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  Colt sought to privately fund his experiment, informing the Navy that he would conduct a demonstration of his underwater mine “without any expense to the government or exposure of any secrets connected with my plans of defense.” On July 4, 1842, in front of a large crowd of politicians and military officials, Colt blew up a sixty-ton schooner in spectacular fashion on the Potomac River using underwater cables and his mine. Many of the onlookers found the show to be horrifying and unnecessary. Some in the Washington establishment thought Colt a swindler. John Quincy Adams, then a congressman, who had sponsored a popular resolution undermining the Colt project, called it an “un-Christian contraption.” Colt, always the showman, proposed blowing up another ship, this time in New York Harbor. His request was denied (although he did blow up three other ships on his own dime).

  The project went nowhere. Colt, perhaps due to his Paterson experience, was disinclined to share his engineering secrets with the government. Government engineers, conversely, were apprehensive about Colt’s invention for a number of reasons. “As experiments, these, as many others have been, were very beautiful and striking, but in the practical application of this apparatus to proposed war, we have no confidence,” an assessment in the Army and Navy Chronicle, and Scientific Repository noted.12 Although, of course, Colt never stopped soliciting its business, he nursed a lifelong enmity toward government officials in Washington—“the great city of humbug,” he called it. It wasn’t until the Civil War that the United States began to seriously explore underwater mines.

  It would, however, be American providence that rescued Colt from obscurity. Jacksonian democracy had manifested in expansion, which didn’t merely render territorial growth but a spectacular opening of individual economic opportunity. Colt’s revolver would play a big part in the settlement of the West, the annexation of Texas, the fighting in the Mexican-American War, the conflict with Native Americans, and the Gold Rush; all these events made him extraordinarily rich. This expansion of American life was inconvenienced by the presence of Native Americans, who weren’t especially inclined to hand over vast tracts of their ancestral lands to the newcomers. This is not a place for a moral debate on the methods of populating the West but rather a place to note that the revolver would, as Colt had imagined, afford the settler an undisputed upper hand.

  “They are the only weapon which enabled the experienced frontiersman to defeat the mounted Indian in his own peculiar mode of warfare,” Daniel Boorstin writes. “[Y]our six-shooter is the arm which has rendered the name of Texas Ranger a check and terror to the bands of our frontier Indians.”13 In 1844, two dozen Rangers led by Captain Jack Hays fought off a far larger force of Comanche, a battle that was to be firmly entrenched in Western lore and Colt’s sales pitch. “They were two hundred in number, and fought well and bravely, but our revolvers, fatal as they were astounding, put them speedily to flight,” wrote Ranger Nelson Lee, who pointed out that a man with a Colt Paterson had five times the firepower of a man with a single-shot gun.14 This and other smaller victories in Texas helped bolster Colt’s reputation in military circles.

  When James Polk became president in 1845, he would facilitate Texas joining the Union as the twenty-eighth state and conclude negotiations with Great Britain for the annexation of the Oregon Territory south of the 49th parallel. The Mexican government, however, was less pliable about the disputed lands between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande. So Polk sent General Zachary Taylor to secure Texas. With war on the horizon, Captain Samuel Walker of the Texas Rangers, a Western celebrity who had become familiar with Colt and his gun doing battle with Indians, came east looking for recruits and weaponry. Walker convinced the U.S. government to place an order of 1,000 guns, launching Colt’s revolver for good.

  Walker would, however, ask the gunmaker to make a number of upgrades to the existing Paterson model. Could Colt, for example, create a gun that could hold six bullets instead of five? Could he create one that was even easier to reload than the Paterson? Could he build a gun that was effective enough to kill the enemy with one shot? He could. The 1847 “Walker,” christened after its sponsor, was a weighty four pounds and shot a .44-caliber black powder cap and ball through a barrel that was nine inches long. It was the most powerful handgun produced anywhere in the world until the .357 Magnum came along in 1935.

