I have to rethink the spare cylinder idea

[Ed C.]

I don't ride horses and have never been in battle on one but it seems to me this reloading on a moving horse takes a good bit of concentration. If you are sitting up on horse not really paying attention to your surroundings and the enemy is around you will be a prime target...goodbye. I think I'd rather get to good cover where I could stop and quickly reload but I imagine that back then it was the same as now....there is the right way, the wrong way, and the Army way of doing things.

 

[nick_1]

Actually unless it was a raid most larger engagements in the civil war the union calvary dismounted and fought from cover on the ground. The 7 shot Spencer carbine made them a formidable force. The start of Gettysburg is very well documented example.

 

[TNGhost]

Saw M1-M2 carbines. In fact, I carried and M2. Full size Garands, NOPE! Was all over that country, trucking supplies and such, for a while working a TMP. In fact, in one Montagnard village, saw a match lock rifle. As for C&B at the OK Corral, C&B would have probably still been around, but in this clip. the caps were clearly visible on the nipples. Even by that time, rim-fire cartridges were becoming a rarity with just a few 'old' .44 Henery's around.

As far as the cap and ball thing, it is very possible them using C&B revolvers in 1881, That is only 15 years beyond the civil war and there were plenty of them around. Some even favored them with an extra "conversion" cylinder for when cartridges were available. The .45 Colt was not even invented until 1872 and not in widespread use for a couple years after that.

Remember smokeless wasn't going to be around for a couple of years yet and not in widespread use until quite a while later. And we are talking about the "wild west" so most of these frontier towns were remote and didn't necessarily have a steady continuous supply of cartridges, but loose black powder and lead was always available in most towns of any decent size.

Remember Matty's "Colt's Dragoon" in True Grit? I'd say The Duke's cartridge guns may have been more out of place in that movie than her C&B, being it was set in 1870, a scant five years after the WBTS. Remember it wasn't until that year or actually December 11, 1869 that S&W's patent on bored through cylinders ran out. So, there would have been no Colt cartridge revolvers until the very year that movie was set in, and to have them in quantity that far away from the manufacturing facility that quick in the late 1800s, is dubious.