Random thread about myths and gun show tales about percussion revolvers......

[M. De Land]

I just had randomly thought about the many myths I've heard over the years...such as....

Civil War soldiers carried spare cylinders for quick reloads in battle...totally false

Rogers & Spencer revolvers were reissued during the Phillipine Insurrection to stop fanatical Moro tribesman.....I find it unlikely that the US military was digging into storage to unmothball brand new , unissued percussion revolvers made during the Civil War, in 1897 . Colt Model P's were taken out of inventory but they were still bring phased out at this time and were still around in the late 1890s.

If you don't grease your chambers you'll have chain fires........false ....people swore up and down all throughout the 1990s when I first starting shooting my first cap and baller , that I HAD to put grease over my chambers "like they did during the Civil War or you'll get a chain fire" . I've probably fired more ungreased round balls through revolvers this summer alone than the people who tried to make me believe this have in their entire lives.

"I can't imagine guys in battle pouring powder and ramming balls , it takes so long that's crazy " nitrate cartridges and capping are as fast as ejecting brass and reloading a cartridge revolver and faster for a highly skilled shooter . Very few if any user of a percussion revolver in military use was pouring powder besides the Rangers with Patersons and Walkers. Nitrate cartridges were produced in huge amounts by arsenals for both sides during the Civil War which was the largest use of percussion revolvers in any combat.

"Those things are so inaccurate they were for hand to hand fighting " False

Those Confederate revolvers were crude and made as cheap throwaway guns....False, most if not all were very well made by skilled workers. People often apply the Japanese Last Ditch weapon mentality to Confederate firearms

I can load and unload a brass cartridge into a single action Army under any condition faster than I can can cap and recharge a percussion gun with paper cartridges.

 

[M. De Land]

Gander Mt printed that in their catalog back in the 90s , I remember seeing it back when you could actually buy a Rogers & Spencer repro from Euroarms from a Major retailer, it was all "The .44 Rogers and Spencer, one of the most accurate and prized revolvers of the Civil War. They were re-issued during the Phillipine Insurrection to stop fanatical Moro Tribesman in the 1890s"

Nowadays find me 2 people who even know what a Moro tribesman is, or the Phillipine Insurrection, but I think an ad writer at Gander just spit out some ad copy because few R&S were issued during the Civil War and I will safely assume none were used in the 1890s because they'd have been antiquated junk to soldiers at that point, and any nitrate cartridges in storage would have been 30+ years old. Not even that but try explaining to Soldiers and Officers that they're gonna carry this Civil War era front stuffer cap revolver ,and you gotta ram these paper things in and cap the nipples......they'd probably throw those pistols right on the ground

What I read about the Moro fight was that the troops were issued .38 Colts or S&Ws that would not stop them so the .45 cal 73s were reissued. I think I got that from one of Kieths books.

 

[Stantheman86]

I can load and unload a brass cartridge into a single action Army under any condition faster than I can can cap and recharge a percussion gun with paper cartridges.

That includes ejecting empty brass and reloading fresh cartridges vs ramming nitrate paper and capping i.e. no empties to poke out

Side by Side it's about the same given the user is skilled with both weapons. The edge would obviously go to the cartridge gun but we're not talking a big discrepancy like it would be with pouring loose powder and loading round balls

Someone needs to make a video

 

[Stantheman86]

What I read about the Moro fight was that the troops were issued .38 Colts or S&Ws that would not stop them so the .45 cal 73s were reissued. I think I got that from one of Kieths books.

Absolutely correct, the Moros tied thongs around their testicles to elicit an adrenaline rush, used opiates and had leather body armor making them able to soak up a full cylinder of .38 Long and keep fighting, or a few 30-40's .

The shortened "Artillery " Colt P .45's were rushed over to the Phillipines in a stop gap effort to give our guys better stopping power.

 

[TDM]

Absolutely correct, the Moros tied thongs around their testicles to elicit an adrenaline rush, used opiates and had leather body armor making them able to soak up a full cylinder of .38 Long and keep fighting, or a few 30-40's .

The shortened "Artillery " Colt P .45's were rushed over to the Phillipines in a stop gap effort to give our guys better stopping power.

Damn. Glad I wasn’t there.

 

[Stantheman86]

Damn. Glad I wasn’t there.

Me too

The written account of an Officer emptying a .38 into a Moro who then killed said Officer with a machete is pretty grim

Sure the Moro most likely expired soon after but not soon enough

 

[Russ T Frizzen]

Absolutely correct, the Moros tied thongs around their testicles to elicit an adrenaline rush, used opiates and had leather body armor making them able to soak up a full cylinder of .38 Long and keep fighting, or a few 30-40's .

The shortened "Artillery " Colt P .45's were rushed over to the Phillipines in a stop gap effort to give our guys better stopping power.