  With a $25,000 government order in hand, Sam persuaded Eli Whitney Jr., the Connecticut contractor for Army muskets, to help him produce the revolvers. They were ready six months later. (A pair of guns for Walker, who had hounded Colt for delivery, arrived in Mexico only four days before he was killed in action.) With money coming from the Mexican-American War, Colt could build his own factory and finally put his entire production assembly-line production into motion at Colt’s Patent Fire-Arms Manufacturing Company.

  After what must have felt like a lifetime of false starts, the determined Colt was finally poised to become one of America’s preeminent industrialists. After more than a decade of refining his ideas, Colt was making an elegant weapon that distinguished him from his competitors. Certainly there would no longer be a shortage of wars or interest in his revolver. Nor, where his business was concerned, would he ever have to answer to others. “I am working on my own hook and have sole control and management of my business and intend to keep it as long as I live without being subject to the whims of a pack of dam fools and knaves styling themselves a board of directors . . . ,” he wrote after securing loans for his new factory.

  For his factory, the Patent Fire Arms Manufacturing Company, Colt picked his hometown of Hartford. The armory, according to his first biographer, Henry Barnard, was located “within a short walk of the State House, railroads, and the business centre of Hartford. It has at hand all the water required for its manifold necessities; it is close to a navigable stream, so that coal, iron, and all the stock, can be landed at its doors, and its products, whenever it may be desirable, can be shopped by the Connecticut [River].”15 Although he would find a dedicated workforce, most of the technical work was to be done by machines, while hand-fitting was needed to finish the product.

  A number of great engineers of the age, like Elisha K. Root, Christopher Spencer, George Fairfield, and Charles Billings, would work for Colt during the early years. By pushing manufacturing efficiency, Colt could ensure that his gun’s price was consistently competitive—from $50 for the first Paterson to $20 for his later models. As the chairman of the Committee of Patents noted, Colt was intent to “perfect his armory by the increase and subdivision of machinery, so that he will be able to furnish . . . a perfect arm at a price which will defy . . . spurious imitators.”16 And there would be many.

  Hartford, already one of America’s leading industrial hubs in the 1850s, was transformed by the Patent Fire-Arms Manufacturing Company. It became not only the city’s leading employer but a place that featured a utopian village that served as the social, religious, political, and labor center of his workers. Colt was intent on building a modern industrial community to surround what was to become the largest gun armory in the world.

  By 1856, Colt’s company could produce 150 weapons per day using interchangeable parts, efficient production lines, and specially designed precision machinery decades before Henry Ford. Visiting the plant in the late 1860s, Mark Twain, then living in Hartford, described it as “a dense wilderness of strange iron machines . . . a tangled forest of rods, bars, pulleys, wheels and all the imaginable and unimaginable forms of mechanism . . . It must have required more brains to invent all these things than would serve to stock fifty Senates like ours.”17

  A Russian-style bright blue onion-shaped dome emblazoned with golden stars topped by a statue of a horse could be seen on the grounds. The factory was augmented by a self-contained town, something comparable in many ways to a modern “campus” built by a Silicon Valley company. H.S. Pomeroy and Elihu Root designed a complex for about 145 families that sprawled out around the brickwork of the factory. Ignoring more nativist trends of the time, C
olt hired from all ethnicities and backgrounds and nations, but especially from Germany. The gunmaker even sent one of his top assistants, Fredrick Kunkle, to Prussia to find artisans, building Swiss chalets and a beer hall to lure them. The neighborhood was referred to as “little Potsdam.”

  Colt had somewhat of a schizophrenic relationship with his workers. He appreciated that manufacturing was monotonous, grinding work, and took pains to ensure his workforce was taken care of. He made certain there was proper lighting—big windows and skylights—and good ventilation. He installed a modern heating system and a state-of-the-art fire prevention system. He paid his workers (including the unskilled sector) well-above-average wages. Colt introduced a ten-hour day and mandated one-hour lunch breaks.

