The Brooklyn Rail

A bloodbath spins across a sprawling field on the engraved barrels of the .44 bore Walker, .31-caliber Pocket Revolver and .44 Dragoon model Colt revolvers. Rendered in their military finest by Waterman L. Ormsby (Samuel Colt’s frequent artistic collaborator) a squadron of Euro-American dragoons are mid-charge with smoking revolvers in hand, taking aim at their Comanche adversaries. The American militiamen’s bullets seem to rarely miss their mark, as a trail of bodies paves the dragoons’ advance. In the presumed center of the landscape, an Indigenous man has just been struck, his weight shifting off his horse as his kin retreat into the indiscernible distance. But just when it seems those who sprint toward an unknowable future have gained safe distance from their adversaries, the battle can begin all over again. The gun’s operator needs only spin the barrel once more, and the chase will start anew.

The rotating cylinder came to define Colt revolvers and later similar weapons: it made the Colt a major technological advancement in mid-19th century firearms. Able to hold and fire more than a single bullet at a time, Colt’s invention vastly improved upon the effectiveness of single-fire guns which had left their operators vulnerable as they paused to reload their weapons. Later going on to earn the moniker as “the gun that won the West,” it was notoriously effective at what it was designed to do—kill. But then with a reputation of such notoriety, why add this scene of racialized bloodshed to a gun already so well known to kill more and faster?

While guns across cultures and times have been ornamented since the invention of firearms, the revolving nature of Colt firearms would have made such narrative scenes an exciting novelty. Often the cylinder scenes of his revolvers rendered violent exchanges with a heroic and victorious presumably white gunslinger wielding the very weapon the depiction was engraved into. With each pull of the trigger, the scene would move forward, often following the narrative arc of a battle. The scene with which we began, known as “Rangers and Indians,” was introduced to Colt revolvers alongside two other cylinder scenes: a battle between naval vessels and a foiled stagecoach robbery.

However, the inscrutable naval battle is absent of any human figures; and the generalized stagecoach robbery stands in notable contrast to the “Ranger and Indian” scene, which portrays a specific battle making actual use of Colt's weapons. Said to depict a conflict in 1844 when a vastly outnumbered group of Texas Rangers under Colonel Jack Hays killed approximately twenty-three warriors of a Comanche and Mexican war party numbering sixty to seventy men, Colt had already gone bankrupt and shuttered his firearm manufacturing in 1842 after failing to acquire a military contract. With only one casualty and four injuries among Hays’s group, Rangers hailed the revolvers as being the reason for their victory.

It was this win which brought Colt not only interest, but actual favor among the US military. This was particularly true for the Rangers from this conflict, one of them, Samuel Walker, would go on to work with Colt directly to vastly increase the effectiveness of his weapon. Eventually leading to a military contract for 1,000 of the Colt Walker revolvers in 1847 to be used in the Mexican-American war, Colt was able to acquire the capital to reopen his arms manufacturing—though this time in Connecticut rather than New Jersey.

With these lived realities and proximities of war to the revolver in mind, consider another key difference between this scene and the others: the sheer amount of dead or dying represented. For the “Ranger and Indian” scene engraved on the Colt Walker revolvers, four men lay dying or dead, with a fifth soon to join, without the promise of a burial beyond the dust stirred by the hooves of horses. Engaged in conflict with Comanche and Mexican people alike, with every bullet fired from this arm, the formerly victorious Texas Rangers of 1844 would advance again and again, re-invoking the very same violence which brought them into conflict.

With the ever-increasing nature of westward settlement, alongside the anti-Indigenous sentiment which came with it, the revolver could and would go on to become a mainstay of an endless conflict based on white supremacist ideology. Colt and his collaborators in this sense did more than produce a weapon which killed more efficiently, they produced a weapon meant to be used in military conflicts with Indigenous people that would always reiterate Indigenous death, regardless of the opponent, an endless cycle of enacting and re-enacting colonial violence. And even when the smoke had cleared, with each rotation still more Indigenous people escaped and the promise of the frontier’s violence continued—an ever-lucrative field for Colt and his arms.