Big Iron: Development of the Colt 1848 Dragoon Revolver

hey guys thanks for tuning in to another video on Forgotten weapons comm I'm Ian McCallum and I'm here today at the Rock Island auction company along with a whole mess of Colt Dragoon revolvers so we have the whole developmental series here first second third stocked special long barrel all of them so we're gonna go ahead and discuss the history and development of the color goon now to start at the beginning Samuel Colt invents the revolver yes there were revolving cylinder firearms that existed previously what colt does is turn them into a truly practical weapon by combining the cocking action of the hammer with an automatic rotating of the cylinder so that when you [ __ ] the thing it automatically moves the next chamber into position ready to fire it was a truly revolutionary advancement sorry and he he patented this in 1836 and went to work at a factory in Paterson New Jersey manufacturing revolving pistols rifles and shotguns now in 1842 he went broke and went out of business having produced less than three thousand pistols and half as many rifles and just a small number of shotguns the problem was his Paterson revolvers were a little bit fragile underpowered didn't have the own small caliber and also relatively small powder charges and really expensive and they just they just didn't sell well he did sell a handful of rifles to the US military they were used in the Seminole Wars didn't do so great down in the Florida jungles in the Everglades so Colt goes out of business and he is financially saved only in 1846 when Captain Samuel Walker of the Texas Rangers approaches him and well I should back up a second these Patterson pistols did make an impression with some people especially down in Texas where there were a number of incidents of guys fighting off vastly superior Indian forces with small groups of men with repeating revolving pistols so Walker knows about these but he also knows their problems and he approached his Colt and basically says hey I like the concept I need a gun that is a heck of a lot more powerful and ain't gonna break and Colt designs the 1847 Walker model revolver in collaboration with Captain Walker and they get a government contract to make a thousand of these guns to equip five companies of troops two guns per man and an extra hundred guns for commercial sale and the idea is this is going to be Colts ticket back into financial viability he gets paid for the thousand guns that he makes he's left with another hundred that he can sell for higher profit margin and here's the key element of this as it applies to the dragoons part of his deal is well he doesn't have a factor anymore so he contracts with Eli Whitney Eli Whitney jr. I believe to use the Whitney Ville Armory to actually produce these Walker revolvers and part of the deal is that he cold gets to keep the tooling that is created to make his revolver so 18:47 contract is fulfilled they make the eleven hundred guns and the army likes them there are some problems with the walkers they're not perfect they occasionally explode like a third of them came back to the factory for repair for one reason or another but it's good enough that the army orders another thousand guns and at this point colt is ready to to take that next step and try and reestablish himself rather than contracting out to Whitney Ville so eighteen late 1847 into 1848 he is moving his now his tooling out of Whitney ville to set up his own shop again he starts producing Walker pattern revolvers these are called the transitionals or the Whitney ville Walker's transitionals sorry well he's moving to a new shop in Hertford and then when he fulfils the bulk of this order they're not exactly Walker model pistols he's made a number of improvements and that would lead us to the first model through gyoon that first dragoon would carry over most of the general design elements of the 1847 Walker but it did make a couple substantial changes so the most substantial change probably is the fact that the cylinder has been reduced in length you can get a good view of that right here the reason for that was frankly the Walker was a little too powerful the Walker was designed for a 60 grain charge of powder if that is a greater powder charge than the 4570 trapdoor springfield carbines would be issued that's almost as much powder as the trapdoor Springfield rifles would be issued with it was a tremendously powerful charge of powder and it occasionally blew up the cylinders so with the dragoons the cylinder was shortened a bit the powder charge was reduced to only 50 grains which is by the way what they eventually would just recommend in the walkers next substantial change was to the loading lever on the Walker revolver the loading lever is held in place by this little flat spring reaching up inside here and that's a neat idea but it didn't actually work all that well and these had a tendency for the loading lever to fall down under recoil leading to people either modifying them like this eventually or doing things like tying with her straps around the barrel to hold the loading lever up that was obviously a problem and they would remedy that by adding a little spring-loaded catch to keep the loading lever properly in place in addition and the barrel was shortened slightly the Walker had an 8 inch barrel they cut that down to seven and a half inches I'm sorry the Walker had a nine inch barrel they cut that down to seven and a half on the dragoons and you can see that there as well so a number of features did stay the same notably the oval cylinder stop holes remained the same the square back to trigger guard remained the same and the general construction alright a couple of specific features we can point out here there is a manufacturer's mark on the top that says address Samuel Colt New York City these were actually made in Hartford Connecticut but Sam Colts business and correspondence was run out of New York City there will be a little Colt patent mark here on the bottom of the frame which may or may not have a US under it that US stamp indicates military property the earlier in production you are the more likely that a gun is a US military contract gun as I got towards the end there were more and more commercial guns being made these are serialized on a bunch of parts but one of the easiest places to look is here on the bottom where you have the the barrel the frame and the trigger guard all side-by-side this is a very early one serial number 25 57 or yeah 57 or 51 in there to put that in perspective these are in the same serial number range as the walkers so the original Whitney Ville walkers were 1 to 1100 there were then approximately 240 Whitney ville yeah Whitney ville Hertford transitionals and then they started the first pattern Dragoon at serial number 1341 or thereabouts so this is only about a thousand guns in something to point out here is that relatively early in production actually changed from a small stamp to a little bit larger stamp for those serial numbers so 5100 here has a larger and easier to read set of serial number stamps they would keep this larger font basically through all the rest of production give you a little bit of a closer look this is the early version of ramrod support latch where just a little catch there to hook into this lug under the barrel in total production of the first