  More than that, those who lived in Coltsville had all the conveniences that a modern American middle-class nineteenth-century family could desire. There was a church and a concert and dance hall that could seat up to 1,000 people. The Colt Brass Band became celebrated throughout the region, playing at many of the huge parties organized for the community by Colt, especially the fireworks extravaganzas on the Fourth of July. Colt encouraged workers to engage in social leisure activities. A Colt employee could go to the newspaper reading room and peruse periodicals from around the country, or sign up for one of the many social clubs or educational programs (which created a number of future notable gun engineers). Or he could go on a picnic with his family near orchards, greenhouses, sculpted lawns, man-made lakes, and botanical gardens in the huge Coltsville park—all of it stocked with an array of exotic animals and flowers.

  It is here, in June 1856, that Colt married Elizabeth Hart Jarvis, the daughter of a prominent Hartford Episcopal clergyman. A steamboat and a fleet of liveried carriages chauffeured the entire wedding party to the nearby town of Middletown for the ceremony. The couple honeymooned in Europe, attending the coronation of Czar Alexander II. When they came back to the complex they moved into the Armsmear, an opulent Italian villa replete with towers and domes and surrounded by large reflecting pools decorated with fountains. It stood high on the hill overlooking the grounds running down to the factory. “Beyond all this luxury,” wrote Martha J. Lamb in The Homes of America in 1879, were the “towers of the great armory . . . also the outline of the pretty Swiss village, which grew out of the planting of willows by the dike . . .”18 The jewel of the estate is still there, a pink-hued mansion.

  It must be remembered that the beautiful environs and societal advantages of Coltsville had been thought up, shaped, and constructed to serve only one purpose: Colt’s guns. In the heart of the complex was the H-shaped brickwork armory. Colt was a demanding boss who laid out tough quotas and gave no quarter to those who failed to meet his demands. A sign hung prominently on the factory floor stated: EVERY MAN EMPLOYED IN OR ABOUT MY ARMOURY WHETHER BY PIECEWIRK OR BY DAYS WIRK IS EXPECTED TO WIRK TEN HOURS DURING THE RUNING OF THE ENGINE, & NO ONE WHO DOSE NOT CHEARFULLY CONCENT TO DU THIS NEED EXPECT TO BE EMPLOYED BY ME. This was no idle threat.19

  Colt was not above social engineering and did not shy away from politics. He was no free market fan, using lawyers and government contacts to undermine competition. He could, by today’s standard, rightly be accused of embracing crony capitalism and rent seeking. A Democrat, Colt pushed his workforce to vote accordingly, going so far as firing apostate Republicans. The elite of Hartford were Republican, and one paper accused Colt of “a most oppressive and tyrannical exertion of the money-power, against which it is the duty of every freeman solemnly and earnestly to protest.”20 When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Colt began making weapons exclusively for the Union. During the first year of the war he was producing 27,000 guns. By 1863, the company’s output dramatically increased to 137,000 and to nearly 300,000 the following year, making it the largest private armory in the United States.21 By the time the war ended, more than 1,000 people worked at the company’s factory.

  It was the Single Action Army—more famously known as the “Peacemaker”—that would embody Colt’s legacy. An elegant gun with a practical and streamlined design, it took on near-mythological status not merely because of its easy use but because of the legendary men who claimed to use it. The first model gun had a solid frame that weighed around three pounds, a .45-caliber with a 7.5-inch barrel, blued steel, and an oil-stained walnut grip. It was soon one of the most popular guns ever made. Mechanically, it still incorporated much of the technology that Colt propagated during his lifetime. In 1872, the Army’s Ordnance Board would adopt the new gun for service and ordered 40,000 between 1873 and 1891, when it was the standard military service revolver.