I wouldn't want to fight anyone who was crazy enough to tie a thong around their testicles! Even the VC weren't that insane.

 

[earlwb]

Well even today, if you were up against a thug all doped up on drugs, nothing short of a brain hit or spinal column hit would stop them and maybe not even then. So no surprise about the doped up Moro warriors.

I remember reading that the Army wanted their .45 revolvers back. The army cavalry was pushing for it more than anything. The cavalry was still the elites of their era. They still wanted to be able to stop horses in a charge and the .38s couldn’t do that. So they came up with the story about the .38s not stopping Moro warriors. That is also why the 1911 .45 acp round duplicated the old .45 Colt round. To keep the cavalry happy.

 

[GREENSWLDE]

Well, I still believe Clint Eastwood always carried extra cylinders for his Remington.

? wasn't that a Beals patent R/F conversion. ??

 

[Stantheman86]

Well even today, if you were up against a thug all doped up on drugs, nothing short of a brain hit or spinal column hit would stop them and maybe not even then. So no surprise about the doped up Moro warriors.

I remember reading that the Army wanted their .45 revolvers back. The army cavalry was pushing for it more than anything. The cavalry was still the elites of their era. They still wanted to be able to stop horses in a charge and the .38s couldn’t do that. So they came up with the story about the .38s not stopping Moro warriors. That is also why the 1911 .45 acp round duplicated the old .45 Colt round. To keep the cavalry happy.

It was probably a combo of real life failure to stop Moros and then the Cavalry using that as a reason to demand their .45's back , plus I've owned a few .38 Colt New Armies , they're not really very good guns . I'd rather have a Colt .45 too

 

[Tanglefoot]

I'm not sure where this thread diverged from muzzleloading, but back some years ago a friend of mine published a monthly called "The Trade Blanket" on black powder stuff, and we did a fairly extensive comparison of the relative force delivered to the target by various cap-n-ball revolvers as compared to that delivered by modern handguns. We tested the .36 Navies and the .44 Armies primarily, with a tip o' the hat to the .31 Pocket models and the .44 Walker. We discovered and documented the following surprising information: The .44 Army revolver - and mine was a Colt 1860 and several clones - delivered slightly more kinetic energy to a target than a modern .22 RF solid nose lead bullet such as Federals. The .36 Navies slightly less. The .31 Pocket was right up there with a .22 Short, and the .44 Walker (DGW Clone) was the "magnum," surprising nobody. All were tested with Dupont powder, CCI caps, felt wads, and round ball loads. We didn't have a chronograph but our test target was a ballistic pendulum with a numerical readout and we shot multiple 5-shot groups and compared the mean values of each sample with the mean values achieved with the modern loads. For the record, the .45 Colt and .45 ACP loads exceeded them all, even the Walker. We published the results. That was at least 30 years ago.
Appropos of nothing, General "Black Jack" Pershing was a serving officer during the Moro Rebellion and distinguished himself by putting down that uprisinng. He favored the 1873 Colt "Artillery" model, I'm told. The Moros were radical Muslims.

 

[earlwb]

Well the old cap and ball guns were still fairly effective. The .44s had very good wound trails and penetration in ballistics gel. Heck the little .31s even had really good penetration too. If the bullets missed bone they could all go right on through a human. I could see where they would consider the .44s capable of stopping a horse way back then.
Ref.

 

[Loyalist Dave]

I just had randomly thought about the many myths I've heard over the years...such as....

Civil War soldiers carried spare cylinders for quick reloads in battle...totally false

That one is easy... if you look at all of the existing 1858 Remingtons with surviving boxes, some of which are paired sets, and some are highly engraved matched pairs..., you find all sorts of extra tools, and a cap box, and box of bullets...., but NEVER an extra cylinder.

What happens is what is known as information creep. An historian correctly points out something akin to, "The 1858 Remington had the ability for the user to change the cylinder, if a loaded spare was at hand, to swap out the cylinders, rather than reload each individual cylinder." THAT then morphs into, "Civil War soldiers carried extra cylinders to swap them out when reloading....."

Then add the ACW Living History community use during reenactment battles... keep reading...,

Rogers & Spencer revolvers were reissued during the Phillipine Insurrection to stop fanatical Moro tribesman.....I find it unlikely that the US military was digging into storage to unmothball brand new , unissued percussion revolvers made during the Civil War, in 1897 . Colt Model P's were taken out of inventory but they were still bring phased out at this time and were still around in the late 1890s.

This one is likely more information creep. While they did issue out some SAA .45 Colts, they didn't issue the Rogers & Spencer revolvers. HOWEVER, a lot of officers carried their own personal weapons. So it's quite possible that a privately owned revolver in the hands of some officer, perhaps even converted to .44 Colt using a Richards-Mason conversion, which were part of the US Army inventory up to 1873, was seen being used. The conversion was of 1860 Army revolvers, so you get a poor observer who sees the guy is using an antique, not realizing it's a conversion... and says "Wow they are issuing Rogers & Spencer revolvers". Probably a "correspondent" screwed up. At that time newspapers would accept stories from "correspondents" that weren't even actual journalists.

