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  All the Colt percussion revolvers made at this time were single-action, which is to say they could be fired only by cocking the hammer and then squeezing the trigger one shot at a time. Other manufacturers, like Remington, likely the second-most-popular gunmaker of the western era, offered both single- and double-action revolvers. The latter allowed the owner to fire single-action or simply squeeze the trigger to fire, thus the “double action.” The British gunmaker Robert Adams had been the first to patent the double-action system, in which the external hammer could not be cocked by thumbing it back. Once the patent expired in the mid-1870s, other companies featured the system in their own revolvers.

  The Smith & Wesson Model .44-caliber “American” was a popular single-action big-bore six-shooter. Remington sold the New Model 1875, which was, for the most part, a knockoff of the Colt Peacemaker. When the outlaw Frank James, brother of Jesse, surrendered to Missouri governor T. T. Crittenden in 1882, a reporter asked him why he preferred the .44-40 caliber 1875 Remington (which was, apparently, the sort of thing journalists asked outlaws in those days). “Because,” the former Confederate soldier reportedly replied, “the Remington is the hardest and the surest shooting pistol made, and because it carries exactly the same cartridge that a Winchester rifle does . . . [W]hen a man gets into a close, hot fight, with a dozen men shooting at him all at once, he must have his ammunition all of the same kind.”11 Staving off a dozen men of a posse might not have been a top concern for most western arrivals, but practicality almost surely was.

  Remington New Model Army Percussion Revolver

  For those inclined to conceal their weapons there was the derringer, a small single-shot large-bore gun that was another widely popular weapon of the West. The gun was a misspelling of the name of its inventor, Henry Deringer, son of a colonial gunsmith who had produced Kentucky rifles in the late 1700s, then began to perfect and mass-produce the small pocket pistols out of Philadelphia. Its popularity soon induced other major gunmakers to copy its design, often adding their own flourishes. The most advantageous aspect of the derringer was that it could be concealed—either as an extra gun or in saloons that had limited gun-carry restrictions—yet it was deadly accurate at short range. John Wilkes Booth used one of his derringer pocket pistols to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln in April 1865. It was during the reporting of this event that an extra r was added to the inventor’s name by reporters. The gun remained popular into the twentieth century, and not only among assassins.

  While the revolver and the derringer (and certainly the rifle) were the dominant weapons of the West, the double-barreled shotgun was also in widespread use by this time because of its affordability and practicality. The shotgun—often known as the “scatter gun,” because it strewed pellets—provided versatility as a weapon for hunting, war, and defense. Developed from the smoothbore hunting guns, there were both muzzle-loading and breech-loading cartridge types. Many thousands of shotguns from a variety of makers and countries were the mainstay of settlers, lawmen, and express coach mail companies. The popular saying “riding shotgun” referred to guards sitting next to stagecoach drivers to protect their cargo and passengers from outlaws and Native Americans. Western dime books were littered with stories of shotguns saving the day. When two deputized men armed with six-shooters, rifles, and derringers attempted to apprehend John Wesley Hardin, he wrote, “I covered them with a double-barreled shotgun and told them their lives depended on their actions, and unless they obeyed my orders to the letter, I would shoot first one and then the other.”

  Nevertheless, despite the prevalence of these new, lethal guns and the sometimes lack of reliable law—and the many men who took advantage of the situations they found themselves in—the Old West did not see the kind of mass violence portrayed in popular depictions. For the many thousands of men and women who would never be written about in dime novels or portrayed in Western films, the gun protected their home and property from criminality. For most of them, firearms were the means of hunting for sustenance and a way to ward off danger. The majority of men and women who trekked westward in the second half of the nineteenth century did so to find prosperity and peace. Most never fired, or even had to point their gun, at another human being.

  There has been a long-running debate among scholars regarding the proper way to calculate the homicide rates of the frontier West. Whatever the precise number is, it’s clear that the average agricultural, ranching, or mining community was far from the violence-ridden place depicted in movies. No, the West wasn’t a tranquil Eden, as we’ve noted. There was danger, criminality, and “range wars” that broke out between competing clans—although usually the number of casualties in these conflicts hardly justified the moniker of “wars.”

