Hunting with Muzzleloading Revolvers - New powders and bullets have made these guns capable game killers.

Evolution of the percussion revolver

 

Replica percussion revolvers. Uberti Colt Walker (top), Pietta Remington 1858 Buffalo Model, Pietta Remington Sheriff’s Model and North American Arms stainless .22- caliber Super Companion.

 

The desire to have rapid repeat-shot capability in battle situations quickly led to the creation of multi-barreled guns of all sorts. Two categories quickly developed. There were volley guns where all of the barrels were discharged simultaneously, and sequential guns where the barrels were fired one at the time. Examples of both types ranging in size from pocket pistols to cannon are found in antique arms collections of all nations and with all available ignition systems. I can show you multiple-barrel matchlocks in Venice that date from the 1400s and hammer fired brass three barreled pole guns from the Boxer Rebellion in China from the early part of the 20th Century.

 

A firearm’s weight increases very quickly with the addition of multiple full-length barrels. To make a multi-barreled pocket pistol reasonable to carry, the caliber had to be reduced as well as the length of the barrels. This resulted in the pepperbox design which saw significant use in the U.S. during the Mexican War and California Gold Rush, and if they could find or afford nothing else, even by individuals who carried them as last-ditch self-defense guns during the Civil War. The double-action pepperboxes were improvements over earlier guns where barrels were manually rotated into firing position so they could be discharged by the strike of a single hammer-lock mechanism. Still, the total weight of the multiple barrels put considerable strain on the guns’ small operating parts and resulted in horrible trigger pulls. Often, the barrels on these guns were not particularly well bored and their accuracy was terrible to the point of being used as comedic material by authors like Mark Twain.

 

From a mechanical point of view, it was reasonable to take this cluster of barrels and cut them off so that they served as chambers to hold the powder and ball. The cluster of barrels now became a cylinder which discharged the balls through a single long barrel, instead of six of them. This could be cumbersomely accomplished with matchlocks and cannon, and examples of both survive. Compared with firelocks, matchlocks and wheel locks, flintlocks were a more compact design for a revolving-cylinder firearm. There was the complication that somehow priming powder had to be injected into the pan either manually for each shot or by a rather complicated mechanism. The most successful of these designs, although not the only one, was based on an 1818 design by Elisha H. Collier of Boston which was patented in in England. His surviving guns are found with 4 and 6-inch barrels and cylinders up to 1 7/8-inches long. An automatic pan priming mechanism with sufficient powder for 10 shots was mounted on top of the frizzen. Another feature of this design was that the cylinder moved forward under spring pressure to reduce gas loss from the barrel-cylinder gap. These guns are marvelous examples of mechanical design. Needless to say I have never shot one. I suppose that some industrious gunsmith might have made a replica Collier-pattern revolver, but I can find no record of it. If he could do it in 1818, it could surely be done today.

 

Samuel Colt was an early master of public relations, and in the spirit of Melville, Hawthorn, and Dickins, was not reluctant to embellish a few points from time to time to tell a good story. The general version is that while at sea as a young man he hand-whittled a working model of his first revolver from wood which ultimately resulted in the Colt Patterson and other designs. Being a New Englander and obviously interested in guns, he very likely knew of Collier’s design. Although flintlocks were still commonly in use, he had the advantage of being able to use copper percussion caps as his ignition source. The cumbersome frizzen and flintlock priming mechanism was replaced by a single hammer and nipple. The cock, flint and jaws to hold the flint were also no longer necessary. The necessary elements of the gun were a cylinder that was sufficiently long to hold an adequate charge of powder, a spindle to hold the cylinder in rotation, nipples to seal the rear of the cylinder’s chambers, a barrel of sufficient length to reasonably combust the powder charge and provide a platform for a front sight along with a frame and operating mechanism.

