just about right sized. Great piece. I learned a lot.