If you don't grease your chambers you'll have chain fires........false ....people swore up and down all throughout the 1990s when I first starting shooting my first cap and baller , that I HAD to put grease over my chambers "like they did during the Civil War or you'll get a chain fire" . I've probably fired more ungreased round balls through revolvers this summer alone than the people who tried to make me believe this have in their entire lives.

This one is a reenactorism from at least the 1970's. The reenactors shoot only blanks, and so the powder when compressed might stay in the cylinder, but you don't want those chambers full of powder open when firing, so you cover the openings with grease. Most of the guys would compress nitrate paper over the powder to act as a barrier and hold the powder in, and then protect the paper with grease. They didn't know about poorly fitted caps back then. Then THAT transferred over to shooting live ball..., never understanding that the ball seals the front of the chamber and if you get a chain fire it was from the loose caps....

"I can't imagine guys in battle pouring powder and ramming balls , it takes so long that's crazy " nitrate cartridges and capping are as fast as ejecting brass and reloading a cartridge revolver and faster for a highly skilled shooter . Very few if any user of a percussion revolver in military use was pouring powder besides the Rangers with Patersons and Walkers. Nitrate cartridges were produced in huge amounts by arsenals for both sides during the Civil War which was the largest use of percussion revolvers in any combat.

That's another hold over from ACW living history ; as I mentioned in the first part of this reply. Most of the umbrella organizations frowned on reloading revolvers during a battle, BUT since the 1858 Remington could swap cylinders, some guys favored those..., and you will find cylinder pouches used by some of them even though those likely are circa 1960... not 1860. Other guys simply went Josey Wales and carried a lot of Colt revolvers. Guys would point to photographs of enlisted infantry with lots of revolvers stuck in their belts (not knowing that such photos were staged). Since most Living History guys in the 1970's and 1980's didn't even know about nitrated cartridges, it was assumed that a guy with one revolver had to use flask and ball to reload in battle.... "since we would have to do that then they must've done that!".... gadzooks!

"Those things are so inaccurate they were for hand to hand fighting " False

Those Confederate revolvers were crude and made as cheap throwaway guns....False, most if not all were very well made by skilled workers. People often apply the Japanese Last Ditch weapon mentality to Confederate firearms

We get this too with AWI discussions of rifles and muskets. The guns were inaccurate, .... the guns were only good to 100 yards...they didn't practice marksmanship...., they closed their eyes when firing..... ., yadda yadda yadda, folks even today assume that since the tech is old, the accuracy must be "bad", when in fact the accuracy was OK to Good with smoothbore muskets, and very good to excellent with rifles, and continued to be so through the ACW. What changed over time was all weather capability and effective range..., that's all.

This is a fun discussion...

LD

 

[user 53891]

you guys are all WRONG. .... if its on the net its got to be true , same as if its on the news..

Good one...

 

[TDM]

This thread has been entertaining, inspirational, and educational. I like it.

 

[Ritmeister Von Hammer]

I wouldn't want to fight anyone who was crazy enough to tie a thong around their testicles! Even the VC weren't that insane.

I would be afraid to get my balls in a knot.

 

[Flintlock Whiskey]

you guys are all WRONG. .... if its on the net its got to be true , same as if its on the news..

TRUTH!
I'll bet there is a B-17 on the far side of the moon, the National Enquirer said so. So, if they wrote it......

 

[Flintlock Whiskey]

If you don't grease your chambers you'll have chain fires........false ....people swore up and down all throughout the 1990s when I first starting shooting my first cap and baller , that I HAD to put grease over my chambers "like they did during the Civil War or you'll get a chain fire"

Shooting any cap n' ball revolver in the Sonoran Desert where I live will result in the "lube" dripping out all over the place and coating everything (including you) in a fine mist of the stuff. Who ever invented felt over wads deserves a bottle of Scotch.

 

[Flintlock Whiskey]

Once a tale gets in circulation logical consideration of the claims and any search for historical facts often drop by the wayside......... People love tall tales and particularly enjoy spreading them (to prove how knowledgeable they are of course LOL).... I've heard most of the ones you posted (except the Rogers & Spencer one, that's a first for me) and plenty of others over the years

One can blame Hollywierd for most inaccuracies.

 

[sheriff john]

"Gunshow Myths" are fun to listen to if you've ever rented a table at one. Some sellers apparently feel compelled to never simply say "I don't know." Likewise, quite a few customers regale anyone within earshot their expertise of all things regarding the pistols on your table ..seldom complimentary, sometimes downright insulting. Common comment ..(applies to modern shotguns as well) .."That right there's a hard-shootin' gun." Okay. Yup.