 

This operating mechanism had to have some means of rotating the cylinder and locking it into alignment with the barrel as well as a device for striking the percussion cap. Almost universally, but not exclusively, this percussion-striking device was a hammer with a thumbpiece for cocking it. Once that decision was made, then the other typical and usual lock parts were designed to be inserted into the frame. These now included a tumbler, mainspring, trigger and trigger spring. This left unresolved, the problem of how to rotate and lock the cylinder.

 

Major components of nitride finished Uberti Colt Walker revolver with modified loading lever.

 

Every sailing ship of the day had a capstan to raise the ship’s anchor. This instrument was equipped with a pawl, or dog, which was a wedge-shaped piece of metal, or wood, that fit into correspondingly-shaped slots on the wheel’s axis and was retained by spring pressure. With each step of the gang of men turning the windless to raise the anchor, the pawl would catch on the next slot so that if the pressure was released the anchor would not plummet to the bottom of the harbor. On larger ships it would be common practice to disengage the pawl by pinning it out of the way, allowing the anchor to free-fall to the bottom of the harbor.

 

Colt would have walked by that capstan numerous times a day. Although operated in a horizontal position to raise an anchor, he was mentally able to turn that mechanism 90 degrees and put the slots that had been on the axis of the windless on the rear of his cylinder. The pawl, which had been a stop mechanism to prevent the winless from free-wheeling the anchor down in the depths, was now put on an arm called “the hand” and linked to the hammer by a pin to rotate his revolver cylinder. Although the position of the pawl and its wedge shape prevented the cylinder from rotating in one direction, there was nothing, outside of inertia, to keep the cylinder from continuing to move in its direction of travel. This would make the chamber’s alignment with the barrel somewhat problematic.

 

Some mechanism was needed to keep the cylinder in place and aligned. A person could mill some groves into the cylinder to provide for a stop pin or block, but where did these need to be? The revolver’s fame had no top. That obviously eliminated anything coming from that direction to lock the cylinder in place. The front of the chambers might be made cone-shaped to jam into a correspondingly shaped receptor area in the barrel. That would be a possibility, but would put the full pressure of the recoiling cylinder against the relatively thin hand. Firing the gun would very quickly batter the rear of the cylinder and likely break a relatively flimsy hand.

 

The front end of the cylinder is mostly holes for the chambers and cylinder pin. Likewise, there is very little metal on the front of the frame. Space at the rear of the cylinder is fully utilized by the nipples, safety notches and a milled disk containing the notches for the hand. The only place remaining for a cylinder-stop mechanism is the bottom of the frame. A round, oval or rectangular shaped piece of metal coming through the bottom of the frame and fitting into corresponding slots in the cylinder would fix it into place and allow accurate chamber-barrel alignment.

 

Another device, a rocker arm pinned through the bottom of the frame was devised. This had a rounded or squared-off stud to fit into a corresponding slot in the exterior of the cylinder to lock the barrel in place when the gun was at full cock. A stud on the hammer locked the rocker arm into position when the hammer was at full cock. When the hammer fell, this stud no longer supported the rear of the rocker arm and spring pressure from the split trigger-locking arm spring caused the spring to fall below the top of the frame (water table) and the cylinder block to fall, releasing the cylinder for rotation when the hammer was re-cocked. When the mechanism was at rest, the hammer’s nose fitted on a nipple or into a slot in the top rear of the cylinder to prevent the cylinder from rotating.

 

Colt’s first revolvers that were produced under contract in Paterson, New Jersey, had a folding trigger and no trigger guard. The folding trigger game came to be regarded as an unnecessary complication of the design and was dropped on later designs in favor of a more robust and trouble-free conventional trigger and bow guard. Col. Walker of the U.S. Mounted Rifles, worked with Colt to make the much more robust Walker revolver which had a more conventional trigger and trigger guard. The remaining operating elements were correspondingly enlarged, but the operating mechanism was retained.

 

Almost instantaneously, other makers began to make direct or variously modified variations of Colt’s revolvers. Some were nearly direct copies like the Manhattan. Others like the Remington 1858, LaMat, and Deane-Adams, used a top-strap to strengthen the frame and provide a stronger sight base. A century later when...