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.

 

[WalnutRed]

If you get away from Hollywood and period photos with obvious studio props I think carrying more than one pistol was rare in the west. There are a few references to So and So carrying two pistols. Which implies that was an exception, not the norm. I can see a desire for a spare cylinder though. You get caught in a couple days of drenching rain and don't trust the loads in your carry gun. Clearing the loads by firing would simply tell everyone you're location. Swapping cylinders with your carefully stored cylinder until you can clear and clean your main cylinder makes sense.

 

[nick_1]

It makes sense to us but it is not documented that it was done at the time.

 

[Whitworth]

Go to an antique gun show and look at all the cap and ball pistols. Shouldn't there be more examples with an accompanying spare cylinder if it was so common? YMMV

 

[nick_1]

the only one I am aware of coming with a spare cylinder is the Paterson which did not have a loading lever. The only first hand report of combat with the paterson that I have read was early rangers fighting Comanches. they charged and emptied both pistols from horseback at which point the Comanches ran away.

 

[Bad Karma]

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.

The average person didn’t have anything like the resources of an average American today. You don’t just chuck a $20 pistol in favor of a 25 dollar pistol when you’re not making that much in a month. We’re all gun cranks here and we can appreciate new and improved firearms but unless you made your living as a professional gunman it made a lot of sense to hang on to that Dragoon until you could afford the luxury of a replacement.