Ep. 03: The First Gunfighters

Gunfighters

This episode traces the origins of the Old West gunfighter era, beginning with Texas Rangers' adoption of Samuel Colt's early revolvers duri

Key takeaways

• Captain Jack Hayes led Texas Rangers armed with early Colt revolvers against Comanche raiders at the 1844 Battle of Walker's Creek, proving the weapon's battlefield dominance.
• Samuel Colt partnered with Ranger Sam Walker to engineer the improved six-shooter, which became the standard sidearm for mounted troops and frontier lawmen.

Main topics

• Texas Rangers and early revolver warfare
• Samuel Colt and Sam Walker's six-shooter development

Notable quotes

"With improvements, I think they can be rendered the most perfect weapon in the world for light-mounted troops."

Conclusion

The episode provides a historically grounded look at how technological innovation, demographic

Transcript preview

Speaker 6 (0:00) This is an iHeart Podcast. Speaker 6 (0:02) Guaranteed human. Speaker 4 (0:04) The best part of a whitetail sit is often the part you have to earn. The temperature drops, nothing's moving, and climbing down starts sounding pretty good. The difference between seeing it through and climbing down early is about heart, but it's also about heat. That's why First Light Built whispered down. With 900 fill power Muscovy down, box baffle construction, and quiet, water-resistant fabric. It delivers serious warmth without weighing you down. First Light, whisper down. Pack light, stay longer. Check it out now at firstlight.com. Speaker 2 (0:42) On June 9, 1844, a squad of 15 Texas Rangers was patrolling the hill country northwest of San Antonio looking for Comanche Raiders. This was during the years when Texas was still an independent country, eight years after the Alamo. still a year before it would enter the Union. That day, the squad's leader, a sharp ranger captain named Jack Hayes, had armed his men with a new weapon, something no one had used against the deadly Comanches and their allies. A private climbed a tree to study the horizon and suddenly shouted, Jerusalem, Captain! Yonder come a thousand Indians! It was more like a hundred, but still, Hayes found himself outnumbered, something like seven to one. When the Comanches withdrew into a hilltop thicket and began heckling them, Hayes gathered his men, but rather than retreat or call for reinforcements, he announced they were going to charge. Fifteen Rangers, a hundred Comanche, charged. And they did. As the horses barreled up toward the Comanche, the Rangers did as they always had, firing with their single-shot muskets. But once they received their long guns, They didn't take out their swords as they often did, but instead took out this newfangled weapon, a massive five-shot Colt revolver. As the Rangers plunged into the Comanches, a desperate hand-to-hand fight ensued, unlike anything in history to that point. Its impact would echo down through the years of the gunfighter era. This is Gunfighters, brought to you by Tecova's. Good boots for good times. Speaker 2 (2:29) Hey, y'all, it's Brian, and thanks for dropping by. I'll tell you more about this fight in a minute, but first I want to say something about Jack Hayes and his men. They were Texans, like me. I live in Austin these days. And as you'll hear, Texans played a big part in the story of the gunfighter era. It wasn't just that Texans were the first to popularize the new revolvers that helped make the Old West so wild, or their hallowed proficiency with these and other weapons. It was the visceral kind of personal violence they spawned, especially in the years after the Civil War, that did more to set the stage for the gunfighter era than just about anything else. Without Texas and these swaggering Texans, I'm not sure we're even here talking about gunfighters at all. Seriously. Which shouldn't be all that surprising. Texas was among the largest gateways for immigrants moving west, and for years was renowned as pretty much the most violent place in North America. Violence and gunplay were just in the Texans' DNA. I mean, it was a dangerous place and had been from the beginning. Born of a bloody revolution against Mexico. The kind thing to say here is that Texans kind of needed to be violent. After the Mexican Revolution, they stayed at war pretty much for years against Mexican raiders, sure, but incessantly against the depredations of a Comanche nation that still occupied half of Texas on a diagonal line into the 1870s. Comanches raided as far as the Gulf Coast in those years. So yeah, Texans knew their guns because they had to. But it wasn't until I started combing through the details of individual gunfights across the old frontier that I began to appreciate the extent of their influence. Because no matter where you look, not just in Texas, but in Arizona, in Montana, in Kansas, I mean everywhere, you find a particular kind of person keeps turning up in major, notable gunfights. A Texan. I noticed it right away. The great Texas historian Bill O'Neill has too. He's actually done a statistical analysis. Bill identified 589 major gunfights on the old frontier after the Civil War. 160 of them, nearly 30%, happened in Texas, by far the most of any western state. And there was something about Texans no matter where on the frontier they went. Of the participants in those gunfights? More were born in Texas than in any other state. More died in Texas than anywhere else, too. And of the 15 deadliest gunfighters, 10 spent the bulk of their careers in Texas. Texas had this reputation even back then. As early as 1878, you could find New York newspaper editorials complaining about Texas-born gun violence. Writers from the East Coast would tour Texas and come back with tall tales of a place where Everything was bigger and badder and scarier and deadlier. But there was some truth to it. One memoirist recalled a dinner where he'd asked 14 Texans how many had killed a man. Eight raised their hands. The frontier writer Emerson Howe wrote in 1907 that Texas was, quote, the synonym for savagery. He wrote, Speaker 3 (5:41) So many bad men of Texas have attained reputation far wider than their state. that it became a proverb upon the frontier that any man born on Texas soil would shoot, just as any horse born there would buck. Speaker 2 (5:58) Look at the shootouts in Tombstone, in Dodge City, build the kids New Mexico, and wild Bill Hickok's Abilene, and you'll always find Texans in the mix. I'd never appreciated how thoroughly Texans had infiltrated the rest of the frontier until I began learning about the frontier's first great business, open-range cattle ranching, which was dominated, almost exclusively, by Texas cowboys and Texas cattlemen. Virtually every cow that landed on a range from Arizona to North Dakota not only came first from South Texas, it usually came escorted by Texans. We'll talk more about this in coming episodes, but it was these roaming Texans in a lot of ways that helped make the West so wild. Here we need to talk a bit about the technological advances that made that influence possible. Single-shot weapons, you know, muskets and flintlocks, had helped Americans conquer much of North America. But these were heavy weapons that took time to reload. In the 20 seconds it might take a soldier to reload a musket, a Comanche warrior could lose five or six arrows. For years, tinkerers had tried to solve the problem. In the early 1800s, the best they'd come up with were pistols that fired with multiple barrels. There were a few models out there like this with two or three barrels that you had to rotate by hand. None of them were all that great. Then, in 1831, a 17-year-old merchant seaman named Samuel Colt dreamed up a new design. Colt was this New England kid who loved to blow things up. When one of his pranks got him expelled from school, his father had him sent off to sea. On his journey, he heard soldiers musing, about a gun that could fire five or six times. Colt sketched out a new kind of revolver, one where cocking the hammer also rotated the cylinder. He came back home and spent the next few years developing prototypes. By the end of 1837, he produced a thousand of these revolving guns and sold precisely none. He finally managed to sell a few to the U.S. Army and just over a hundred more to the Texas Navy. By 1843, though, Colt was bankrupt. His factory closed. That same year, Texas phased out its Navy, and those revolvers, which had hardly been used anyway, became surplus property. That's when Jack Hayes discovered the guns and had an idea they could give his Rangers the edge he wanted. The Rangers had been around since the first Texas settlements back in the 1820s, first as an informal militia, later