  In 1883, for example, the Associated Press breathlessly reported that the “Dodge City War” had broken out, making the frontier town sound like a combat zone to eastern readers. This “war,” it must be noted, yielded exactly zero casualties. Dodge City was often treated as the epitome of alleged western unruliness. It had its share of violence. But as historian Robert R. Dykstra has pointed out in his book The Cattle Towns, the problem these communities faced “was not to rid themselves of visitors prone to violence, but to suppress the violence while retaining the visitors.”12 Dodge City, Dykstra observes, witnessed an average of only 1.5 homicides per year over the ten years it was the leading cattle-trading center of the West.

  The reputation of debauchery and gunfighting was often exaggerated by locals, who found not only a warped sense of pride in portraying their towns as centers of brutality and depravity but also a pretty good marketing campaign. In 1879 a Dodge City editor wrote that “to live in the ‘wickedest city in the west’ is a source of pride” because locals measured the “accomplishments and glorious ends” of those who were buried in the town’s cemetery, Boot Hill.13 We all know the slogan “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.” Well, the 1870s version of tourist promotion was not much different. “Everything goes in Wichita” read the welcome sign on the outskirts of town. “Hell is still in session in Ellsworth”14 was the sign that hung in the Kansas cowtown, claimed one reporter. The truth was less spectacular. Ellsworth probably saw only one shooting of note in 1872, and no murders.15 Another town, Ogallala, Nebraska, considered the “cowboy capital” of the West and sometimes the “Gomorrah of the trail,” saw six killings from 1875 to 1884.16

  Many contemporary gun control advocates argue that the lack of violence can be attributed to the fact that there was more gun control in the West than there is in modern America. These days, there are numerous articles, columns, and “fact-checkers” making these absurd claims.17 One of the most popular pieces of evidence bolstering this assertion is to point to a picture of a Dodge City ordinance that read: “Any person or persons found carrying concealed weapons in the city of Dodge or violating the laws of the state shall be dealt with according to the law.”

  It’s true that, by 1879, Dodge City had nearly twenty businesses licensed to sell liquor and many whorehouses teeming with intoxicated young men. It seems reasonable not to want these men to be armed with revolvers as they packed into a red-light district. However, the men voluntarily handed over their weapons in exchange for the chance to find entertainment and drink. Not in the wildest recesses of the westerner’s imagination would he think a person had to ask for permission—or get a license—from the government to own a firearm. Nor do we know how rigidly the law was enforced or for how long. Moreover, the Dodge City ordinance—and some other towns, featured similar ones—typically applied only to the area north of the “deadline,” which was the railroad tracks and a kind of red-light district. In the rest of the city, guns were allowed.

  There is, in fact, a much stronger case to be argued that guns made crime like robbery and assault less prevalent. In reality, a man walking into town with gun blazing would almost surely see the retribution of a gun-wielding citizenry—many of whom had learned to use their weapons during the Civil War�
�that was far more interested in building a peaceful community. To put this in some context: during the frontier period, which historians typically define as 1859 to 1900, a survey of primary and secondary sources from all the states of the “West” could find fewer than a dozen confirmed bank robberies—in total—over those forty years.18 There were more than 1,000 in those same states in 2015 alone.19 Yet there were probably tens of thousands of such crimes depicted in movies over the past century. Despite the perceptions we’ve created, guns were far more likely to keep the peace than be used in wanton acts of violence.

  13

  THE SHOWMAN

  “The West of the old times, with its strong characters, its stern battles and its tremendous stretches of loneliness, can never be blotted from my mind.”

  —Buffalo Bill

  Buffalo Bill Wild West Show

  It was only a matter of time before an industrious American began to package and monetize the mythology of the West for widespread consumption. William F. Cody—or “Buffalo Bill,” as he would be known to millions—was born in Scott County, Iowa, in 1846, the year the territory would become a state. Sam Colt might have romanticized the guns of the frontier to his consumer base, but Buffalo Bill brought the frontier and the personalities and distinctive lifestyles and their weapons to the world. The man who modeled his looks on Hickok (who would end up working for Cody) was portrayed as everything from a gunslinger to a chivalrous warrior to a madman to a preening effete to a sniveling coward in movies and books in the coming century. Maybe he was a little bit of all those things.