mobile dragoon would run from 1848 until 1850 with serial numbers running up to approximately 8,000 so a total of about just under 7,000 first model dragoons manufactured the second model dragoon is actually the rarest of them all there were only about 2700 of these produced we have a second model right down here these were made in 1850 and 1851 and they're serial numbers will range from eight thousand and one you know about ten thousand seven hundred now the distinguishing features of the second pattern is that they kept the square back to trigger-guard but they improved these cylinder latches sorry cylinder stop notches they changed from the oval shape to this squared off shape because well this worked a lot better and this would go on to be the standard design for all of the later Colt revolvers it just worked better so this is the one that people kind of expect but it's also the thing that combined with the square back to trigger guard really distinguishes the second pattern so this particular one is number and 99 68 and it has one other interesting addition late in the second model Dragoon they added a roller to the hammer so you can see nothing there there's a little roller here that hammer is pivoting across or rolling across the mainspring of the gun and adding a roller here reduces friction and just generally can makes it an easier gun to operate at about the same time they changed from a V spring of V mainspring inside the grip to a simple single piece flat spring which was easier to make more reliable easier to fix should it break and they would they would add they would carry along though the flat spring and the hammer roller through the rest of production continuing to move along we then of course have the third variation of the Dragoon and this is distinguished by its rounded trigger guard which you would come to expect on most of the rest of Colt pistol production revolvers production afterwards so third pattern is round trigger guard has the the same square cylinder stop notches and they introduced a slightly better ramrod support latch where the early version operated vertically in the ramrod this improved pattern was horizontal and this would also go on to become the standard and this guy is from the very end of Dragoon production overall serial number nineteen thousand and 33 total serial numbers would run from ten thousand seven hundred up to nineteen thousand six hundred and these third patterns were manufactured from 1851 right up until 1860 you will notice there is the patent mark here but there's no us on it this was a civilian sale gun not uncommon by the end of production and at this point some other things would start to creep in so there started to be a little bit of availability of custom you could custom order a shorter barrel than seven-and-a-half inches there was a small number made with eight inch barrels like this one there had been a very small number of dragoons made with stock attachments from fairly early on but it was towards the end of the third model that they finally really standardized on what would be the the final and most by far most common stock attachment method so we have one here with that set up to accommodate the stock there are two cutouts on the bottom of the recoil shields here you'll notice on the standard gun we don't have that and then you have an extra set of lug screws right here above the trigger those stick out a bit from either side and then there is a notch cut in the bottom of the grip the stock is going to attach with two hooks here that go up into those notches and then this lug that tightens down into the bottom of the grip so if I pivot that right in here you can see how that fits in and then the lugs act as stops right there and then this guy is loose until I take this this screw and tighten it up you can see that hooking into the bottom of the stock there that is going to tighten up like so and you have a legitimately very stable nice stock if you want to do some more accurate shooting note that while the standard rear sight was this little notch on the hammer four guns that were sold with shoulder stocks you could get in a better sight attached to the back of the barrel itself so we have a couple of extra flip up leaves there you can fold them both down although this one's alright now that one's pretty tight you've got three notches there I'm honestly not entirely sure what ranges they were meant for but I suspect something like 50 100 and 200 yards now these weren't quite as heavy or expensive as the walkers but they were still pretty darn big heavy and expensive guns so just to put them in context the dragoons weighed four pounds two ounces that's just under two kilos each the price originally started at $28 when production began it dropped over the course of production by 1860 these had dropped to $20 a piece however to put that in context typical average individual salary was something like $8 per month so even at the end of production you're talking two and a half months of your total gross income required to purchase one of Colonel Colts fine Dragoon revolvers so in total there would be twenty thousand seven hundred dragoon pattern revolvers manufactured including the transitional Whitney Hartford Whitney ville Hartford guns the production of these basically ends by 1860 they're not actually around all that long because they're quickly surpassed by newer better lighter more efficient models of pistol so anyway of that twenty thousand seven hundred eighty three hundred and ninety of them are manufactured specifically for the US government the rest are commercial of course as the production went along it went more commercial and less military by 1860 these were relegated to the designation of the old model pistol being effectively replaced by the model of 1860 army which was the same caliber and a substantially lighter gun a much more elegant gun really a truly excellent cap-and-ball revolver where the Walker was Sam Colts breakout ticket it was the dragoon as well as the pocket pistols that he was doing simultaneously with the dragoons that really cemented Colt as a successful manufacturer inventor and manufacturer of revolving handguns and he would of course go on to develop the 1851 Navy which was very well liked 1860 army and then on into centerfire cartridge guns so hopefully you enjoyed the video it's really cool and really quite scarce to be able to get all three patterns major patterns of the Dragoon here in the same place to show you know if you'd like to follow Rock Island auction company more you can check the description text below for a link to their YouTube channel as well as a link to their Instagram page everything they've got going on is accessible there and thanks for watching

Channel: Forgotten Weapons

Views: 379,689

Rating: 4.9757843 out of 5

Keywords: history, development, mccollum, forgotten weapons, design, disassembly, kasarda, inrange, inrangetv, colt, dragoon, walker, 1847, black powder, sixgun, big iron, 44 caliber, horse pistol, cavalry, us army, texas rangers, samuel colt, whitneyville, hartford, first variation, second variation, third variation, cap and ball, 1860 army, 1851 nacy, 1848 dragoon, colts, seminole war, mexican american war, old west, western revolver, shoulder stock, frontier

Id: 325p_CkUVZQ

Length: 15min 59sec (959 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 23 2019