Help me with some history.

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EvilGenius

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I've been reading around. I'm trying to get an idea of when cartridge revolvers became the standard.

I know around the late 1860s to early 1870s is when real production of standardized designed for cartridges revolvers started. But when did people really start moving away from C&B revolvers?

I know there'd be a delay in people switching over due to costs (they didn't just buy the newest hippest gun that came out each year like most of us) and distance/availability for those living out west. Did it happen within 10 years or so? Or was it a longer transition for the dedicated cartridge arms to become the majority?
 
For argument I would say that is some murky history. Look at the Bedford County longrifle or the Tennessee Mountain Rifles that some say were being built up in the Laurel Highlands and the Appalachian Mountains until World War One. And that’s back east, out west, wow that would be tough to pin down.
 
Crawdad1 said:
For argument I would say that is some murky history. Look at the Bedford County longrifle or the Tennessee Mountain Rifles that some say were being built up in the Laurel Highlands and the Appalachian Mountains until World War One. And that’s back east, out west, wow that would be tough to pin down.
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Yeah, I was thinking out south west.

Would it be unreasonable to think C&B was the norm up till the 1900s or would the transition likely have been sooner than that?
 
Custer's troops were carrying Springfield trapdoor single shot rifles in .45-70 and Colt Single Action Army revolvers in .45 Colt at the Little Bighorn in 1876, a scant 3 years after both of these cartridges were introduced, so the Army made the transition pretty quickly. Wild Bill Hickock was carrying his percussion 1851 Colt Navies when he was murdered in Deadwood the same year, 1876.

Some switched quicker than others...
 
The Second battle of Adobe Walls was on June 27 1874.......while looking for brass and bullet remains,,forensic archaeologists have discovered several Richards' Colt conversions, some Smith & Wesson Americans, and at least one Colt .45 (then new on the frontier) pistol, along with numerous rifles (in calibers .50-70, .50-90, .44-77, .44 Henry Flat, and at least one .45-70, also very new) were in use at Adobe Walls.
 
Some rim fire revolvers were being used during the civil war, although rare. For instance the Reid knuckleduster. I remember an old timer here in the east using a Pottsdam musket with shot for small game into the early 1960's. It was his only gun. Granted Wild Bill stuck with c&b. But i think by the late 1870's C&B were becoming the minority. A few folks continued even with muzzleloaders. The picture of the mounted Indian Trapper painted by Fred Remington shows the Indian still toting a flintlock. Now granted it was a fiction book and then a movie, but look at the fuss Cogburn made about the Colt's Dragoon in True Grit. I think the changeover was pretty swift in the 1870's. (Which may account for why there were so many C&B shooter guns still around in the 1950's. )

Look in the back of the Dixie catalog at the year production tables for remington, colt and winchester. the really big push in cartridge gun production was in the 1870's to early 1888's.

Keep in mind also, that few farmers and frontier folk had need for anything other than a shotgun, perhaps also a rifle. Not many people carried a sidearm like we see in the movies. My dad was a Leo, had numerous rifles and shotguns, but his only handgun ever was his agency issued sidearm.

My GGGF was a railroad engineer here in the east, from about 1875 to 1930 and carried most of his life on the job for security. But it was a POS 38 short rim fire, which has been passed down to me. When I first started going to gun shows, there were piles of those old rim fire revolvers for sale. I do mean piles. Thrown in a heap like old tin cans. H&R's, Bull dogs and similar crap. Not but a couple dollars new in the 1870's and 1880's.
 
Cool, thanks for the info guys.

I figured the govt./military made the switch pretty quick. What about small town law enforcement or militia type groups like the Rangers? I figured small, but official groups like that may have still been a bit behind due to lack of funds?

I figured homesteaders and cowboys rarely had pistols and if they did it was unlikely they'd be hangin off the hip like in the movies.
 
EvilGenius said:
Cool, thanks for the info guys.



I figured homesteaders and cowboys rarely had pistols and if they did it was unlikely they'd be hangin off the hip like in the movies.
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My grandfather raised 13 kids on a small cattle ranch near Clayton, New Mexico in the late1890s. He had a shotgun, that was all. I know this because my uncles delighted in telling me how the shotgun knocked their kid sister, my Aunt Grace, on her tushy!
 
