Its frame and grip initially matched the Navy in size, but Colt later lengthened the grip to absorb recoil and modified the frame to accept the enlarged.
44- caliber New Model Army revolver soon rivaled the Navy on which it was based. While the Pocket models and mighty Dragoon remained popular, it was the Navy that captured the imagination of California gold-seekers, Western emigrants and those determined to settle on frontier lands rife with buffalo and/or hostile Indians.īy 1860 the. Models exhibited at the Great Exhibition in London that year, alongside Dragoon and Pocket revolvers, were in such demand that Colt later established an armory in London, from which he supplied thousands of Navies to the British government for use in the 1853–56 Crimean War.īack in the United States, Colt added a night shift at his Hartford, Connecticut, factory to meet domestic demand for his guns. (National Portrait Gallery)įrom 1850 until the mid-1860s, Colt manufactured most of its revolvers from raw materials supplied by Thomas Firth & Sons of Sheffield, England, including the “silver steel” introduced in the late 1850s and used to make the Army Model of 1860 and later weapons.
This photograph was taken around 1876, the year Hickok was shot and killed while playing poker in a saloon in Deadwood, Dakota Territory. While dime novelists exaggerated many of his feats, he was nonetheless a deadly fighting man. Back in the West, he earned a wide reputation for his skill as a card player and for his adeptness as a gunfighter. Cody's invitation in 1873 to perform together in the play Scouts of the Plains, he found the stage was not to his liking and returned to his preferred full-time work as a professional gambler. Seated at the right in this tintype portrait, Hickok served as a scout during the Civil War and later worked in law enforcement in Kansas. James Butler Hickok received his nickname "Wild Bill" after he shot and killed a man-supposedly in self-defense-during an argument over money in 1861.
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