  Cody, nearly a decade younger than Hickok, lost his father when the future showman was still in his adolescence. The youngster grew up quickly as his family found itself swept up in the Kansas-Missouri wars over slavery. In his early teens, Bill took a job riding horseback in a wagon train and delivering messages between the drivers and workmen. Cody witnessed an economic boom in Kansas sparked by a new wave of emigrants moving westward after the completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad in 1869. An industrious young man like him, fearless and good with a gun, could profit from “railroading and trading and hunting. I went out to make money and I was just looking for anything that could come along.”1

  Cody claimed to have ridden for the Pony Express, which famously employed around eighty men and used hundreds of horses to travel the nearly 1,800 dangerous miles between St. Joseph, Missouri, and Sacramento, California. We don’t know if this is true. But we do know that Cody won a medal of honor in 1872 as a scout in the U.S. Army during the Indian Wars, famously engaging in a rifle duel in which he killed and supposedly scalped the Cheyenne warrior Yellow Hair. It’s a story he would retell often.

  It was at some point in 1867 when the young veteran began hunting buffalo herds to feed the crew working on the Kansas Pacific Railroad. Although there were probably dozens of “Buffalo Bills” wandering the West at the time, it was during an eight-hour shooting match with a hunter named William Comstock that Cody won the moniker. He used a .50- to .70-caliber Springfield trapdoor rifle that he named after the Italian femme fatale Lucretia Borgia.2

  The buffalo were intricately entwined in the vibrancy and health of American Indian life and the sustenance of the expanding white presence after the Civil War. The eradication of these massive herds not only changed the complexion of the North America, it hastened the end of Indian dominance of the land. While doing it, however, buffalo hunters became nearly as legendary as the gunslingers.

  In 1840 the United States estimated that there were around 17 million American bison west of the Missouri River. Today it is estimated that 30 million of these animals roamed the West in giant, nearly inconceivably massive herds. One frontiersman claimed that he had come upon a herd that was seventy miles long and thirty miles wide. Others confirmed herds of comparable sizes. Not only would new guns drive the hunting, they created a growing market for the animal. Buffalo tongues, for example, became a delicacy in the East. By the 1870s a new process for tanning the hides—using a strong lime solution to soak the skins—was perfected. Because of such technological developments, the only limits set on buffalo hunters were their own. By the mid-1800s, hundreds of thousands of buffalo were being killed annually.

  For thousands of unskilled and uneducated men like Cody who were searching for riches and adventure, buffalo hunting was an easy way to make good money quickly. Buffalo hunting wasn’t merely profitable; it was easy and profitable. The U.S. government and the railroad companies endorsed the hunting as a way to populate the West. The railroads didn’t just rely on bison hunting grounds for food; they marketed them as vacation areas for sports hunters. One Harper’s story from 1867 describes these hunting excursions:

  Nearly every railroad train which leaves or arrives at Fort Hays on the Kansas Pacific Railroad has its race with these herds of buffalo; and a most interesting and exciting scene is the result. The train is “slowed” to a rate of speed about equal to that of the herd; the passengers get out fire-arms which are provided for the defense of the train against the Indians, and open from the windows and platforms of the cars a fire that resembles a brisk skirmish. Frequently a young bull will turn at bay for a moment. His exhibition of courage is generally his death-warrant, for the whole fire of the train is turned upon him, either killing him or some member of the herd in his immediate vicinity.3

  The new guns made all of it possible. And perhaps the most effective of these guns was the Sharps rifle, which would overtake the Springfield Army rifle as the hunter’s weapon of choice. Some called the Sharps rifle the “Big Fifty,” others the “Poison Slinger” or “Beecher’s Bible,” after the anti-slavery minister Henry Ward Beecher told the New York Tribune in 1856 that he believed shipping a Sharps rifle to the fighters in Kansas’s anti-slavery effort “was a truly moral agency, and that there was more moral power in one of those instruments, so far as the slaveholders of Kansas were concerned, than in a hundred Bibles.”4 Around 1,000 of these had been sent to anti-slavery “Free Soil” settlers who were fighting against pro-slavery forces in “Bleeding Kansas” during the 1850s. One of the most famous Free Soilers was John Brown, who later used Sharps Model 1853 carbines in his ill-fated attempt to capture the U.S. Armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859.