If you read the story of "Old Jules" Sandoz in the sandhills of Nebraska in the late 1800's he used a Swiss Veterli rimfire most of the time. It was a rimfire and he reloaded his own cartridges.
 
It sort of depends on what cartridges you mean.

The first practical self-contained metallic cartridge was the pinfire, which was being used in Europe well before the U.S. Civil War. Some pinfire revolvers were imported and used in that war to the extent that U.S. Ordnance contracted for ammunition to be made for them in the U.S. Still, the system never caught on here, where the rimfire cartridge, first introduced by Smith & Wesson, became popular.

The center fire system was seen as the best, but making CF cartridges was difficult at first because the machinery needed to draw strong cartridge cases did not exist; several priming systems were used to get around that problem and still allow center fire cartridges. Two adopted by the U.S. Army were the Martin primer and the Benet primer.

By 1870, it was pretty obvious that fixed ammo was here to stay, and by the mid-1870's production of percussion guns had effectively ceased except for small-town gun makers in remote areas where tradition was strong. In the West, though, there were still many percussion guns (and even a few flintlocks) in use, mostly by those who could not afford the new guns or were concerned about the availability of cartridges and even percussion caps.

Jim
 
S&W was making rimfire revolvers in the 1850s and Colt started making cartridge revovlers in the 1870s. Those that could afford them might buy one. Often the old C&B was reworked to handle the new cartridges. Some 1860s were converted to accept the 44 Colt and 1851s and 1861 converted to handle the 38 Colt. Not everyone needed a cartidge firearm, but I would say that by the 1880s, the odds of buying a new C&B revolver were pretty slim.

The US imported a centerfire revolver to use in the Civil War, along with numerous pinfire and rimfire revolvers.
 
One of the first rimfire revolvers invented was in the late 1850's I think..By a couple of guys named Smith and Wesson..Hard to find ammo for it anymore cause it was 22 shorts, then 22longs..lol
 
Thanks guys!

Keep it coming if you've got anything else to add.

I asked about this because my gf is writing a western. She has a lot of info and understanding of the politics and history of groups, etc. But when it comes to the firearms and certain other technologies she's less informed. I know a little bit about what years what came out and that cartridges had been around earlier than the 1870s, but that doesn't mean that everyone had them either. The book is right around 1872-1874 and I'm inquiring about what local law would've been equipped with at that time. Right now we're trying to flesh out a character that's in his 50s and has been a ranger for the last 20-25 years up until recently. He's pretty stubborn and jaded, but still tries to do right.

She wants it to be far more accurate than the majority of westerns, but at the same time she's trying to not get bogged down in the minutia of every little thing to satisfy the myriad of armchair historians it may come across.
 
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The rim fire bulleted breech cap (22BB cap) was developed by 1845 for the Flobert parlor rifles and gas light pistols. it was basically a rimmed percussion cap with a round ball stuffed into it. In 1856 or 1857 S&W introduced a 22 short revolver. By 1861, the 44 Henry rimfire was in heated production for the US war effort. About the same time the 56 rim fire was being produced for the Spencers although the gun was on the market as early as 1860.

For a short few years, I had a Joslyn carbine in 58 rim fire. That dated from about 1864. I currently have a Ball and Williams (Ballard) relic condition, in 44 rim fire. which was also used in the civil war. IIRC issued to the Kentucky militia cavalry.

I was a bit surprised, that with all the need for firearms, and those that loaded more rapidly, the US never considered any Dryse needle fire guns. The split breech gun that became the Remington rolling block was also in infant production before the war's end.
 
Please have someone who is knowledgable about firearms read the book before it is published to catch any other gun related errors in addition to historical inconsistencies. I recently read one of the "Jack Reacher" novels, and the author talked about cartridges standing on the table on their "firing pins". Geez. And he makes enough money to get it right.
 
J-Bar said:
Please have someone who is knowledgable about firearms read the book before it is published to catch any other gun related errors in addition to historical inconsistencies. I recently read one of the "Jack Reacher" novels, and the author talked about cartridges standing on the table on their "firing pins". Geez. And he makes enough money to get it right.
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I will, but I don't think it'll be an issue.

She has far more shooting experience than I do, especially with handguns. So these things aren't foreign to her. She just doesn't know a whole lot about back in the day with regards to types, issues, dates, etc.
 
