Strawhat's 1860 bears a strong resemblence to a revolver attributed to Orin Porter Rockwell who was one of the earliest converts to the Church of Jesus Christ of LDS and boy hood friend of Joseph Smith. Porter became Joseph Smith's body guard and was a body guard of Brigham Young. He also blazed trails from Utah to California and lead pioneer companies to the west .
Some called him and his revolvers Morman Angels or Avenging Angels and some made accusations like those meantioned here about "death squads"
Porter served as a deputy Marshal most of his life and worked as a scout for the US Army and as a US mail Carrier...... not jobs one would expect of someone that really was a member of a "death squad"
A photo of his sawn off 1860 is on page xxxiv of the illustration section of "Stories from the Life of Porter Rockwell" by John W. Rockwell and Jery Borrowman from Covenant Communications of American Fork, Utah, May,
2010. ISBN 978-1-60861-005-1
There were originally four body guards and they were certainly colorful characters, at least one of them being excommunicated later in life. Most of the stories attributed to them in the anti-morman press of the times were not as well researched or vetted as your typical supermarket tabloid stories about aliens or big foot of today.
On atleast one occassion Porter used one of his snubbies to shoot through his coat pocket to shoot a man holding him at gunpoint and threatening to murder him. I imagine it must have been interesting to fire a BP revolver from a coat pocket, what with the flame and blast.
In the early 1980's I was doing an article on the S&W Bodyguard .38 Special and as one of its supposed attributes is that it can be fired like Porter's revolver from with in a coat pocket I had to try this. I had a sort of spoungy fabric zippered hoody from Sears that was a bit long in the tooth and so donated it to the cause ( and my publisher refused to replace any coat or jacket I shot up for some reason) and loaded the S&W up dropped it into a pocket and advanced to 3 meters from the manshaped target. Instructing my photographer to watch the pocket, NOT THE TARGET, and try to get a photo or two, I blazed away with three quick shots......before pain distracted me. Note to folks, streach polyester and blazing .38 Specials do not mix well. The pocket area of the jacket burst into flame breifly and melted over my hand and the revolver. Lost the hair on my hand and had like a bad sunburn from my shirt cuff down. The revolver cleaned up nicely though and the target had three good center hits. The photographer was staring at the target the entire time and got not one photo, but more importantly did not tell me I was ON FIRE. Darned shutter bugs.
I am however loath to repeat the experiment, especially with BP, for some reason.
-kBob