  Christian Sharps had built on John Hall’s idea of interchangeable parts. The New Jersey–born inventor worked under Hall at Harpers Ferry and patented his own rifle in 1848. By 1850 he had set out on his own and set up shop in Mill Creek, Pennsylvania, producing two models of his ever-improving rifle. A year later he moved to Hartford to be among the many leading gunmakers. Lacking production facilities, he contracted Robbins & Lawrence to manufacture his new breechloader.

  While the earlier models of Sharps could not bring down the buffalo with one shot, the later models had no such difficulty. The Sharps rifle used three-inch-long cartridges and weighed over nine pounds when loaded. One noted western hunter wrote in 1883 that “I saw probably a hundred of these in my travels, and only three of four of any other kind. I questioned a great many of these men who use them, as to their effectiveness and adaption to frontier use, and all pronounce them the best arm in use, all things considered, for that purpose.”5 The weapon also featured a unique “two-trigger” setup in which pulling a rear trigger set the front trigger ready for discharge at the slightest pull, allowing the gun to be steadied for a long-distance shot.

  “A large majority of the frontiersmen I met with—in fact, nearly all of them—used Sharp’s [sic] rifle,” another traveler wrote.6 Although it was most lethal to the bison—one 1887 government survey estimated that the Sharps rifle had killed more buffalo between the years 1867 and 1882 than any other—it was widely used in warfare. The Indians sometimes referred to it as the “shoot today, kill tomorrow” gun.7 In June 1874, its reputation would grow when around two dozen buffalo hunters repelled a force of hundreds of Comanche Indians at the small town of Adobe Walls in the Texas Panhandle. A hunter name Billy Dixon purportedly sh
ot an Indian from 1,500 yards, convincing the war party to give up on their three-day siege.

  Sharps rifle

  Bill Cody made his name hunting these buffalo, once claiming to have downed over 4,000 of them during an eighteen-month span. In his career as a buffalo hunter, he had amassed a total kill of 20,000 bison between 1870 and 1879. Others would make him look like a lightweight. There was Orlando A. Brown, who in a two-month span shot nearly 6,000 buffalo.8 He shot so often with his loud Sharps gun that he would go deaf in one ear. Tom Nixon, one of the most notorious of the bison hunters of the day, slaughtered 3,200 of them in a thirty-five-day hunt—120 of them in one forty-five-minute span. What’s more, buffalo rarely ran from their killers. A man like Cody could saunter to within one hundred yards or less of his prey, and even after the loud bang of the rifle—even after a beast had collapsed in a heap on the prairie ground—the other buffalo typically continued grazing as if nothing had happened. When the herd did take off, hunters learned that shooting the lead buffalo would stop the entire herd. In essence, a hunter like Buffalo Bill could kill as many as he could skin and carry. A western hunter with even a middling work ethic could probably make around $35 a day in the late 1870s killing buffalo.

  Cody would, at various times in his life, fight, champion, befriend, and exploit Indians, whose history has also been distorted by culture. As we’ve seen, guns began to play a major role in Indian life from the time they were introduced by the newcomers in the seventeenth century. Many Native American tribes of the West would become exceptionally skilled at using both horses and guns as a means of hunting and warfare. For a number of decades, Indians relied predominantly on smoothbore muskets, for which they could sometimes fabricate their own ammunition. However, since they were unable to fix or produce new guns, obtaining and maintaining them was often a major concern of tribal leadership. Trading guns and ammunition with Indian tribes was legal but often restricted. In 1837, for instance, the United States Office of Indian Affairs limited trade to “a pound of lead” for ammunition to “not make less than forty-five, nor more than one hundred [shots], and must be of a length and weight corresponding properly with the size of the ball.” Most westerners ignored these restrictions, as the tribes traded for all types of weaponry.