  Colt Model 1860 Army Percussion Revolver

  It was likely Colt himself who came up with the moniker “Peacemaker” for his gun. It was not merely a stab at irony or an adman’s clever copy. Colt often, and vigorously, argued that this gun could empower the average American. The weapon could be brandished for self-protection, of course, but it was a firearm so formidable that war was to become too destructive to be worth engaging in. The gun was, to him, an imperative tool in fulfilling the American dream on both a personal and providential scale. “Living in a country of most extensive frontier, still inhabited by hordes of aborigines, and knowing of the insulated position of the enterprising pioneer, and his dependence, sometimes alone, on his personal liability to protect himself and his family, [I] had often meditated upon the inefficiency of the ordinary double-barreled gun and pistol,” he said in an 1851 speech to British engineers.22 A Colt made one man six. “Place a revolver in the hands of a dwarf . . . and he is equal to a giant,” noted the industrialist.23

  Even more significantly, the average man could order one through the mail for the somewhat affordable price of $17 and have a light but powerful weapon within weeks.24 And selling his guns to civilians—every civilian, if possible—would be Colt’s principal goal. In a nation coming to terms with growing wealth, power, and size, Colt capitalized on Americans’ romanticized view of the rugged frontier to sell pistols. With all the complex mechanical modernizations of the gun, Colt’s success was also wrapped up in aesthetics and storytelling. Embedded in his guns were the adventurous attitudes of the era, the Western impulse and individualistic notions, patriotic fervor, and American life. These were weapons, elegant and utilitarian, but they told stories. Literally.

  Colt built a relationship with the artist George Catlin, who had made numerous forays into the West during the 1830s to paint scenes of Indian life. Catlin not only produced many of the first artistic renditions of the Wild West, but he was a meticulous collector of artifacts and stories. In 1838 he began delivering a series of popular lectures about his time on the Plains, publishing two volumes of engravings detailing his adventures. His sense of drama caught the eye of Colt, who commissioned the artist to produce a series of oil paintings portraying his adventures in the West—with one stipulation. All ten, known as the Firearm Series, depicted Colt revolvers and rifles either being used in hunting or impressing the local Native Americans. Colt used these images as a promotion to bolster the legend of Colt as the premier weapon of the frontier.

  Colt had also heard about Waterman Ormsby, a man who later created intricate and beautiful etchings used by the United States on its banknotes to repel counterfeiters. His invention, the “grammagraph,” could roll-die artistic engravings onto steel, allowing Colt to create numerous cylinder scenes that made his guns more visually attractive and further evoked visions of the West. These beautiful images—created by the noted engraver Gustave Young, who worked for the Colt company from the 1850s to the 1870s and would be poached by Smith & Wesson from the 1870s to the 1890s—depicted scenes of legendary battles and individual bravery. They were featured on the Dragoon Revolver, the Model 1849 Pocket Revolver, the Navy 1851 Revolver, and other models.

  Colt Second Model Dragoon Revolver

  Colt did what he could to personalize guns in several other ways, often playing on his own celebrity by sending his gun “compliments of
the inventor” and running ads signed by Colt in which he spoke directly to his consumers. He would, if possible, whet the consumer’s appetite by offering slightly modified models with customizable elements at additional cost. Colt included quirky add-ons that created a more unique experience, like a gun case that looked like a reference book with a serious-sounding title like Colt on the Constitution: Higher Law & Irrepressible Conflict. One was inscribed Law for Self Defense.

  Colt embraced a modern notion that is recognizable to anyone who owns an iPhone, constantly churning out “new and improved” models—an expression he may have coined—to keep people clamoring for the latest iteration of his products.

  The gunmaker also created a national network of sales reps, running ads in newspapers that featured professional artwork. Colt had been aware of the emergence of the “penny newspapers” since his days on the Lyceum circuit. These papers were mass-produced in the United States from the 1830s by means of steam-powered printing. Colt would be one of the first to use them as marketing tools, publishing ads that explained his guns, defended them from critics, offered specifics on technical changes to the design, and, perhaps for the first time, running celebrity endorsements to vouch for his product. In 1857, Colt paid the popular United States Magazine to publish a fawning twenty-nine-page illustrated feature in its March issue titled “Repeating Fire-Arms: A Day at the Armory of Colt’s Patent Fire-Arms Manufacturing Company.” Colt pursued and compensated publications for this sort of coverage his entire career.