Around the 1872 to 1874 era of the southwest, the guys been around for 20 years, I would say you couldn't go wrong arming him with an old beat up but deadly accurate, 51' Navy, either converted or a c&b.
Either way good luck, you can never have enough westerns to see or read!!!
 
The transition was faster than we might imagine. There were certainly some shooters who stuck with caplocks. And those who could not afford anything new. But Americans even then were usually early adopters of high tech. From the end of the CW to the 1880's you see a dramatic shift to cartridge arms. And then in the 1890's you see another dramatic shift to smokeless powder cartridge arms. By the Klondike and Nome gold rushes, men were equipping themselves with the latest high-tech weapons. They're prominent in many photos. If anything the shooters then were much less hidebound and traditional than we are. They were also younger as a rule.

I think one thing that gets missed over and over again in books and movies is how NEW it all was then, and how much innovation there was. If you consult some books about the arms of the 1860's and 70's you'll be amazed by the sheer variety of them, and the many weird designs that we've mostly forgotten about now. Folks were game to try anything that might give them an edge in hunting or combat. And the "old" guns weren't old. Imagine buying a new rifle that was invented that year, using a new kind of action and new kind of propellant system. What we consider high tech like the AR platform is actually old enough to be a granddaddy.

Instead we tend to view the old west as OLD. Instead of young men with brand new high tech weapons, we tend to imagine the old timer with the old sixgun then anachronistically place him in the 1870's.
 
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The first two or 3 years of production of 1873 Colt SAAs went to the military so most pistoleros were using percussion guns well into the 1880s. The professional killers/gunfighters got their SAAs/Scofields etc. sooner as it was a tool of their trade and like a professional of any kind will get the latest. The typical joe blow citizen will get what they can afford. War surplus C&Bs were quite plentiful, familiar and cheap, as were loose powder and ball.
 
This Erwin Smith photograph collection http://www.cartermuseum.org/collections/smith/collection.php?asn=LC-S6-110&mcat=1 is just outstanding. Yes you see guns, looks like cartridge mostly, but you also see a lot of no guns.

I don't know the percentage of guns/no guns, but guns were expensive, and not everyone spent money on a pistol.

Guns were expensive and people were broke. In our rich society folks don't understand true poverty or hunger. If you are tramping around the country, begging for work, to get food, you don't have a lot of money for guns. My Uncle, a kid in the 30's, said they had no money, bartered for everything, currency was hard to get. Only wore shoes in the winter, too expensive to wear out shoes. Never went to the movie theater till winter, because he was out plowing, sowing, harvesting, reaping the rest of the year. Having a nickel and going to the movie theater was like a big vacation.

People looking for a fight would have spent money to acquire cartridge guns, people not looking for a fight would have been happy to have something that just went bang. Timewise, I am too far removed from the transition period, but you don't read much about cap and ball pistols around 1900. I am certain some were in use as hog killers.

Based on articles from the 1930's in the American Rifleman, it is my opinion that cap and ball rifles were in constant use through the depression. The articles were written by a member of the Chattanooga Rifle Club and were about the rifles made and used in the Appalachians. The author was attending turkey shoots with the “Hillbillies” and they were shooting cap and ball target rifles. They were creating outstanding groups. One article shows a gunsmith cutting rifling on a barrel. No electricity was used in the making of the barrel. The author’s pictures show the abject poverty of these people. Bare foot kids with no knees in their pants. I have no doubt that cap and ball deer rifles, squirrel rifles were being made and used all the way up to WW2. Maybe into the 50's.
 
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FWIW, I find that writers not familiar with a subject should not attempt to write about details. One failing of many writers, mostly British, is to try to throw in a mass of detail in order to pretend an expertise they don't have.

Examples:

BAD: "The detective moved back into the darkened doorway and pulled his .43 millimeter calibre Smyth and Western automatic revolver out of its scabbard. He pulled back the clicker thingy and checked the drum nozzle to see if the gun had bullet shells in the little round holes..." Over detailed and complete nonsense.

BETTER: "The detective moved back into the darkened doorway, drew his gun, and waited for the burglar to show himself." Clear, simple, and without traps for the non-expert.

Jim
 
Don't Be Fooled

Those self-contained cartridges are a passing fad. 'course they're lasting a little longer than I thought they would...
 
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